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Rethinking Triplebyte

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Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#361

Post by cwalv »

rytor718 wrote: post #337
pc86 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Performing an interview is a different skill from writing code.

I think this is true for the day-long leetcode interviews, but to succeed as an engineer, even at the entry level, I think you need to be able to talk through how you would solve fizzbuzz. A big part of the job is communicating trade offs with other engineers.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#362

Post by ping_pong »

It's sad but interesting to see the pivot that Triplebyte is taking. As the top comment says, if they were doing great they wouldn't be pivoting, so it speaks volumes.

I still don't understand exactly what benefits it brings to me as a programmer though. I'm about to start preparing for interviews with 25+ years under my belt, after not working for 2 years and I've accepted the double-edges nature of these interviews. I know I need to LeetCode for 3 months to be competitive and memorize as many of the answers as I can. I know that some companies will ghost but others will be forthcoming. I know that in big companies, different teams have different recruiting processes, so it's hard to put an entire company in a single basket.

I have friends at all FAANG, and they are very open with their salaries and TC, so I don't know what Triplebyte would bring to the table besides friction, so be perfectly honest.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#363

Post by wernercd »

ipaddr wrote: post #202
gip wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is similar but at a differet level of seniorty. I've applied to ~15 jobs for engineering manager and got 1 answer. On the other end a recruiter reached out to me and I'll be doing the final interview with their VP next week. I don't think we can draw conclusion at that stage (we are a dataset of 2..). But I'd love to have access to the LinkedIn dataset to figure out if applying for jobs is broken at sca…

Waiting for a recuitor to call you limits your potential but makes the process easier for you. Applying yourself takes a lot of work but you get to select who you want and to target a bigger group which. But it's messy, ugly , stressful and filled with rejections for no reason.

Doing both, when you need a job, gives you the best of both worlds.

It's ugly and mimicks real life... more effort gives better results but life isn't fair and never has been. Luck factors but always fight on multiple fronts.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#364

Post by andrewnicolalde »

hellcow wrote: post #148
driverdan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I should have clarified, the first interview is just a code screen. People submit resumes, and we test them with fizzbuzz. 90% of applicants are removed at this first filter.

How many (if any) of that 90% are just non-replies?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#365

Post by nickysielicki »

samatman wrote: post #168

My random Triplebyte anecdote is that I did good on the quizzes and gave a solid interview, but they declined to represent me. They were transparent about their reasoning: they saw me as somewhat of a specialist in parsing, and they didn't know how to place someone with that peculiar skillset. Which turned out fine. I found a job where my pre-computer programming work experience was relevant, and here a couple jobs l…

I made it through the interview and got all the fast track stuff…

I have a total of 6 profile views. So you’re truly not missing much.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#366

Post by 29athrowaway »

I am not sure who are these engineers that Ammon talked to... but nowadays what most engineers I know do is visiting Glassdoor or Blind. There you can anonymously and openly discuss salaries, their opinions about companies, business units, teams, and even discuss interviews.

If a company has a bad interview experience, a bad culture, or the management is impopular, if the work life balance is bad, or anything... you'll be able to read about that in those websites.

For example, a recruiter contacted me last year regarding an opportunity for a fancy senior role at a large company (Sr Staff engineer)... I checked the Glassdoor reviews for that company and found many testimonies from people who were contacted with the exact same narrative, but at the end of the interview process they were offered vastly lower levels, so clearly that was their intention all along. Because of that, I assessed that interviewing there was going to be a waste of my time and I ghosted the recruiter. Developers win.

Of course, you need to take some reviews with a grain of salt, but if everyone is saying the same thing, you will at least have a sample of what you are getting into.

Having said this, I am not sure Triplebyte will ever be able to effectively solve or mitigate the problems Ammon is describing. It is possible that he needs to continue talking to developers, and I am not trying to say this in a rude way. There are also many more problems that need help fixing that Ammon did not describe.

Having a conversation with a developer about different topics can give you some insights on the breadth and depth of the knowledge of a developer, and many interviews omit this. I think interviews should be "adaptive" tests, that get as progressively more difficult until you reach your limit.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#367

Post by hectormalot »

filoleg wrote: post #201
heavyset_go wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 something that should exist. I want to try to build it! This is a space that unions fill well compared to for-profit recruiting agencies. The organizations give engineers control and leverage in hiring, and can help them up-negotiate.…

While I still slightly prefer the direct experience for other reasons, the recruiting agency experience was pretty good for me in its own way. More specifically, when it comes to salary negotiation. Let me elaborate. People at the recruiting agency usually get paid a commission as a percentage of the first year of the hiree’s salary (not taken from your paycheck, but just in general). Which means, it is in their inte…

> Which means, it is in their interest to get you as high of a comp as possible.

Beware: this is not universally true. What you typically see is that it leads to closing as many candidates as possible. A recruiter can make more by closing 2 candidates at 80% of max comp than 1 candidate at 100% in the same time.

This is a well known behavior in real estate sales, which have a similar commission structure.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#368

Post by blueblisters »

failwhaleshark wrote: post #256
an_opabinia wrote: post #192

Earlier 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…

> PS. I. Don't even get me started about a car full of CS IITians talking about the JEE and high-placers who seem normal on the way to snow country for snowboarding and gambling.

That sounds awfully specific.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#369

Post by tdeck »

RussianCow wrote: post #264
usaar333 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A particular problem with doing that is discussed in the post; you risk everyone's time being wasted if the company will never be able to meet your target.

For a big enough company, you can collect a few data points via Glassdoor[0], levels.fyi, etc to make sure that they pay in the range you're looking for before you even begin the interview process. For smaller companies, you're absolutely right, although I personally tend to give a very broad range[0] at the beginning of the process, and only narrow that down at the offer stage. That's worked well for me in the past.…

In my experience Glassdoor numbers are low. They've been low compared to the reality at places I've worked, at least.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#370

Post by inThePendant »

I applied through Triplebyte in 2015 & again in 2018, and got to know Harj & Ammon a bit. They, along with Gilluame, all struck me as remarkably smart and incredibly dedicated to their vision. So if after 6 years that lot haven't "cracked the code," that's reason enough to abandon hope for there ever being a sane recruiting process, anywhere.

My takeaway from my experience finding a SW engr job was that actual technical capability was really only a second- or third-tier consideration in companies' hiring decisions. (This is often misaligned with the companies' actual business needs, but that's not what materially drives hiring decisions either.) So, although TB nailed TFOO the competence assessment & pre-screening problem, Amdahl's Law still applied to the whole enchilada.

What TB should do is monetize their experience placing candidates over the last 5+ years and just sell training & maybe some standardized SaaS products to HR departments -- especially at startups! -- that regularly need to hire SWEs/SDEs (yes I'm a FAANG-er now). Because the real dysfunction in tech hiring originates & thrives in those departments, and...something about robbing banks because that's where the money is...

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