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Rethinking Triplebyte

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Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#171

Post by hughpoint »

manv1 wrote: post #62
guessmyname wrote: post #55

TripleByte is awful. Take a look at the question they just asked me when I was doing their General Coding Assessment: What is the output of the following function? (1m 12s) function foo(a, b) { a += 1 b.push(1) } const a = 0 const b = [] foo(a, b) console.log(a, b)

Depending on the language and how it passes in values, you'll have different answers. Assuming it's javascript the answer is 0,1. In other languages it might be 1, 1. That's a tricky question, and if you're not good enough to understand why they're asking that then you fail!

This particular example is 0, [1], which is easily seen by pasting it in the console.

There may be some edge cases I'm not covering here, but JavaScript passes primitives by value (strings, numbers, etc) and non-primitives (objects, arrays, etc) by passing a copy of the reference.

What this means is if you reassign the reference inside of the method, it will only affect that scope, because the reference itself is a copy. If you modify the properties of the non-primitive, it will be modified, because the copy of the reference points to the same non-primitive.

Since primitives are passed by value then any modifications are not reflected outside of the method.

To the other poster below, in JavaScript, const with an array (object, etc) simply prevents reassignment of the variable, the array can still be modified.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#173

Post by shkkmo »

ammon wrote: post #126
ninetax wrote: post #92

I'd love to work with Triplebyte (as someone who's running a hiring process), but a while back they removed their option to work on contingency, and it's a difficult sell to fork over $X,000k for another source of engineers when it would just be one of 10 sources we already work with. Maybe I'm wrong here, but it gives me the impression that Triplebyte doesn't believe in it's ability to get candidates into jobs. If c…

The main problem we had with the contingency model is that it resulted in companies using us for a few of their "hardest" hires, rather than as a bread-and-butter part of their recruiting. For example, almost no one wants to pay a contingency fee on junior or remote hires (because they are perceived as 'easier'). This made our platform kind of suck for junior and remote engineers. The subscription model is more of a…

Why not a combo where the subscription isn't paid until a hire is actually made through the platform?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#174

Post by curryst »

dvt wrote: post #138
hellcow wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I've seen similar. I wouldn't say 80%, but somewhere in the 20% range of people on phone screens. If I ask a similar modulo question that isn't obviously a rephrased FizzBuzz (i.e. "write a function that returns every 4th item in a list"), that percentage goes up dramatically. A lot of candidates memorize FizzBuzz without actually understanding what's happening and how to use it.

> 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."

There are no time constraints, and no way to tell how much of their contribution is from their own knowledge and how much is copied from StackOverflow/other open source projects/etc. The point of view is consistent; I can't run a marathon, but I can walk 26 miles. That's fine for the local charity marathon, but it's not going to cut it if I want to do competitive marathons. The constraints and expectations are wildly different.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#175

Post by marcinzm »

ammon wrote: post #5
dawnho wrote: post #2

Interesting idea. But it seems like there’s room for abuse - won’t engineers, who are unhappy that they didn’t get an offer, just report companies? Don’t you just become Yelp in that case, full of reviews from salty customers? How are you going to get useful data when you’re worried about that?

This is certainly an issue. As you say, it’s a problem on yelp and glassdoor. It’s why most nightclubs have low yelp ratings (people they exclude give them low scores). There are a few things I think we think we can do: 1) Look at relative data, not raw ratings. Written reviews or raw numerical scores are what show the nightclub effect the most. What we care about is a ranking of companies (showing the better compani…

In my experience toxic companies will essentially force employees to give good feedback through either social pressure, incentives or threat of repercussions. You can see this quite clearly on Glassdoor where a bad review is followed by five very similar good reviews within a week for some companies.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#176

Post by naimishviradia »

towergratis wrote: post #58

The problem with Triplebyte IMHO is that what the originally promised, while a great idea and concept, it cannot scale. Also after interviewing with them for a role in their company I got to realize they don't know how to conduct interviews themselves. I used them two times. The first one was very early on, where I was given a home assignment and interviewed on it by Aaron himself, if I am not mistaken. The dude was…

Yup happened to me. The experience they wanted to provide couldn't not be scaled up.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#177

Post by mattheww »

mike_d wrote: post #143
rachofsunshine wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Awesome! I've started a POC, but as with most things I'd rather not have to build it myself.

It's unbelievable that nobody has done this well - I and most people I know are tracking their own job searches on a spreadsheet.

Pretty obvious value-add for job searchers. Not to mention that having access to this data would enable tons of other product features. Shows that most services/sites don't care that much about the applicant experience.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#178

Post by lazyasciiart »

dvt wrote: post #138
hellcow wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are a surprising number of people who have done marathons that couldn't run half a mile - https://www.verywellfit.com/finding-walker-friendly-marathon...

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#179

Post by ipsum2 »

tdeck wrote: post #102
reillyse wrote: post #40

I see a lot of people in the comments describe triplebyte as a “market leader” and discuss how good they are. I can’t believe how gullible everyone is especially on a startup forum. Let me spell it out to y’all, nobody pivots and changes their entire business model if they are crushing it. So the implication is that triplebyte are not crushing it. So, this probably has gone the same way as lots of other tech startups…

I thought this was pretty telling: > We got jobs for over 1000 engineers Given how many years Triplebyte has been running, "over 1000" seems surprisingly low. I wish them luck with their pivot.

How much is a referral worth to companies? $1,000? If so, their revenue is only ~$1m, but they've raised $48m.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#180

Post by stove »

akomtu wrote: post #80

Here's an advice. The software engineering market, at least the upper end of it, doesn't need a email forwarding proxy middleman. What it needs is a club-like organisation that acts as a negotiator that leverages insider knowledge to get unreasonable parties on both ends to sign a contract. Good devs don't really search for jobs and don't really talk to random recruiters. They get a steady stream of sales pitches fro…

I very informally do this right now. I think of my role as a sports agent for top engineers. The engineers I work with pay nothing and the companies who want access to them give us no bullshit, all access interviews where we're not working with HR or recruiters. It works so well for both parties that I'm scaling it at the moment.
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