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Rethinking Triplebyte

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Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#131

Post by dvt »

wittycardio wrote: post #125
dvt wrote: post #29

I'm personally very excited to see this change by an industry leader! I think that there's a seismic shift waiting to happen w.r.t. engineer hiring. The "old guard" of hazing, quizzing, and gotcha-style interviews are slowly losing ground. The most friction when switching jobs is the interview process -- and the question is why? I've been writing code for a decade+ now, working on startups, for known tech companies,…

You think literal geniuses can't solve sligtly challenging algorithm questions ?

> You think literal geniuses can't solve sligtly challenging algorithm questions ?

(N.B. I was being a bit hyperbolic, but, yes, for example, I highly doubt Steve Jobs could.) The spirit of my point is that most smart people don't care about the kind of idiotic minutia typical hiring panels ask. They care about interesting/creative problems.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#132

Post by rachofsunshine »

mike_d wrote: post #121
ammon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair comment. I certainly don't think of us as a market leader. LinkedIn is the market leader. Honestly, the last year has been pretty hard for us (COVID and the problems with our model that I talk about in the post). That said, I think a hiring process that puts engineers in control (no ghosting, get data on when a recruiter looks at your application, search ranking by whether companies lie to candidates) is somethi…

If you want to put candidates in control, build a CRM tool. When a recruiter pings me on LinkedIn or emails me, I have a URL I can send them to with an intake form. No more calls wasting my time, I can see the company/role/salary/etc. up front. The trick here is you need to figure out a business model where you don't take money from employers, because once you do its just the long slide to becoming a shittier LinkedI…

We've talked about things in this area, but this particular framing is pretty interesting. We're talking about it now.

I personally like this proposal and am probably going to at least draft a hypothetical spec of it and see how it fleshes out. Thanks for the suggestion!

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#133

Post by driverdan »

hellcow wrote: post #106
dvt wrote: post #29

I'm personally very excited to see this change by an industry leader! I think that there's a seismic shift waiting to happen w.r.t. engineer hiring. The "old guard" of hazing, quizzing, and gotcha-style interviews are slowly losing ground. The most friction when switching jobs is the interview process -- and the question is why? I've been writing code for a decade+ now, working on startups, for known tech companies,…

For what it's worth on the hiring side, applicants lie (or more charitably, wildly overestimate their own abilities) all the time. Of resumes I see, 50% of them will not show up on time to their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz. Past companies and open source contributions are not perfect indicators. I've seen people with stellar resumes fail to even know the syntax for an 'if' statement in any…

> Of resumes I see, 50% of them will not show up on time to their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz.

Wow, sounds like you either need to change your sourcing or improve your early screening. If that many poor candidates are making it to the interview stage something is wrong with the process.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#134

Post by woeirua »

wittycardio wrote: post #125
dvt wrote: post #29

I'm personally very excited to see this change by an industry leader! I think that there's a seismic shift waiting to happen w.r.t. engineer hiring. The "old guard" of hazing, quizzing, and gotcha-style interviews are slowly losing ground. The most friction when switching jobs is the interview process -- and the question is why? I've been writing code for a decade+ now, working on startups, for known tech companies,…

You think literal geniuses can't solve sligtly challenging algorithm questions ?

They usually can, but not necessarily under strict time constraints and the pressure associated with a whiteboard coding exercise.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#135

Post by wittycardio »

dvt wrote: post #131
wittycardio wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think literal geniuses can't solve sligtly challenging algorithm questions ?

> You think literal geniuses can't solve sligtly challenging algorithm questions ? (N.B. I was being a bit hyperbolic, but, yes, for example, I highly doubt Steve Jobs could.) The spirit of my point is that most smart people don't care about the kind of idiotic minutia typical hiring panels ask. They care about interesting/creative problems.

I mean Steve Jobs may not be a great software developer. I don't think companies are hiring for a Steve Jobs. You could be really good at other things and not be great at programming

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#136

Post by titanomachy »

The original TripleByte worked well for me. Even though I didn't have a stellar resume, I got the chance to talk to some really interesting companies. My TripleByte recruiter was helpful in deciding which interviews to take, and there was mutual fit at all the companies I went on-site with.

I recommended TripleByte to several friends whom I considered reasonably skilled and currently undervalued. None of them passed the test, however, so they got little value out of service (except for the interview feedback, which at the time was unusually excellent). And I ultimately needed TripleByte less than they did, since someone who could pass the old TripleByte test also has a high chance of eventually passing on-sites at Google, Facebook, etc.

So I understand the pivot, although it will certainly be harder to differentiate yourselves in this new space. Good luck.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#137

Post by Igelau »

908B64B197 wrote: post #100
Terretta wrote: post #65

A benefit of Triplebyte to big enterprises not mentioned in Triplebyte’s discussion here: acting as engineering assessment proxy for engineering hiring managers stuck with pathologically risk averse enterprise HR departments. Often enterprise HR is paranoid of honestly evaluating anyone for anything, to the point that many HR teams tell one another and engineering hiring managers that it’s “illegal” to assess candida…

> If you think about joining a dev team where no one checked if any candidate could FizzBuzz, you can imagine the workplace environment that can end up with. That sounds hilarious How could a dev team not be able to write 5 lines?

I'd believe it.

I got shitlisted at one place for being the only dev with the mathematical insight to know that multiplying pesos by a dollars:yen ratio doesn't yield a correct conversion of pesos to yen. They let that one slide without fixing it, but the final straw that got me frogmarched was refactoring an if-else to a switch.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#138

Post by dvt »

hellcow wrote: post #106
dvt wrote: post #29

I'm personally very excited to see this change by an industry leader! I think that there's a seismic shift waiting to happen w.r.t. engineer hiring. The "old guard" of hazing, quizzing, and gotcha-style interviews are slowly losing ground. The most friction when switching jobs is the interview process -- and the question is why? I've been writing code for a decade+ now, working on startups, for known tech companies,…

For what it's worth on the hiring side, applicants lie (or more charitably, wildly overestimate their own abilities) all the time. Of resumes I see, 50% of them will not show up on time to their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz. Past companies and open source contributions are not perfect indicators. I've seen people with stellar resumes fail to even know the syntax for an 'if' statement in any…

> Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz.

If this is actually true, which I highly doubt (I've interviewed people, too), your process is terrible at preselection. I've heard so much about this "programmer charlatan" that lies on his resume and ends up blowing up million dollar systems, but have yet to see any tangible proof.

> Past companies and open source contributions are not perfect indicators.

This is self-contradictory: how/why would any open source project let someone that doesn't know fizzbuzz contribute to their codebase? I run a tiny throwaway open source project (~600 GH stars) and even my reviews are pretty stringent. This point of view is not consistent. It's like saying "I know people that ran in marathons, but couldn't even run for half a mile in my interview."

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#139

Post by rachofsunshine »

tdeck wrote: post #128
ammon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair comment. I certainly don't think of us as a market leader. LinkedIn is the market leader. Honestly, the last year has been pretty hard for us (COVID and the problems with our model that I talk about in the post). That said, I think a hiring process that puts engineers in control (no ghosting, get data on when a recruiter looks at your application, search ranking by whether companies lie to candidates) is somethi…

A small bit of feedback here. I tried TripleByte a couple of years ago and the experience was really polished. I passed the interview and got great detailed feedback which I really appreciated. However, I dropped out completely because TripleByte wouldn't let me see companies without entering in a desired comp number. My recruiter at triplebyte said I could just put in "$1 or $1,000,000" to get past it, but that just…

You're totally right. If we'd been thinking in this mode when that particular requirement was built, it wouldn't have been. It isn't required today (and IIRC hasn't been for a while now).

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#140

Post by epberry »

Credit to these guys for not giving up. Hiring engineers remains unsolved so if they're still in the game they still have a chance to ultimately solve it and reap the rewards.
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