Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:07 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #26

taurath wrote: post #17

"Evaluating" 5000 engineers a month almost seems low to me - they've been going full bore with advertising and have been on the top of reddit for the last month or two (and if I remember correctly I think I've seen them on twitter and FB). With this much spend I would have thought they'd have more candidates. Maybe thats a lot!

Google says there are 3,500,000 software engineers in the USA. If they are doing 5,000 a month, that means they are interviewing about 2% of all the engineers in the US each year. That's not totally accurate because it doesn't account for those breaking into the field or if international candidates are going through the process. Either way, that's a lot of candidates.

[deleted]

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

#92

Post by joshribakoff » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:10 PM UTC

I went through the process & got some attractive offers. I had mixed thoughts overall. Initially, they told me the benefit was I can avoid white boarding & on site coding challenges, however all the companies had their own white boarding or coding challenges. The hotel they put me in was in the Tenderloin, a bad part of town. I had lunch with Triple Byte & they were all very nice. Overall it was a positive experience so much so that I did not submit my urban fee/uber costs for reimbursement, seeing as I got offers on the upper end of their range & still turned them down. Going through their process has easily made me 2x as strong of a developer & helped me recognize my own worth.

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

#93

Post by ummonk » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:13 PM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #4

Anyone care to comment on how the whole Triplebyte process goes as a person who wants to be hired? I'm interested since I never got past the set of questions due to some kind of bug in the beta.

Took the quiz just over a year ago, and passed the phone interview. I stated my preference to avoid very small / early stage startups, and got interviews at Asana, Apple, and a medium-sized startup. Accepted the Asana offer, where I have been working for a year.

I think Triplebyte was really useful for me because I didn't have a CS degree and didn't have any work history directly in tech, so I couldn't get through resume screens via direct applications and didn't really know many people who could refer me. So Triplebyte had high value in getting me actual the actual technical interviews. I'm not sure how valuable it would be for others who don't have trouble with this, but given the minimal time investment (a few hours for phone interview), it's probably worth a shot regardless.

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

#94

Post by gxs » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:19 PM UTC

Benjammer wrote: post #88

gxs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crux of this problem in my opinion is that long term results aren't tracked. It's hard enough internally to track someone's performance over the course of the year or two after they get hired, it would be even harder to do it if you are a recruiting company. It's especially sensitive because employers are weary of sharing employee performance data to third parties because of the high risk of a lawsuit (there is c…

>Once that data problem is bridged, it blows the problem right open for data to be explored and figure out what exactly predicts a top performer, in any field. Yes, assuming there is some top-level "data problem" to actually bridge here... How do we know that the concept of "top performer" isn't just a completely divergent idea that means different things to different people and different companies in different indus…

Sure, it's a subjective measure, but it's a start.

Keep in mind there is ZERO data available for this type of analysis at the moment.

Even if it's subjective, the analysis can provide the employer with candidates that are good based on the same subjective criteria.

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

#95

Post by pryelluw » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:20 PM UTC

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…

About a week ago, I did some A/B testing. I completed their online screener twice. Once answering all of the questions as good as possible. The other answering the questions with the third option (multiple choice). In both cases, I passed the screener. (shrugs)

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

#96

Post by ebakan » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:24 PM UTC

xiphias wrote: post #20

Harj wrote: post #13

What was always most interesting to us about starting a recruiting company was seeing what would happen if you treated hiring as a data problem. Partly we've raised more funding for the same reason any startup does, so we can grow faster to get more customers = more revenue = more success, etc. But we're also driven by how the larger the scale we operate at, the faster we can run experiments to answer questions about…

Hi, I just went through the interview questions, they were fun (they said that I did exceptionally well, but nothing concrete, like percentage). I'm not looking for job, just though I try it out. What I was interested in is whether the questions get harder, if I answer well, but they seemed random. You could use logistic regression to estimate the level of an interviewer and adjust the questions to get to the same ac…

So you're right that the quiz does try to be harder if you're doing well, but it'll also give you easier questions if an incorrect answer lowers its confidence in your ability estimate. We have a pretty sizeable bank of potential questions to ask a candidate, but the quiz tries to strike an optimal balance between appropriate difficulty and maximum informativeness. For example, we wouldn't want to as you a particularly difficult question unless we're confident that it's a) a good fit for your estimated ability level, and b) will give us more information about your ability than any other question in the bank.

You're right that tailoring question difficulty to ability level can drastically increase a test's accuracy. But while a logistic regression model works well when you have a fixed quiz or a low number of questions, it isn't flexible enough to work with a fully adaptive system like we have at Triplebyte. Our models are loosely based on the kinds of systems that the MGAT or GRE use, but we've implemented significant extensions on top of those approaches to fit our needs.

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

#97

Post by sotojuan » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:28 PM UTC

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,…

That tech is open to people of all backgrounds, even self taught, is awesome but it has its drawbacks: it's harder for the interviewer.

I disagree that there are objective measures and the vast amount of e-ink spilled on interviewing practice debates is proof of that (tech interviewing also doesn't correlate to the actual work being done!).

I'm on the "tech should be open to all" side but it _is_ harder for companies to filter out potential bad candidates. That's why they make up their own filters like "we only want seniors".

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

#98

Post by e_b » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:31 PM UTC

pryelluw wrote: post #95

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…

About a week ago, I did some A/B testing. I completed their online screener twice. Once answering all of the questions as good as possible. The other answering the questions with the third option (multiple choice). In both cases, I passed the screener. (shrugs)

Cargo cult data science.

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

#99

Post by xiphias » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:39 PM UTC

ebakan wrote: post #96

xiphias wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I just went through the interview questions, they were fun (they said that I did exceptionally well, but nothing concrete, like percentage). I'm not looking for job, just though I try it out. What I was interested in is whether the questions get harder, if I answer well, but they seemed random. You could use logistic regression to estimate the level of an interviewer and adjust the questions to get to the same ac…

So you're right that the quiz does try to be harder if you're doing well, but it'll also give you easier questions if an incorrect answer lowers its confidence in your ability estimate. We have a pretty sizeable bank of potential questions to ask a candidate, but the quiz tries to strike an optimal balance between appropriate difficulty and maximum informativeness . For example, we wouldn't want to as you a particula…

Thanks for the answer. When I was implementing a language learning program (who hasn't? :) ), using logistic regression was working quite well to quickly find my vocabulary level in about 10 questions in the top 10000 most frequently used words list adaptively (I ran a full logistic regression on the user dataset after each new data point, by mapping the position of the words to the estimated level of the user), and the questions just felt right. So I'm not talking about multiple logistic regression model, just using 1 variable, which works with lots of questions (as long as the question hardness is well calibrated).

Although I'm happy that you're trying to predict the most informative question, for me some questions near the end felt trivial, so either my feeling wasn't right about the hardness of a question, or the algorithm has lots of space to improve, or the question hardness levels weren't calibrated optimally.

Anyways congrats for the success for your startup (I just hope that you prioritize people who don't have U.S. VISA)!

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

#100

Post by koopuluri » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:52 PM UTC

sotojuan wrote: post #97

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,…

That tech is open to people of all backgrounds, even self taught, is awesome but it has its drawbacks: it's harder for the interviewer. I disagree that there are objective measures and the vast amount of e-ink spilled on interviewing practice debates is proof of that (tech interviewing also doesn't correlate to the actual work being done!). I'm on the "tech should be open to all" side but it _is_ harder for companies…

> the vast amount of e-ink spilled on interviewing practice debates is proof of that (tech interviewing also doesn't correlate to the actual work being done!)

You're right that CURRENT interview screening practices are far removed from actual work, but that will change. I don't think that it's proof that there aren't better assessments (which should be aligned with how work is actually done on the job). If anything, this is an opportunity to experiment more, and find better assessments.

> I disagree that there are objective measures...

I agree that there aren't fully objective measures, and may never be. What I do believe is that you can get SOME signal of competence from, say, someone's code about their competence at building something right now, which is a more objective, impartial signal than what happens in other industries which relies mostly on a behavioral interview (which allows for a lo t of bias to creep in)