I like this direction and I'm rooting for you now but it's tough when I can't even fill out the Basic Information section because of a bug in which the form won't submit even though there are no errors.
Rethinking Triplebyte
331–340 of 463 posts
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
in the comments: dev) > I forgot how to implement the zig operation in a splay tree. employee at Triplebyte) > To put some hard numbers to this: further down this thread, there's a post about how "any engineer" could answer a question the poster thinks is too easy. I looked up the question in our back end and, in fact, barely a third of people who take our quiz get it right (the correct answer isn't even the most com…
I agree. We tried using TripleByte for hiring but what they screen for and what matters are entirely different. A founder we knew got an angry missive from one of the TripleByte founders because they’d rejected candidates during a final culture screen. Apparently the only qualification should be whether the candidate can do contrived coding tests and programming jeopardy, but whether you actually want to work with th…
> Apparently the only qualification should be whether the candidate can do contrived coding tests and programming jeopardy, but whether you actually want to work with them is beside the point!
Yeah, different companies want different things and are ok with different things. My best experiences have been with companies that have taken less than 2 weeks to hire me with no testing whatsoever: just a couple of calls. Other companies want and only select for the contrived coding tests and programming jeopardy, and that's fine, but I want nothing to do with them at all.
I would be interested in using triplebyte if they explored something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27545446
Maybe even allowing 3rd parties to bet on specific hiring decisions (in addition to what is described in the link) could add another layer of incentivized feedback loops to the process (esp if the people making the hire/fire before 3 months are made known) and add another layer of market driven signals for them to pay attentions to. Maybe make it more expensive to chase certain types that are in higher demand, and less expensive to chase others types that are in low demand (not the salary to the employee, just the payment for filtering). Maybe less expensive for shorter refund windows, and more expensive for longer refund windows.
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#333Earlier 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…
> 50% of them will not show up on time to their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz. Of the people that turn up late to the interview, what percentage pass fizzbuzz?
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Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If your desired comp number actually is $1M/year, will that just flag you as a joke to Triplebyte companies? With post-pandemic stock price increases a lot of engineers at FAANGs are making more than that now. For any reasonable definition of "a lot", no they absolutely are not. A lot of people with 2+ years of experience who've either been promoted once and received a strong annual review, or switched jobs as a mi…
> Nobody was making $1M/year. Nobody that makes 2x what their coworkers do at the same job/level casually discloses their comp at the water cooler.
Someone has not worked on wall street
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
On hiring side we screen folks out pretty quickly who can't discuss money. I used to be much more relaxed about this, but if you get burned doing a few rounds of interviews and it was a waste you wise up pretty quickly - teams do not like time wasted. I've also found that folks who can't / won't talk money - usually not great hires for a bunch of reasons. We're happy to talk through the different positions, levels, p…
Why can't you just tell them a range you're offering?
I think that question applies equally to both parties.
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#336I almost applied to Triplebyte, but at the time they were Bay Area only, and I needed a remote job. The most important part of a job search is to avoid wasting time, so I stayed away. (But I would have used them if I was in the Bay Area.)
What am I looking for?
1: I want my skills evaluated in a standard way by some neutral licensing board, just like engineers who build dams or surgeons.
2: I want job interviews based on mutual interest, not proving competency.
3: I want my colleagues to be certified, just like me.
4: I want legal standards in place that give me leverage against employers who are cutting corners, or managers who "know enough to be dangerous."
Example: My wife, a doctor, had to go through an intense process to be certified. The vast majority of medical school graduates pass certification. She only applied for a handful of jobs. The interview was based on mutual interest because the certification process proved she was competent. All her colleagues are competent, and her hospital is well run. There are legal guidelines that make it hard for her hospital to cut corners or make her do something unethical.
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
You would be surprised how many people legitimately can't wrap their heads around a fizz buzz style problem, but also how many people who can yet completely freeze in an interview setting.
This. I think most people devs, including low skill, understand Fizzbuzz, but performing on the spot is just very difficult for many people.
Its the same reason why a top notch, genious writer can turn out to be terrible at giving speeches, even if they're reading from a script.
Performing an interview is a different skill from writing code.
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
A SJ type is what TB would need to orient this pivot… to turn the problem around. Sourcing ideas on HN will only lead to “faster horses” suggestions. BTW did the TB interview after been lured by dark patterns on social media a while back when I was still using. Got the bloom filter from a hipster that was playing on his phone while I coded tictactoe in a langage I hadn’t used In years. Complete waste of time. Then they wanted to make profiles I hadn’t signed up for public, good thing they listened to the backlash. Just saying; it seems the management needs to use an hypothetical service like theirs but that works to find someone to help them on the angle for that pivot… a headhunter ?:-)
Tongue in cheek, good luck on the pivot guys, it is a tough problem.
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#339Earlier 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…
I get what you are saying, but on the contrary, I don't want to go through interview process as a candidate just to be lowballed in the end. If the range is not there, and often it is not, I am fairly good and not everyone understand how much this costs, I just don't want to waste anyone time.
I don't think this part is off. Why I never went to Triplebyte and will not go, I think doing tests is dumb and don't wanna do it. Like original commenter said, you can't change model that quickly.
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used TripleByte to recruit people for a startup without paying, by asking people to sign up for the test and screenshot the answers and collecting the scores at the end. I already had an inbound funnel, I just liked your test when I saw it the first time. In 2015, candidates with the same schooling scored about 20 percentage points lower than 2020, the last candidates I used the test for. The number of questions do…
Pedigree filtering is most often myopic elitism, especially in a business context. Anecdotally, I avoided MIT and Harvard because of Boston's snow and traffic. CalTech is Pasadena: too frick'n hot. I didn't study at all for the SAT-I and aced the math section. (The SAT should be more like the JEE.) I went to an expensive, "top 50" public university where I liked the area. Also, it was more practical and rigorous acad…
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