Having interviewed with TripleByte, I think this is a bold and poor decision.
Upfront, I didn't pass a TripleByte interview I had (one of the few companies I haven't passed).
My interviewer showed up late initially, then took a break and showed up 10 minutes late after the break. Further, the interviewer nit picked super irrelevant details, and acted exceedingly smug and condescending. Some of the stuff he told me I was wrong about was related to my research. Even after attempting to explain it several times, he just said, "No, you're wrong, you don't know what you are talking about."
I then literally brought up the paper and sent it to him, before he said something along the lines of... Oh, well I guess that is right.
Overall, it was one of the worst interview experiences I have had, and I don't believe they are good way to recruit. Hell, I even passed all their coding questions with flying colors. It was the silly video conferencing interview with a smug engineer who really made the interview fall apart.
I had an interesting experience with triplebyte which wasn't as objectively bad as yours, but it also makes me skeptical of the company.
First round was multiple choice questions, relatively straight-forward. Second-round was skype-call and just felt incredibly subjective. I was asked questions around building out memcached to support arbitrarily-sized values, and I got the same "smug" vibe you sensed.
The interview style was very
"Him: How would you do X?"
"me: Well that's not a simple problem, there are a lot of solutions each with tradeoffs."
"Him: Okay so name one"
"Me: So you could do X"
"Him: BUT THEN Y [GOTCHA!]"
"Me: Yes, that's one of the tradeoffs of X"
It wasn't clear to me what the heck he was even looking for. Was he hoping I'd list race-condition problems? Had he not even considered race-condition problems? Was he looking for a theoretical solution or a real-world solution? Also he kept going on random tangents ("That brings me to an interesting question, how would you shift a gigabyte of memory 1 bit?"). He seemed very concerned with efficiently bit-packing the header in this problem, which seems silly to me when we're talking about storing gigabytes.
My understanding was that triplebyte was seeking to be the SATs of engineering, however SATs do heavy validation with test-retest reliability and such, I had no particular reason to suspect triplebyte's interview was any more objective than any other company's.
I'm sorry that the interview went poorly! I'm especially sorry about the lateness. I just pulled up our notes from your interview, and I was your interviewer! So that makes it especially bad :(
I'm not an expert in all areas. At the end of the interview we have a section where we let the discussion go into whatever technical area the engineer wants to talk about. It sounds like you're an expert in an area where I am not. In those cases I try to ask questions and push deep, but (depending on the topic) that can be hard.
edit: removed discussion of the specific topic discussed. Sorry, folks below are right
Expertise is something our model handles less well (it's much harder to standardize). This certainly results in us failing some great people (and it sounds like that may have happened here). I'm happy to talk about this more. Give me an email at [email protected].
Had a bad experience myself (with the obvious caveat that it will seem sour if you don't pass the the interview, and posting anon but will follow up privately for anyone posting contact info).
The challenge was to code up a regex parser in three hours then discuss in an interview.
During the interview I was asked to add (IIRC) a Kleene operator. I repeated back his explanation of what a Kleene operator is. I explained how that definition would impact my choice of how to implement it. During the implementation, I made repeated references to that same spec. I got it working.
Then, he told me that it didn't work, because a Kleene operator means something completely different than what I understood. He apparently wasn't listening the whole time because I repeated back his spec several times when implementing it and he never corrected it!
(Perhaps this was some subtle test of "see how they react to impoliteness"?)
More importantly though, it was rejected for not being an elegant state machine implementation of a parser, which made it hard to extend. Which is fair, in a way. I knew, abstractly, that that was a better way to do it and I would have gladly read up on the concept and written my implementation that way. But with the overhead of setting up the codebase, docs, and tests, I would have exceeded 3 hour limit that they trust applicants to hold themselves to.
Apparently, the right way to proceed here would be to learn state machines, severely exceed the 3 hour limit, and then lie and say it took me 3 hours. Is that what they're selecting for? Or perhaps for people who already know state machine implementations?
I also had a failed interview with Triplebyte that left a bad taste in my mouth. I experienced similarly condescending tones and disrespect from the interviewer. I was told to prepare and share/explain code I'd already written, but when the call started I was instead given three problem options for a live-coding session.
To be fair, they were super friendly and responsive to my critique, and I found their interview notes/follow-up helpful and accurate. Still, if you're going to provide interviews as a service, you should work hard to make the interview a positive experience for the candidate. I'm loath to apply to any company using Triplebyte for now, but I'd probably do it if I really wanted the job.
This was an interviewer working for Triplebyte? I thought their interviews were standardized. Can you tell us more about the experience, and what they asked? I'm super interested in this.
I had the opposite experience with Triplebyte. I found every part of it enjoyable and really liked the interviewer.
What I didn't like was the chats with the companies that followed. It felt like the whole Triplebyte interview process never happened and we were starting from scratch..
Almost exact same situation here. I was rejected by TripleByte and ended up getting offers at many of the companies I applied to. I had the same feelings about the interviewer as the parent comment.
I wouldn't say it was particularly bad, but it was worse than average compared to my other interviews.
For what it's worth, I had the video conference part go poorly. For one I was really nervous with the interviewer after they exhibited smugness and I was sure the thing went south from that instant. Funnily enough the person claimed they weren't fully awake and needed coffee and what not; not sure if it was because of an early morning call, but 10am PST isn't really early, especially not when you setup an interview in advance. I passed interviews at a couple of other places so while this incident is attributable to the interview-loop variance I'm skeptical of spending time with their process if that's the case.
Don't worry not passing it is probably for the best, as if you interview through companies with them, good luck trying to get reimbursed for your interview expenses. They promise that they will handle everything and it will be super "convenient", but it's only convenient if you are fine with getting nothing in the end. I am somewhat convinced part of their business model relies on saving money by not paying people.
Interesting, I interviewed with one of the cofounders and felt like it was one of the best interviews I had. Lengthy, moderately difficult, but fair. I passed, but remember feeling that way even immediately after the interview.
As someone who went through the Triplebyte interview process not long ago, I actually had a positive video screening experience with Guillaume as my interviewer. He was definitely focused on getting as much signal from the interview as possible in the time we had (which is a plus imo, since I don't have tons of spare time to waste). IIRC I didn't complete 100% of the coding part, but he seemed genuinely interested in how I was approaching things and the underlying algorithmic concepts more than in the nitty-gritty of the code itself.
That session was overall certainly energy-intensive, but then no more than a good interview session with someone who knows what they're doing interview skills wise. But at a more general level only Triplebyte would know about interviewer variance and whatever secret sauce they have to maximize SNR during the screens, so I can't speak about that.
I avoid Triplebyte like the plague. I passed their "online interview" and was marked as exceptional.
I mailed the guy (forgot who he was, but his email address showed up on one of the pages) since I had some questions. He responded once and never again.
Then they had the audacity to email me again a few month later to schedule a call to give feedback for their platform.
Yeah sure, I am going to take extra time from my day to provide you feedback for no return. If they had sent it as a web survey, it would have been probably better.
Finally, they can only schedule interviews on two days a week. Really?
As a general reply to a variety of the complaints in this thread: don't underestimate the task that triplebyte has in selling you to companies, especially since they have focused on candidates who might not even get an onsite interview at companies on their own. Their process also involves helping candidates skip a lot of the interview pipeline at several companies at a time, so that you can get better offers. This means that companies have to place a lot of trust in their assessment, and my personal experience (having gone through the process and gotten a job through them) is that they have to be very very rigorous to sell companies on their model.
My interviews with triplebyte were definitely some of the hardest ones I had during my search, but they also focused on things I consider important in developing software in a way that no other interview pipeline I've been through has. It may be that my overwhelmingly positive experience with them is not reflective of most, but I think that's unlikely given the amount of work they put into standardizing their process.
Being on the side of engineers in the hiring process does not mean they can take it easy on interviews, and my experience would suggest that whatever personal intensity you may feel in an interview with them is very likely to be outclassed by any decent sized sample of interviews at a big company.
I'm definitely bullish on their model, and while the process isn't perfect I'm really excited to see them moving the needle on interview quality in the industry. I sincerely wish them the best with the expansion.
I'm in Triplebyte's pipeline right now, and have had nothing but a great experience. The interview questions have been... not unusual? If people are complaining they're too challenging, I think I must have gotten lucky, because they seemed fairly normal to me. I believe my interviewer even told me that rather than finishing the whole programming problem, they were looking to see how far I could get and how I develop code.
It's been a great experience so far, even though several of my favorite companies in the pipeline have gone incommunicado before I could even talk to them :-/!
It's been interesting working with larger companies through Triplebyte. When we started, we were mostly working with smaller startups making early engineering hires. The challenge for these them is letting engineers know the company exists and why it's interesting.
Bigger companies like Facebook don't need to let engineers know they exist, a huge number of engineers have already applied to them at some point. What they've realized is the way to hire more is to find the good ones that are sitting in the resume review stage of the hiring process, not getting looked at because they don't have stand out credentials.
One thing that's struck out to me in a surprising way about the average startup hiring process compared to larger companies is speed. We've found the larger companies are actually faster to move on the first step of booking a call to speak with our candidates. This completely reverses when it gets to bringing someone onsite and making offers though. Bigger companies take longer to do both and this is where startups have a hiring advantage.
I had relatively quick (1 week time turnaround) onsites with "big companies" thorough triplebyte. Startups were relatively quick to 'weed me out' as someone with less experience. One of my frustrations was that I was not sure if triplebyte was effectively communicating my junior engineer status to the big companies; one of the companies was pitched to me as a company that had a history of being ok with taking on someone and indoctrinating them in their way of doing things and then turned me down with a reply that they were looking for a senior engineer.
In retrospect I kind of realize that Triplebyte is really more targetting as a service for more senior positions (at least for now) but I think this is a great move for Triplebyte to get a bigger marketshare and wish them luck.
>What they've realized is the way to hire more is to find the good ones that are sitting in the resume review stage of the hiring process, not getting looked at because they don't have stand out credentials.
Yup, I was one of those people whose resume kept getting sucked into the review black hole due to lack of stand out credentials. I understand companies are swamped with applications and need some way to screen applicants even before phone interviews, but it was rather frustrating knowing I would do perfectly fine if I only I were given an interview.
Triplebyte was an immense help here (just today I accepted an offer from Asana that I got through Triplebyte). I'm really a fan of your philosophy and what you're trying to do to improve tech hiring, and strongly recommend people (especially those without great conventional resumes) to give Triplebyte a go.
How does the matching process work on the other side? How do you figure out the correct interview loop and position to match a candidate with when you're working with large companies that have so many different groups inside them?
When I interviewed with Triplebyte I had applied to actually become part of their staff. I was told I'd go through the standard process and then afterward we'd talk about what Triplebyte does in-depth and what the responsibilities would be. Guillaume was kind, engaging, and interested in how I approached a problem. The Australian dude (Buck) took over toward the end and he was very dismissive - he didn't seem to care what I said. It was kind of a let-down because I had crawled his online presence when researching Triplebyte and I was interested in asking him about his charity contributions. I had a good time talking to Harj about buckling-spring keyboards like my beloved Model M in the in-between moments.
I found out later I didn't pass the interview because my solution to the coding exercise didn't work at the end of the hour. We had continued past it and I thought I was safe because I was complimented on its organization and straight-forward interpretation. I finished it that night:
I'm a recruiter that is technical (js engineer) based in NYC. I don't see what TripleByte is doing that is that different from what a good recruiter can offer. Matching at very selective companies doesn't seem challenging.
I don't work with Apple or Facebook, but in the past four months recruiting part-time I've had 15 placements. Over 65% resume submission to on-site rate. And over an 85% offer close rate (close counts if I get 3 offers for someone and they choose one). I can match relatively well without needing to put candidates through a day of tests and I save candidates time by sending them to selectively chosen companies (safety, fit, reach). And I spend a ton of truly understanding each unique process of the companies I work with.
What makes Triplebyte actually unique? What are they changing about the industry? Are they actually reducing bias or is this a gimmick? Are they that different from a recruiting firm with strong lead generation?
I interviewed and was rejected from Triplebyte. It was pretty miserable. Compared to real recruiters, I feel more comfortable talking to recruiters since they care about my background and won't ask me to program an hour's worth of code on the spot or ask me several questions about redis and webscale technologies. They're kind of just filtering through candidates looking for people who they think could work at Google instead of looking for hard-working people.
With that said, do you accept new candidates for the NYC area?
My experience with TripleByte is worse than I have had with recruiters emailing me.
I tried going through TripleBytes process and answered the programming quiz. Then TripleByte changes their policy stating that I must do a project before I can proceed. I stopped the process there.
Then after awhile when I try to login and try again after a few months it says that I am in some kind of pending state which I can't get out of. I gave up on the service after that.
I don't get it. If someone's done has an incredible body of work behind them, why do you want to hide that from yourself?
Isn't it a great way to pick the best people out of the pool of applicants? 'Ah this person designed the new IR in Google's V8 - we should definitely talk to them'.
When I speak to potential hires the first thing I ask is 'tell me about the projects you've worked on - what have you built in the past'. Am I doing it wrong? Someone could be great at general programming and pass a coding test, but if they have no experience in my field what are they going to do for me?
I failed the 3rd round interview because I hadn't studied garbage collection. C# handles it for me, I could have learned, I just hadn't prioritized that yet and folks want to say now you aren't very senior. I was told I could apply again, but haven't been offered a chance to even after a couple of follow ups. The problem that ultimately stumped me in the 3 round was the exercise of drawing a spiral in a console window. Sounds easy, but when you are timed and nervous, almost impossible. After I bombed the 3rd round knowing the rejection was coming, I ended up successfully implementing it in Excel and VBA. Good coders are like a snowflake and I think TripleByte doesn't have a business if they buy that.
I had an awesome video-interview with Triplebyte in January but they didn't decide to move forward. No complaints though as they gave a solid heads-up on what to expect, my interviewer was super positive (I felt like he was actually rooting for me), and they gave me solid feedback on my strengths and what concrete actions I should take if I choose to reapply in the future.
These guys are the real deal, so it's pretty neat that they're expanding out to big-names! I wish them the best!
First Round: Online quiz: pretty easy, very intuitive questions. Different languages, but concepts are language-agnostic.
Second Round: Onsite (I live close by). One OOP coding question, Lightning round of very basic college CS concepts, and debugging session.
First Round Matches: The company tries to match you with 10 companies; I got 5. All the companies were either YC or top-vc funded. I received responses from 3 companies; the startups move very quickly -- onsite within a week. However, I've interviewed with 2 of the 3. Did not get an offer from either (qualification and mismatch in culture-fit).
PROS:
- The team moves VERY fast when it comes to companies (really tough to think of PTO excuses)
- Responsive - each candidate is assigned to a single talent manager
- After the initial matches did not fit my liking or yield any results, my talent manager immediately started looking for new matches.
CONS:
- Initial matches were not what I was looking for/interested in. (hopefully being fixed).
So far, the experience has been positive. Personally, the lack of stress of finding places to submit to is a huge plus.
Yep signing up more companies to work with is how we can improve the likelihood we'll find enough matches that are both a technical skills fit and interest fit for every candidate. That's what we're working towards.
I'm sorry you had a negative experience and we're working hard to make sure it doesn't happen for anyone again.
We started the company to help those people for whom manually submitting their resume to companies isn't an option. We don't use resumes as part of our screening process because we're looking to find skilled engineers without elite resume credentials. For them, submitting their resumes directly results in either silence or rejection.
We've been able to find many of these engineers jobs at companies they'd never imagined they'd be able to work at. We just had a self taught engineer working as a pizza delivery person in Cincinnati, hired by Instacart - his onsite interview was the first time he'd met another engineer in person. We helped a recent high school graduate, who didn't attend college, get hired by Apple - his dream company.
I'm the founder so I'm obviously incentivized to highlight these success stories and I don't claim that we've built a perfect process for everyone yet. We're working on a hard problem, judging the skill of other human beings in a fair way and vouching for them to companies that have maintained the same hiring process for decades and are resistant to change. Our approach is not perfect but it has had life changing outcomes for many people and we're doing our best to increase the % of all Triplebyte applicants that's true for.
We've been using TripleByte (in addition to career fairs, etc.) at Expo for a few months and find it really good. Every candidate from TripleByte we've interviewed has been knowledgeable about many facets of software engineering, and it's been great to work with the one we've so far brought on board.
One effect of using TripleByte is that we've been able to focus our interviews more on engineering design and seeing how someone thinks. Since we've found TripleByte's interviews for programming skills and knowledge to be quite good, we get to spend more of our time and the candidates' time on areas other than coding questions.
My experience working with Triplebyte has been great. I found them through hackernews from a post about visualizing the timeline for a job search [1].
Unlike most people in this thread, I thought their interview process was much more relevant and tangible to real engineering applications than most companies I've interviewed at. I was not presented with any gotchas or arcane algorithms questions.
Finally, the big draw to them as an engineer is that it significantly cuts down on the amount of time you spend on the phone with other companies before going on site. I'm still holding a job (hence the anonymous account), so looking for other opportunities was somewhat prohibitive to me.
The phone number validator on the signup page does not work correctly. Doesn't recognize or validate my valid Swiss phone number in any normal variation although it does correctly change the little flag to Switzerland.
Have you guys considered working with Udacity? They have a "plus" version that does offers placement guarantees or a refund. There might be a synergy there.
[+] [-] lettergram|9 years ago|reply
Upfront, I didn't pass a TripleByte interview I had (one of the few companies I haven't passed).
My interviewer showed up late initially, then took a break and showed up 10 minutes late after the break. Further, the interviewer nit picked super irrelevant details, and acted exceedingly smug and condescending. Some of the stuff he told me I was wrong about was related to my research. Even after attempting to explain it several times, he just said, "No, you're wrong, you don't know what you are talking about."
I then literally brought up the paper and sent it to him, before he said something along the lines of... Oh, well I guess that is right.
Overall, it was one of the worst interview experiences I have had, and I don't believe they are good way to recruit. Hell, I even passed all their coding questions with flying colors. It was the silly video conferencing interview with a smug engineer who really made the interview fall apart.
[+] [-] zug_zug|9 years ago|reply
First round was multiple choice questions, relatively straight-forward. Second-round was skype-call and just felt incredibly subjective. I was asked questions around building out memcached to support arbitrarily-sized values, and I got the same "smug" vibe you sensed.
The interview style was very "Him: How would you do X?" "me: Well that's not a simple problem, there are a lot of solutions each with tradeoffs." "Him: Okay so name one" "Me: So you could do X" "Him: BUT THEN Y [GOTCHA!]" "Me: Yes, that's one of the tradeoffs of X"
It wasn't clear to me what the heck he was even looking for. Was he hoping I'd list race-condition problems? Had he not even considered race-condition problems? Was he looking for a theoretical solution or a real-world solution? Also he kept going on random tangents ("That brings me to an interesting question, how would you shift a gigabyte of memory 1 bit?"). He seemed very concerned with efficiently bit-packing the header in this problem, which seems silly to me when we're talking about storing gigabytes.
My understanding was that triplebyte was seeking to be the SATs of engineering, however SATs do heavy validation with test-retest reliability and such, I had no particular reason to suspect triplebyte's interview was any more objective than any other company's.
[+] [-] ammon|9 years ago|reply
I'm not an expert in all areas. At the end of the interview we have a section where we let the discussion go into whatever technical area the engineer wants to talk about. It sounds like you're an expert in an area where I am not. In those cases I try to ask questions and push deep, but (depending on the topic) that can be hard.
edit: removed discussion of the specific topic discussed. Sorry, folks below are right
Expertise is something our model handles less well (it's much harder to standardize). This certainly results in us failing some great people (and it sounds like that may have happened here). I'm happy to talk about this more. Give me an email at [email protected].
[+] [-] interview42115|9 years ago|reply
The challenge was to code up a regex parser in three hours then discuss in an interview.
During the interview I was asked to add (IIRC) a Kleene operator. I repeated back his explanation of what a Kleene operator is. I explained how that definition would impact my choice of how to implement it. During the implementation, I made repeated references to that same spec. I got it working.
Then, he told me that it didn't work, because a Kleene operator means something completely different than what I understood. He apparently wasn't listening the whole time because I repeated back his spec several times when implementing it and he never corrected it!
(Perhaps this was some subtle test of "see how they react to impoliteness"?)
More importantly though, it was rejected for not being an elegant state machine implementation of a parser, which made it hard to extend. Which is fair, in a way. I knew, abstractly, that that was a better way to do it and I would have gladly read up on the concept and written my implementation that way. But with the overhead of setting up the codebase, docs, and tests, I would have exceeded 3 hour limit that they trust applicants to hold themselves to.
Apparently, the right way to proceed here would be to learn state machines, severely exceed the 3 hour limit, and then lie and say it took me 3 hours. Is that what they're selecting for? Or perhaps for people who already know state machine implementations?
[+] [-] aganders3|9 years ago|reply
To be fair, they were super friendly and responsive to my critique, and I found their interview notes/follow-up helpful and accurate. Still, if you're going to provide interviews as a service, you should work hard to make the interview a positive experience for the candidate. I'm loath to apply to any company using Triplebyte for now, but I'd probably do it if I really wanted the job.
[+] [-] tptacek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfilargi|9 years ago|reply
What I didn't like was the chats with the companies that followed. It felt like the whole Triplebyte interview process never happened and we were starting from scratch..
[+] [-] rckrd|9 years ago|reply
I wouldn't say it was particularly bad, but it was worse than average compared to my other interviews.
[+] [-] vikiomega9|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poikniok|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bogomipz|9 years ago|reply
Ouch. That is truly awful. I'm sorry that happened to you. The irony, their site claims:
"The existing hiring process is broken. We’re building a new kind of interview that evaluates tech skills, not credentials."
If that's their mission there's really no excuse for this. I will be sure to avoid them. Thanks for sharing.
[+] [-] cbau|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exit0|9 years ago|reply
That session was overall certainly energy-intensive, but then no more than a good interview session with someone who knows what they're doing interview skills wise. But at a more general level only Triplebyte would know about interviewer variance and whatever secret sauce they have to maximize SNR during the screens, so I can't speak about that.
[+] [-] cheez|9 years ago|reply
Ammon is a smug dude, no doubt about it.
Edit: to be clear, I passed the interviews.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jeremyis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisper|9 years ago|reply
I mailed the guy (forgot who he was, but his email address showed up on one of the pages) since I had some questions. He responded once and never again.
Then they had the audacity to email me again a few month later to schedule a call to give feedback for their platform.
Yeah sure, I am going to take extra time from my day to provide you feedback for no return. If they had sent it as a web survey, it would have been probably better.
Finally, they can only schedule interviews on two days a week. Really?
[+] [-] anp|9 years ago|reply
My interviews with triplebyte were definitely some of the hardest ones I had during my search, but they also focused on things I consider important in developing software in a way that no other interview pipeline I've been through has. It may be that my overwhelmingly positive experience with them is not reflective of most, but I think that's unlikely given the amount of work they put into standardizing their process.
Being on the side of engineers in the hiring process does not mean they can take it easy on interviews, and my experience would suggest that whatever personal intensity you may feel in an interview with them is very likely to be outclassed by any decent sized sample of interviews at a big company.
I'm definitely bullish on their model, and while the process isn't perfect I'm really excited to see them moving the needle on interview quality in the industry. I sincerely wish them the best with the expansion.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|9 years ago|reply
It's been a great experience so far, even though several of my favorite companies in the pipeline have gone incommunicado before I could even talk to them :-/!
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Harj|9 years ago|reply
Bigger companies like Facebook don't need to let engineers know they exist, a huge number of engineers have already applied to them at some point. What they've realized is the way to hire more is to find the good ones that are sitting in the resume review stage of the hiring process, not getting looked at because they don't have stand out credentials.
One thing that's struck out to me in a surprising way about the average startup hiring process compared to larger companies is speed. We've found the larger companies are actually faster to move on the first step of booking a call to speak with our candidates. This completely reverses when it gets to bringing someone onsite and making offers though. Bigger companies take longer to do both and this is where startups have a hiring advantage.
[+] [-] dnautics|9 years ago|reply
In retrospect I kind of realize that Triplebyte is really more targetting as a service for more senior positions (at least for now) but I think this is a great move for Triplebyte to get a bigger marketshare and wish them luck.
[+] [-] tedmiston|9 years ago|reply
How do the types of engineers Apple or Facebook want compare to that?
[+] [-] ummonk|9 years ago|reply
Yup, I was one of those people whose resume kept getting sucked into the review black hole due to lack of stand out credentials. I understand companies are swamped with applications and need some way to screen applicants even before phone interviews, but it was rather frustrating knowing I would do perfectly fine if I only I were given an interview.
Triplebyte was an immense help here (just today I accepted an offer from Asana that I got through Triplebyte). I'm really a fan of your philosophy and what you're trying to do to improve tech hiring, and strongly recommend people (especially those without great conventional resumes) to give Triplebyte a go.
[+] [-] itsdrewmiller|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djcapelis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blitmap|9 years ago|reply
I found out later I didn't pass the interview because my solution to the coding exercise didn't work at the end of the hour. We had continued past it and I thought I was safe because I was complimented on its organization and straight-forward interpretation. I finished it that night:
https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-snippets/blob/master...
https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-snippets/blob/master...
I had fun but I felt like they got more out of it than I did.
[+] [-] dsk139|9 years ago|reply
I don't work with Apple or Facebook, but in the past four months recruiting part-time I've had 15 placements. Over 65% resume submission to on-site rate. And over an 85% offer close rate (close counts if I get 3 offers for someone and they choose one). I can match relatively well without needing to put candidates through a day of tests and I save candidates time by sending them to selectively chosen companies (safety, fit, reach). And I spend a ton of truly understanding each unique process of the companies I work with.
What makes Triplebyte actually unique? What are they changing about the industry? Are they actually reducing bias or is this a gimmick? Are they that different from a recruiting firm with strong lead generation?
[+] [-] OSfrog|9 years ago|reply
With that said, do you accept new candidates for the NYC area?
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|9 years ago|reply
I tried going through TripleBytes process and answered the programming quiz. Then TripleByte changes their policy stating that I must do a project before I can proceed. I stopped the process there.
Then after awhile when I try to login and try again after a few months it says that I am in some kind of pending state which I can't get out of. I gave up on the service after that.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|9 years ago|reply
I don't get it. If someone's done has an incredible body of work behind them, why do you want to hide that from yourself?
Isn't it a great way to pick the best people out of the pool of applicants? 'Ah this person designed the new IR in Google's V8 - we should definitely talk to them'.
When I speak to potential hires the first thing I ask is 'tell me about the projects you've worked on - what have you built in the past'. Am I doing it wrong? Someone could be great at general programming and pass a coding test, but if they have no experience in my field what are they going to do for me?
[+] [-] throwawayact01|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeeDave|9 years ago|reply
These guys are the real deal, so it's pretty neat that they're expanding out to big-names! I wish them the best!
[+] [-] utmachina|9 years ago|reply
First Round: Online quiz: pretty easy, very intuitive questions. Different languages, but concepts are language-agnostic.
Second Round: Onsite (I live close by). One OOP coding question, Lightning round of very basic college CS concepts, and debugging session.
First Round Matches: The company tries to match you with 10 companies; I got 5. All the companies were either YC or top-vc funded. I received responses from 3 companies; the startups move very quickly -- onsite within a week. However, I've interviewed with 2 of the 3. Did not get an offer from either (qualification and mismatch in culture-fit).
PROS: - The team moves VERY fast when it comes to companies (really tough to think of PTO excuses) - Responsive - each candidate is assigned to a single talent manager - After the initial matches did not fit my liking or yield any results, my talent manager immediately started looking for new matches.
CONS: - Initial matches were not what I was looking for/interested in. (hopefully being fixed).
So far, the experience has been positive. Personally, the lack of stress of finding places to submit to is a huge plus.
[+] [-] Harj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Harj|9 years ago|reply
We started the company to help those people for whom manually submitting their resume to companies isn't an option. We don't use resumes as part of our screening process because we're looking to find skilled engineers without elite resume credentials. For them, submitting their resumes directly results in either silence or rejection.
We've been able to find many of these engineers jobs at companies they'd never imagined they'd be able to work at. We just had a self taught engineer working as a pizza delivery person in Cincinnati, hired by Instacart - his onsite interview was the first time he'd met another engineer in person. We helped a recent high school graduate, who didn't attend college, get hired by Apple - his dream company.
I'm the founder so I'm obviously incentivized to highlight these success stories and I don't claim that we've built a perfect process for everyone yet. We're working on a hard problem, judging the skill of other human beings in a fair way and vouching for them to companies that have maintained the same hiring process for decades and are resistant to change. Our approach is not perfect but it has had life changing outcomes for many people and we're doing our best to increase the % of all Triplebyte applicants that's true for.
[+] [-] jameside|9 years ago|reply
One effect of using TripleByte is that we've been able to focus our interviews more on engineering design and seeing how someone thinks. Since we've found TripleByte's interviews for programming skills and knowledge to be quite good, we get to spend more of our time and the candidates' time on areas other than coding questions.
[+] [-] xursabgyn|9 years ago|reply
Unlike most people in this thread, I thought their interview process was much more relevant and tangible to real engineering applications than most companies I've interviewed at. I was not presented with any gotchas or arcane algorithms questions.
Finally, the big draw to them as an engineer is that it significantly cuts down on the amount of time you spend on the phone with other companies before going on site. I'm still holding a job (hence the anonymous account), so looking for other opportunities was somewhat prohibitive to me.
[1] http://kellysutton.com/2016/10/20/visualizing-a-job-search-o...
[+] [-] blackkettle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soneca|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] drwl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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