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Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

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Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#101

Post by lettergram »

My interactions with Triplebyte have been less than good and honestly am concerned about the company as a whole (perhaps my thoughts are misplaced).

In a prior conversation on HN (link below), I brought up some aspect of my interview (interviewer late, argumentative, smug, etc.). Then the interviewer came on to HN and PUBLICLY SHARED PORTIONS OF MY INTERVIEW. Honestly, should have been fired on the spot, but nope.

To the interviewers credit, after I was the number one comment for most of the day he deleted that portion of the comment. I am grateful (looking back now) that was removed, however I think it speaks volumes.

The prior discussion is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13830444

My two cents, is the idea is good - there is some room for improvement. What's scary is putting one company as a wall between you and the employer. I hope it never comes to pass where they control even 5% of the market. No one should be able to interview better than the company itself and employees shouldn't use a service which upon being declined blocks them from other companies. I don't believe that's the case (yet), so no qualms for the time being.

Given my experience, I hope they've improved and would happily change my view if I had reason to.

EDIT: Added prior interaction for reference

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#102

Post by driverdan »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #4

Anyone care to comment on how the whole Triplebyte process goes as a person who wants to be hired? I'm interested since I never got past the set of questions due to some kind of bug in the beta.

Around the middle of 2017 I interviewed with them to be a part time interviewer. It was something they promoted on HN for a while.

They put me through the standard interview process along with additional discussion about the interviewer position.

Overall they're much better than most startups but have room for improvement.

The good:

They kept me well-informed throughout the process and set proper expectations. They were prompt with followups and stuck to the schedule they set. My interviewers were knowledgable, clearly software engineers.

The bad:

Too much focus on algos and CS fundamentals, not enough on higher level concepts and what makes someone a good fit for an available position.

I understand it's really hard to have a generic evaluation that covers multiple potential roles. That said, I believe that these questions do not select for good employees for most roles. They are biased to select for recent college grads and people who are willing to study before interviewing.

For example, they asked me about bloom filters. 95%+ of startup software jobs will never have to deal with bloom filters. Why would you ask about them? Ask something that will actually be encountered on the job.

To add a little background I was responsible for our hiring process in my last position, including interviewing, so I'm a bit opinionated about this.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#103

Post by kearneyandy »

treis wrote: post #26
taurath wrote: post #17

"Evaluating" 5000 engineers a month almost seems low to me - they've been going full bore with advertising and have been on the top of reddit for the last month or two (and if I remember correctly I think I've seen them on twitter and FB). With this much spend I would have thought they'd have more candidates. Maybe thats a lot!

Google says there are 3,500,000 software engineers in the USA. If they are doing 5,000 a month, that means they are interviewing about 2% of all the engineers in the US each year. That's not totally accurate because it doesn't account for those breaking into the field or if international candidates are going through the process. Either way, that's a lot of candidates.

5000 / 3,500,000 = 0.00142857142

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#104

Post by freehunter »

disease wrote: post #82
taurath wrote: post #17

"Evaluating" 5000 engineers a month almost seems low to me - they've been going full bore with advertising and have been on the top of reddit for the last month or two (and if I remember correctly I think I've seen them on twitter and FB). With this much spend I would have thought they'd have more candidates. Maybe thats a lot!

Seeing their ads, and only their ads, on reddit constantly since forever has rubbed me the wrong way.

I get that way with any ad I see or hear too much. The more I experience your advertisement, the less satisfied with your company or product I am going to become.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#105

Post by burntrelish1273 »

listic wrote: post #45
haaen wrote: post #33

For anyone who thinks that Paul Graham is still a YC partner: he has retired from Y Combinator. https://www.ycombinator.com/people/

What is he doing now? I can't find any information.

I wonder if he still has the purple Porsche.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#106

Post by ScottBurson »

tway12 wrote: post #50

Unfortunately, my experience with TripleByte was terrible and a waste of my time. I completed the interview with a very high evaluation across all categories as provided by the interviewer. There were certain areas where the interviewer messed up in their evaluation, e.g. they felt I "was a little weak at hashmaps and API design", which is probably because they did not know what I was talking about when I described t…

> There seems to be a bias to discredit the interviewee if the interviewer lacks knowledge in an area.

That reminded me of this classic HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701625

The containing discussion is also relevant.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#107

Post by treis »

montrose wrote: post #35

This quote from the TechCrunch article was to me the most striking element of this story. They already yield double the rate of good candidates: ""The metric that companies care most about is what percentage of on-site interviews convert into hires, and the industry standard is 20 percent. Triplebyte’s placement rate is 40 percent," says Taggar."

I wonder if these numbers are comparable. For the 40% to be true their candidates would have to interview at a maximum of 2.5 of their cleints on average. That doesn't seem to fit with their model.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#108

Post by vonmoltke »

hunter23 wrote: post #79
tway12 wrote: post #50

Unfortunately, my experience with TripleByte was terrible and a waste of my time. I completed the interview with a very high evaluation across all categories as provided by the interviewer. There were certain areas where the interviewer messed up in their evaluation, e.g. they felt I "was a little weak at hashmaps and API design", which is probably because they did not know what I was talking about when I described t…

Echoing with a similar bad experience although this might be their customer's (Mixpanel) fault. I applied to Mixpanel and they sent me a Triplebyte quiz. They bugged me a few times to fill it out and then promised to give me feedback "very quickly". I never heard back (I applied several months ago) and sent them 3 - 4 follow up emails. I'm not sure if the fault lies with Triplebyte or Mixpanel but it was an overall s…

It may well have been Mixpanel. I applied to them and they sent me a non-Triplebyte quiz before having any human contact with me (not even a personal email). It was horribly designed; all edge-case language trivia and multiple choice design questions. Needless to say I didn't pass, and I will never go near them again.

Edit: fixed the formatting

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#109

Post by lettergram »

taurath wrote: post #17

"Evaluating" 5000 engineers a month almost seems low to me - they've been going full bore with advertising and have been on the top of reddit for the last month or two (and if I remember correctly I think I've seen them on twitter and FB). With this much spend I would have thought they'd have more candidates. Maybe thats a lot!

My prior experience is the top comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13830444

Further down the comment thread, the interviewer came on and shared information about my interview (essentially because I called them out for rude and smug - which IMO they were).

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#110

Post by lettergram »

kearneyandy wrote: post #103
treis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google says there are 3,500,000 software engineers in the USA. If they are doing 5,000 a month, that means they are interviewing about 2% of all the engineers in the US each year. That's not totally accurate because it doesn't account for those breaking into the field or if international candidates are going through the process. Either way, that's a lot of candidates.

5000 / 3,500,000 = 0.00142857142

5000 a month

60,000 a year

0.01714 = 60,000 / 3,500,500

OR

1.714%

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