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

triplebyte.com

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

#111

Post by austincheney »

koopuluri wrote: post #78
austincheney wrote: post #72

> We started Triplebyte because we were frustrated by the noise present in every step of the hiring process. This is largely just a software/technology problem. In all other professional industries there are means to validate a candidate's competency before they are allowed to interview for a position: licensing, required internships, legal certifications/authorizations, authorized relationships, and so forth. Techno…

I believe that this problem is far, far, far more pervasive than just a software/technology problem. > there are means to validate a candidate's competency before they are allowed to interview for a position: licensing, required internships, legal certifications/authorizations, authorized relationships, and so forth. The problems with credentials that you mention: 1. They are often weak signals of actual competence,…

> They are often weak signals of actual competence

I disagree. They are weak at separating the top 10% from the rest of the qualified people, but they are excellent at removing the people who have no business being there in the first place.

The first two that comes to the minds of most people are law and medical licenses. These licenses don't exist as a job qualifier. They exist as a legal qualifier. That means a gross abuse of the license requirements are cause for law suits and serious criminal offenses even though most lawyers and doctors are corporate employees.

If programmers had the realization that gross negligence could land them in jail or cause them to lose their career and property in a lawsuit I suspect they would take their jobs more seriously than merely writing code.

Programmers don't just write code just like doctors don't just prescribe painkillers and soldiers don't just shoot people. They make numerous critical decisions that have real world implications. Examples of gross failure are simplistic known security breaches that allow confiscation of millions of credit card numbers and PII. Other examples include discriminatory and accessibility violating software products.

These are basic foundational qualities of competence. In any other industry negligence of this magnitude would put in prison. Since the base line is so ridiculously low for hiring developers these are considered advanced qualities often transferred to third party firms and only after threats of pending legal actions. All we care about when hiring developers is whether they are literate and have a pulse.

Be serious, no change to any hiring process will fix that.

> They are not accessible by everyone.

Don't care. If a person want to achieve access to a given career they will find a way through their own internal motivation. If the industry wants to make the careers more accessible they will promote a desirable education path. This isn't a secret legendary arcane black magic.

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

#112

Post by amorphid »

lettergram wrote: post #101

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…

It's really easy to game Triplebyte. It's probably really easy to game all the online interview platforms. May be it's hard to game Interviewing.io, because they have you chat w/ an actual person.

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

#113

Post by marcell »

amorphid wrote: post #112
lettergram wrote: post #101

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…

It's really easy to game Triplebyte. It's probably really easy to game all the online interview platforms. May be it's hard to game Interviewing.io, because they have you chat w/ an actual person.

For Triplebyte they have a two hour interview with a real engineer who has passed their own interview. Even if you cheat on the live interview, you still have to do an on-site at the company that might hire you, so it’s not a huge benefit to cheat.

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

#114

Post by Cyph0n »

triplebytelol wrote: post #89
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…

Throwaway, because I'm well-known on HN. I ran the TripleByte course once, and it was 100% not worth my time as a professional. The "coding test" was criminally simple, but got me in the door quickly for an interview. I spent a number of hours building out projects with a paired interviewer, as well as answering questions. This part I enjoyed, it felt like a nice back and forth while building an interesting bit of so…

That first sentence, if true, already narrows the search space drastically for anyone who wants to find you, especially given the length of your comment.

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

#115

Post by Cyph0n »

austincheney wrote: post #111
koopuluri wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that this problem is far, far, far more pervasive than just a software/technology problem. > there are means to validate a candidate's competency before they are allowed to interview for a position: licensing, required internships, legal certifications/authorizations, authorized relationships, and so forth. The problems with credentials that you mention: 1. They are often weak signals of actual competence,…

> They are often weak signals of actual competence I disagree. They are weak at separating the top 10% from the rest of the qualified people, but they are excellent at removing the people who have no business being there in the first place. The first two that comes to the minds of most people are law and medical licenses. These licenses don't exist as a job qualifier. They exist as a legal qualifier. That means a gro…

Law and medicine are not relevant examples at all.

In both cases, licensing did not arise because of hiring issues, but rather because both law and medicine directly involve human lives and livelihoods.

Any field where this can be the case on a day-to-day basis ends up having strict licensing and/or training requirements. Examples include civil engineers, pilots, soldiers, sea captains, heavy machinery operators, and so on.

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

#116

Post by lunchbreak »

Do they have lots of jobs on offer? I passed the quiz and was accepted after the technical interview in late 2017 (I must say the interview was very well done and the feedback was very constructive), but they had 2 matches for me in NYC, of which neither progressed to a company interviewed. I heard of others that had a similar experience.

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

#117

Post by [deleted] »

treis wrote: post #107
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.

[deleted]

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

#118

Post by e_b »

marcell wrote: post #113
amorphid wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really easy to game Triplebyte. It's probably really easy to game all the online interview platforms. May be it's hard to game Interviewing.io, because they have you chat w/ an actual person.

For Triplebyte they have a two hour interview with a real engineer who has passed their own interview. Even if you cheat on the live interview, you still have to do an on-site at the company that might hire you, so it’s not a huge benefit to cheat.

There's also not a huge benefit to doing the test at all.

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

#119

Post by zdky »

triplebytelol wrote: post #89
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…

Throwaway, because I'm well-known on HN. I ran the TripleByte course once, and it was 100% not worth my time as a professional. The "coding test" was criminally simple, but got me in the door quickly for an interview. I spent a number of hours building out projects with a paired interviewer, as well as answering questions. This part I enjoyed, it felt like a nice back and forth while building an interesting bit of so…

Before reaching any conclusions, would you let us know how specific is Technology X? Is it like a library or a framework? How uncommon is that?

If it's something commonly used by lots of developers and needed by lots of companies, I think it'd be fair to think of it as a bad signal at least.

The giants (Google, etc) have great engineers, but they also often use technologies that's very different from the general public.

Being an engineer from those companies are great, but it doesn't automatically qualify you for any job on the market.

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

#120

Post by bshlgrs »

amorphid wrote: post #112
lettergram wrote: post #101

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…

It's really easy to game Triplebyte. It's probably really easy to game all the online interview platforms. May be it's hard to game Interviewing.io, because they have you chat w/ an actual person.

(I am a former Triplebyte employee) The Triplebyte process also involves talking to an actual person; how are you proposing to game that?
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