
Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham - kwi
https://triplebyte.com/blog/we-ve-raised-a-10-million-series-a-from-initialized-capital
======
tway12
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
the details of advanced hashmap implementations. There seems to be a bias to
discredit the interviewee if the interviewer lacks knowledge in an area.

Either way, despite getting great evaluations, I was matched with a total of 5
companies most of which were highly underwhelming early stage companies with
minimal traction. Furthermore, I was matched with full stack companies despite
begin evaluated as "weak in API design", which is perplexing. I was able to
get higher quality offers in my own search and it seems like the TripleByte
pipeline consists of many mediocre companies.

If I had known, I wouldn't have wasted my time with this service and invested
more time in my job search.

~~~
triplebytelol
Throwaway, because I'm well-known on HN.

I ran the TripleByte course once, and it was 100% not worth my time as a
professional.

The "coding test" was criminally simple, but got me in the door quickly for an
interview. I spent a number of hours building out projects with a paired
interviewer, as well as answering questions. This part I enjoyed, it felt like
a nice back and forth while building an interesting bit of software. It was
like an open discussion, and getting to tap away on my laptop was such an
enjoyable time.

Then came the technical questions. The interviewer asked if I knew anything
about a specific Technology X. I'd list the tech here by name, but it's so
specific I'm afraid of it being linked back to me. It's not something most
engineers would run into.

I responded with "I have not worked with that, I've heard of it" as well as it
never being listed on my resume or professional work. The interviewer went
ahead and simplified it down for us to discuss, much like "Ok well it works
like this, so let's chat abstractly". I went along with the discussion since I
figured it would be fine to chat abstractly about a technology I never worked
with.

The interview concluded, we parted ways and I thought things went very well.

The following days later I received an e-mail from Triplebyte. They praised my
clean code and thought process, but specifically said my weakness in said
Technology X, which I would like to call out again I never worked with
professional nor had it listed as a skill or on my resume, was too much to
consider me for the next round.

 _TripleByte literally evaluated, and discounted me, on not knowing an
uncommon bit of technology. Just what the hell._

I was _shocked_ at the levels of failures that occurred to reach this point.
It was unfair to use that as any benchmark, and unfair to waste a day of my
time doing that. It was a smack in the face to an industry vet like myself.

I tell all job seekers to stay far, far away from TripleByte for this reason.
They're not really changing the game at all, but like to pretend they are the
magic answer.

One footnote: I'm an engineer at one of the giants (Google, Amazon, Apple,
Microsoft, etc) who was and is way more qualified than anything TripleByte was
or is pushing out.

~~~
taurath
The giants fail people for the same reasons as well. I've learned over time
that qualifications matter far far less than interview skills at software
companies, and even a maximally qualified person only has a 60-70% chance of
passing any arbitrary interview.

------
Harj
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 the best way to evaluate technical
skills. More rigorous and data focused approaches to hiring benefit everyone.

Interviewing and evaluating engineers is an area a lot of people feel
passionately about and have strong opinions on. We're continually looking for
ways to improve our process, if you've any thoughts or feedback please ping me
- harj at triplebyte.

~~~
fro0116
Wow. Is it just me or does that sound like a downright horrifying company to
deal with as a candidate?

At our company, we try to painstakingly craft our recruiting experience to
make sure each candidate we interview has a good experience and ends up with a
positive impression of our company regardless of whether or not we end up
sending them an offer. At the end of the day, we're all human beings, each
with something unique to bring to the table, even if that something might not
be what we're looking for for a particular role at the moment.

Maybe past some scale we'll have to start changing our approach and start
reducing candidates down to data points and "run experiments" on them like lab
rats, like Google, et all, and these guys here seem to be so proud of
themselves for doing, but I'd sooner quit than to stay a part of a company
that does that.

~~~
7h3kk1d
I'd rather find a better long term fit quicker than have a pleasant process
when looking.

~~~
fro0116
I mean sure, so would I if I had to choose between the two, but that's a false
dilemma.

And for me at least, a company that doesn't treat their candidates with
kindness and respect in the hiring process likely wouldn't be a long term fit
for me anyways.

------
lettergram
My interactions with Triplebyte have been less than good and honestly am
concerned about the company as a whole (perhaps my thoughts are misplaced).

In a prior conversation on HN (link below), I brought up some aspect of my
interview (interviewer late, argumentative, smug, etc.). Then the interviewer
came on to HN and PUBLICLY SHARED PORTIONS OF MY INTERVIEW. Honestly, should
have been fired on the spot, but nope.

To the interviewers credit, after I was the number one comment for most of the
day he deleted that portion of the comment. I am grateful (looking back now)
that was removed, however I think it speaks volumes.

The prior discussion is here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13830444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13830444)

My two cents, is the idea is good - there is some room for improvement. What's
scary is putting one company as a wall between you and the employer. I hope it
never comes to pass where they control even 5% of the market. No one should be
able to interview better than the company itself and employees shouldn't use a
service which upon being declined blocks them from other companies. I don't
believe that's the case (yet), so no qualms for the time being.

Given my experience, I hope they've improved and would happily change my view
if I had reason to.

 _EDIT_ : Added prior interaction for reference

~~~
amorphid
It's really easy to game Triplebyte. It's probably really easy to game all the
online interview platforms. May be it's hard to game Interviewing.io, because
they have you chat w/ an actual person.

~~~
marcell
For Triplebyte they have a two hour interview with a real engineer who has
passed their own interview. Even if you cheat on the live interview, you still
have to do an on-site at the company that might hire you, so it’s not a huge
benefit to cheat.

~~~
nikanj
Waste time doing an online test, for an opportunity to waste time with a faux
interview, for the opportunity to..have an interview at $bigcorp.

What’s the TripleByte value add here, why should I spend time with them? Why
not send my CV to $bigcorp directly?

~~~
burner87
Using a burner because I don't want to tie this to my company.

You can send your CV to $bigcorp directly, but $bigcorp is inundated with CVs,
and many CVs have a casual relationship with reality.

I do a lot of interviews on the hiring side. I look at a lot of resumes. And
other than "worked in a similar position at a big-5 tech company or well
regarded unicorn," nothing on a resume provides much signal. There are a
handful of universities that make me pay attention, and a few particular
programs outside that handful, but even that is weak signal. A candidate
saying "expert in [whatever]" is useless.

I spend about 10% of my work week doing technical phone screens. This comes
after a recruiter reads a candidate's resume, talks to them on the phone about
their experience, and decides they're a plausible candidate. I get on the
phone with them, we fire up coderpad, and I ask them to start coding. Nothing
requiring exotic data structures or algorithms, just a straightforward "make a
class with a couple of properties" type thing. Something along the lines of:

Part 1: Make a class that represents a playing card. It should have a suit
(clubs, diamonds, hearts, or spades), and a rank (two through ten, jack,
queen, king, or ace). Make a way to print out the card as a string. And make a
comparison function that can tell whether two cards are the same (same suit
and same rank).

Part 2: Make a deck of all 52 possible cards.

Part 3: Make a 5-card hand by picking 5 random cards from the deck.

and one or two more similarly straightforward parts after that.

There are a few places where a candidate can show off (e.g. override the
default string representation for the class, anticipate that we might want a
comparator that does more than just check for identical cards, or use a
special data structure, use an optimized algorithm for picking 5 random cards)
but none of that is necessary to pass the interview. More than half the
candidates I talk to can't get through part 1. Half of the remainder can't get
through part 3. Most people who get through part 3 move on to an onsite
interview.

70 or 80 percent of candidates who say on their CV that they can code, and
have convinced a recruiter that they can code, can't write a class and a
couple of functions. So a lot of companies do the easy thing, and just toss
out (or at least don't fast track) all the resumes that don't include
particular schools or companies, or come from referrals. And in the process,
companies lose out on tons of qualified candidates, and those candidates lose
out on jobs.

If Triplebyte can reliably identify candidates who can pass a phone screen,
when I'm sorting through resumes I'd be happy to treat a Triplebyte stamp of
approval the same way I'd treat a degree from a top school.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
_70 or 80 percent of candidates who say on their CV that they can code, and
have convinced a recruiter that they can code, can 't write a class and a
couple of functions._

Any other hiring managers here see this? It just seems hard to believe. Are
you sure it's not the case that they can code just fine but just can't balance
a red black tree in 5 minutes in a language that was never mentioned as a
requirement before while a stop watch is shoved in their face while also
having to jump through rings of fire to the background noise of some people
sighing disapprovingly.

~~~
paranoidrobot
The number is honestly not surprising, particularly if it's a genuinely large
and well known tech company.

When we've put out the call for Senior Developers experienced with language X
(pick any: C#, Javascript, Objective-C), we get people who can't even write a
basic hello-world statement being sent through by recruiters.

Years ago we built a basic coding test which is effectively "Here's a class,
now modify it according to these sets of requirements" \- something that
anyone modestly competent in those languages can do in 20 minutes at most. We
deliberately avoided writing trick questions, and tried to write it in clear
basic language to avoid any issues with language barriers.

Applicants are asked to either do it at home, or if they don't have the
ability to do so, they can come into our offices and sit in a meeting room
with a laptop to complete it.

Keep in mind, this is for people who've already submitted a CV (directly, or
through a recruiter) and report they have years of experience with these
languages.

We've had people write back saying that it was too difficult, others who
submit complete garbage that not only doesn't compile/run, but doesn't even
have vaguely correct syntax for the language.

We had someone who took up the offer to do it in our offices, who we had to
kick out after they sat there from about lunchtime until we were closing the
offices at 7pm, and all they had done was copy down our model class from the
questionnaire (incorrectly) and write some comments about how they might
implement it.

I thought that it kind of overstating of skill was limited to just development
roles, but having seen the quality of the people applying for Senior-level
roles as DBAs, Sysadmins, BI folks - it's all terrible.

------
mrnobody_67
$50m in job offers last 6 months at $130,000 average salary, with 70% of job
offers being accepted/signed = 267 people got hired in the past 180 days after
completing roughly 30,000 interviews (based on the 5000/month quoted in the
article).

That means the chances of being hired after doing a TripleByte interview is
slightly under 1% if my back of the napkin calculation is accurate.

~~~
tudelo
Only 267 people in 180 days? Sounds low. I guess it might not be based on the
number of interviews as I am not sure how selective the hiring companies are
being.

~~~
stale2002
Now multiply that 267 people hired by the average headhunting fee of 20
thousand dollars and tell me that this is "low".

------
dilatedmind
My experience with triplebyte was positive, but the interviews with the
companies I matched with was not.

The first thing every company asked for was my resume, clearly they had not
bought into the triplebyte process. Some seemed entirely unfamiliar with
triplebyte.

Interviewing can be a sad process. Triplebyte gave me a taste for what things
could be like, but didn't give me any advantage in the application process.

The companies triplebyte matched me with resulted in some of my worst
interview experiences. Think disinterested ceos, hostile line of questioning,
and a focus on my previous job experience vs things I would have liked to talk
about (open source, personal projects)

------
dabockster
As a job seeker, how is TripleByte different than the other companies that
spam my email inbox with their own "exclusive" coding tests? It seems to me
that when you peel back the fancy website, TripleByte is not functionally
different from the hiring agencies on other job boards (cough cough, Dice)
that would advertise an "exciting opportunity" with their nameless client in
order to hook you into signing a contract with them. ("Hey, while you're not
qualified for this role, we have others that come by our desk constantly. So
how about letting us sell you to other companies?")

EDIT: Their website layout is a classic agency layout.

> header with giant "sign up" button

> "top tech companies" in big print as a selling point

> huge section with the most "famous" companies in their client pool

> free cost (you're the product they're selling, so they're not looking out
> for a best fit - they're looking to get paid for placing you)

> testimonials

> blogroll that reads like it was built solely for SEO

------
thecombjelly
Do programmers love numbers and algorithms so much they want to be reduced to
them? Programmers are people and should be treated as such.

Also, shouldn't we be concerned that giving one company's algorithms control
over who gets hired will be too much power in too few hands? And algorithms
are not neutral. The people that make the algorithms have biases and
discriminations just like regular people do but at least if your company does
its own hiring you can work on figuring out what those are and how to address
them. How can you do that if you depend on some proprietary algorithm?

And what about disabilities? How does your algorithm handle those? Racial
bias? So many unanswerable questions.

I have many issues with the way most companies interview but giving up that
process to a proprietary algorithm seems like the worst solution. This is not
news to be celebrated.

~~~
koopuluri
> And what about disabilities? How does your algorithm handle those? Racial
> bias? So many unanswerable questions.

Couldn't algorithms reduce racial bias by focusing on evaluating candidates
independent of their race, and other personal attributes?

~~~
thecombjelly
They could but if part of the process is proprietary or hidden how can you
know what it is doing?

~~~
opportune
Or it could be implemented naively e.g. as a simple input feature in a DNN
model

------
montrose
This quote from the TechCrunch article was to me the most striking element of
this story. They already yield double the rate of good candidates:

""The metric that companies care most about is what percentage of on-site
interviews convert into hires, and the industry standard is 20 percent.
Triplebyte’s placement rate is 40 percent," says Taggar."

~~~
treis
I wonder if these numbers are comparable. For the 40% to be true their
candidates would have to interview at a maximum of 2.5 of their cleints on
average. That doesn't seem to fit with their model.

------
haaen
For anyone who thinks that Paul Graham is still a YC partner: he has retired
from Y Combinator.

[https://www.ycombinator.com/people/](https://www.ycombinator.com/people/)

~~~
listic
What is he doing now? I can't find any information.

~~~
yoloswagins
He's raising a child, from what I've heard.

~~~
dabockster
Cheers to him! That sounds awesome.

------
koopuluri
This is great news. Hiring needs to be better solved.

The current screening process provides a low signal of competence, and so
companies have to rely more on credentials (degrees, previous company brands)
during screening, which means that a lot of skilled people still can't get
their feet in the door at companies if they don’t “look right”, and companies
fight over a restricted talent pool.

Lack of hiring data for smaller companies means they copy larger company’s
interview processes, but there’s no strong forcing function to drive
innovation in larger company’s hiring processes (i.e. their success could be
despite a bad interviewing process - because they have a brand and offer a lot
of perks, hence attracting the best talent, and so they aren’t in a “we have
to fix hiring or we will die” mode).

This also really hurts startups - who aren’t in positions to take risks with
hiring, and with a lack of good evaluations, have to rely on credentials,
which restricts their pool, and makes them compete with the big cos for that
talent.

Another important implication of fixing hiring is that it will introduce a
powerful forcing function on higher education institutions. If students know
that they can get jobs without having “traditional” credentials, but if they
can pass, say TripleByte’s, or some other company’s, assessment which is more
aligned with what’s required on the job, and is a signal that companies
believe in, then students can use money that they would have spent on college
to instead actually learn the skills that would be useful on the job.

This movement of money out of higher education, would fund a lot more
experiments in learning and education.

I can’t stress how important I think this problem is to solve, and I’m glad
companies like TripleByte, interviewing.io, are working on it. We need more
companies, more approaches, more experiments in this space.

------
austincheney
> 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.

Technology doesn't have this. The big difference is that in those other
professions they are using the interview to actually interview the candidate,
as in the person. In software and technology the entire interview is used to
gauge basic competency and even then the trust relationship is inherently
broken.

Contrary to what technologists will tell you the problem isn't the hiring
process or low salaries (preposterous answer unless you live in the bay area).
These are symptoms of a broken trust relationship. Hiring companies inherently
do not trust the people they are interviewing as basically competent unless
they have been told otherwise by somebody they know personally.

Hiring companies shouldn't trust a candidate is minimally competent, because
there is no means to a standard baseline on which competency is measured. That
is the primary problem. Solve for this problem and the resulting symptoms are
easily addressed by the marketplace as a matter of economics.

\---

The problem is very clear to see when you have two simultaneous careers: one
as a software developer and a different one in an unrelated industry that has
professionally addressed these concerns with required professional education
and accreditation/licensing.

~~~
koopuluri
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, and in the case that
they are decent, there is still a lot of room for improvement through
experimenting via a data driven process (current credentialing is, in many
cases, outdated, and doesn't map to what actual work is like).

2\. They are not accessible by everyone. This is problematic as the means to
learning is becoming more accessible (through online education, etc.), but the
credentialing is still restricted - since the institutions that hand them out
haven't scaled credentialing. There is a lot of opportunity to provide signal
for competence that scales... and measures skill that is actually used on the
job (which is also changing as technology matures and penetrates other
industries - we'll need a credentialing system that can adjust to those
changes quickly).

In fact, I'll go as far as to say that this is a bigger problem in non-
software industries. At least in software, there is a _more_ objective way to
measure a candidate's competence independent from the path they took to gain
that competence. This means that people that might not have necessarily had a
formal education / credentialing have a sliver of a chance of an opportunity
to prove their skill. In other industries, if you don't have the
credentialing, you have no shot.

~~~
austincheney
> They are often weak signals of actual competence

I disagree. They are weak at separating the top 10% from the rest of the
qualified people, but they are excellent at removing the people who have no
business being there in the first place.

The first two that comes to the minds of most people are law and medical
licenses. These licenses don't exist as a job qualifier. They exist as a legal
qualifier. That means a gross abuse of the license requirements are cause for
law suits and serious criminal offenses even though most lawyers and doctors
are corporate employees.

If programmers had the realization that gross negligence could land them in
jail or cause them to lose their career and property in a lawsuit I suspect
they would take their jobs more seriously than merely writing code.

Programmers don't just _write code_ just like doctors don't just _prescribe
painkillers_ and soldiers don't just _shoot people_. They make numerous
critical decisions that have real world implications. Examples of gross
failure are simplistic known security breaches that allow confiscation of
millions of credit card numbers and PII. Other examples include discriminatory
and accessibility violating software products.

These are basic foundational qualities of competence. In any other industry
negligence of this magnitude would put in prison. Since the base line is so
ridiculously low for hiring developers these are considered advanced qualities
often transferred to third party firms and only after threats of pending legal
actions. All we care about when hiring developers is whether they are literate
and have a pulse.

Be serious, no change to any hiring process will fix that.

> They are not accessible by everyone.

Don't care. If a person want to achieve access to a given career they will
find a way through their own internal motivation. If the industry wants to
make the careers more accessible they will promote a desirable education path.
This isn't a secret legendary arcane black magic.

~~~
Cyph0n
Law and medicine are not relevant examples at all.

In both cases, licensing did not arise because of hiring issues, but rather
because both law and medicine directly involve human lives and livelihoods.

Any field where this can be the case on a day-to-day basis ends up having
strict licensing and/or training requirements. Examples include civil
engineers, pilots, soldiers, sea captains, heavy machinery operators, and so
on.

~~~
lr4444lr
The guys who work at Lockheed Martin programming vehicular data sensors, or
who work for medical device manufacturers on MRI machine interfaces - they
aren't directly involved in human lives and livelihoods? What about the
massive security failures at Equifax? That's not putting people at risk?

~~~
Cyph0n
Once again, these kinds of industries adapt to the kind of work they do. There
are numerous bureaucratic and access-control procedures in place at defense
contractors. The FDA has a ton of requirements for anyone working on medical
devices.

Equifax was a monumental shitshow. I think SSNs are also a shitshow, but I
digress.

------
abraham_s
I decided to comment after seeing a number of negative comments here. I went
through the process a it was a positive experience for me. I ended up
interviewing at 5-6 places and didn't receive an offer. I liked getting the
interview feedback. The time saved in skipping the usual application process
seemed worthwhile to me ( You spend 2(?) hours on the triplebyte interview.
Then a short introducutory call with each company you are matched and the
onsite interview). My only complaint was that I was looking for larger and my
matches were all 5-50 employee companies. I guess not many large firm are
using them. Overall I would recommend triplebyte for anyone who is interested
in startups and who currently in a full time job search.

------
taurath
"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!

~~~
treis
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.

~~~
kearneyandy
5000 / 3,500,000 = 0.00142857142

~~~
lettergram
5000 a month

60,000 a year

0.01714 = 60,000 / 3,500,500

OR

1.714%

------
bhuga
I had a great experience with Triplebyte as a candidate (now hired employee),
but I'd love to see them expand to other categories. Remote-friendly companies
is a big one, but even more important is different skill levels. Right now
triplebyte is oriented around finding the best, instead of finding everyone
and helping employers get a candidate whose career path matches their needs.

Their process is fantastic. I can see them replacing first round interviews
entirely at some companies if they can look for all the candidates companies
need, not just the most senior.

I'm glad to hear they're expanding.

~~~
slfnflctd
> different skill levels

Not nearly enough people in the hiring chain understand the importance of
this.

Whether an employee can get along with co-workers is probably by far the most
important metric in most jobs, yet it's mostly ignored because it's hard to
test for. I guess companies hope they'll figure out if someone's a bad fit
while they're still in a probationary period or something.

The most skilled worker in their field is useless if they can't cooperate and
communicate effectively with others.

With the loyalty, willingness to learn and work ethic you can usually expect
from an initially lower-skilled employee (along with lower wages/cost), a
little training could turn them into a hugely valuable team member in fairly
short order if a company makes an effort to ramp them up properly. Giving more
of these people a shot will dramatically increase your odds of finding team
members who work together well and become greater than the sum of their parts.

This idea of ignoring everyone who doesn't fit a ridiculously narrow criteria
causes a whole lot of missed opportunities across the board. You end up hiring
a bunch of elites-on-paper all trying to outmaneuver each other into the most
possible money who will be gone in 2-3 years, while 'less attractive'
candidates who would actually care about the work and tend to stick around get
tossed in the garbage without even being seen.

------
joshribakoff
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.

------
Alex3917
> And we've now reached the point where our automated assessment substantially
> outperforms human interviewers at evaluating technical skill.

What does this mean exactly? E.g. does the test successfully identify the
people who have the best portfolios of things they’ve built previously?

~~~
gwern
It might mean something like the test predicts better than a randomly-selected
interview whether a candidate will eventually be hired. The real question is
whether the interview here is an unstructured interview or a structured
interview. Industrial psychologists have been pointing out for decades that
unstructured interviews are awful, even though everyone keeps doing them, so
it wouldn't be surprising if they can be outperformed by even a simple
checklist or test. (There are similar, somewhat infamous, results for things
like judges and parole - where simple linear models can outpredict the
experts.)

------
zitterbewegung
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.

~~~
cheez
I was interviewed by them. Best process ever. Easy, straightforward, had
options but I wasn't really interested in working for other people anyway.
They let me code in ClojureScript for the snake game if memory serves. Also,
this was many years ago when they initially started out so I am assuming they
only got better.

~~~
tudelo
You made a snake game for an interview? Sounds fun :)

~~~
cheez
Yeah, and live mods to it as well. They had me write a Tetris game in person.
All in all, I think the process most definitely will find good devs.

------
aerodog
With Marissa Mayer's investing, I take it the idea is to get their $50MM
valuation to $5MM over 3 years before they sell it?

~~~
pankajdoharey
Absolutely, the Ratio works the same Yahoo Valuation in 2012 $51 Billion, in
2016 $5 Billion and sold.

------
crabasa
Disclaimer: I am building a startup in this problem space.

Does anyone think that social proof could work here? If 15 peers endorse Sally
for React Native and those 15 people are likewise found to be credible, could
such a network effect be more valuable than a coding test?

~~~
duncanawoods
Obtaining endorsements is a different skill from RN. Those on linkedin with
all the endorsements are not the ones doing the work but the social operators
that value networks and symbols more.

~~~
crabasa
I 100% agree about LinkedIn endorsements. But those seem pushed on users
without their consent in order to drive engagement metrics. I often get
garbage endorsements for vague skills like "mobile development".

But what if you could self-identity your skills (Erlang, Vue.js, etc) and
there was a low friction way for your peers to +1 those skills?

~~~
duncanawoods
Utterly meaningless to me as an employer. It measures how big the group of
friends is that decide to +1 each other.

------
lunchbreak
Do they have lots of jobs on offer? I passed the quiz and was accepted after
the technical interview in late 2017 (I must say the interview was very well
done and the feedback was very constructive), but they had 2 matches for me in
NYC, of which neither progressed to a company interviewed. I heard of others
that had a similar experience.

------
nightsd01
I got my current job with Triplebyte. I’m incredibly happy with how it all
worked out and couldn’t recommend it enough.

I got to interview with some pretty exciting/interesting companies.

The only problem with Triplebyte, in my opinion, is that I don’t think they
track job success AFTER the hire. I imagine this is probably a problem they’re
working on. But it’s hard to build a successful recruiting company if you
don’t know what happens to the employees once they actually get hired.

------
mindhash
I hope we move towards recruiting being a culture/attitude problem and not
really a skills data problem. Most jobs are repeatative and most engineers
adapt. So important is to identify culture and attitude fit.

The problem with raising the bar for interviewing engineers is the work that
they end up doing isn't moving at same pace. With more frameworks, better
languages and open source building stuff is getting easier

------
wheresvic1
While I can totally understand the need for this by hiring managers who need
to get people onboard without wasting too much time, I am a little bit
skeptical of being reduced to a simple number in some sort of a machine
learning algorithm. Especially if this algorithm is then being used by half
the companies in my area.

I think hiring is a difficult process because we need to work with others and
people are different in general.

I have personally worked with people who started programming just because they
were interested in it - they had no knowledge of algorithmic complexity but
they were very open-minded, had a great perspective on the domain and were a
pleasure to work with.

This is very anecdotal of course but I sincerely hope that they would have
been able to make it past the online quiz...

(If you're thinking they should be smart enough to be able to game the quiz,
then my question would be - why not just screen everyone in person then? Of
course, that's not scalable and not worth the 50 million then...)

------
quadcore
Thinking about it, I think I understand their insight now. The idea is that,
even if you got triplebyte-d, the startups will pass you through their
interviewing process - let's be realistic for a sec. So triblebyte is not
about getting you hired, I mean, not directly. It's about something else.

Thing is, a startup cant do like amazon and actually dive into every random
applicant. It's too big of a work. So, a startup is limited and can only use
recommendations in order to even think about interviewing someone.

Now, what if a company would do the grunt work and select a few of those
random applicants and submit them to the companies. That would bring a
shitload of value because now startups would have a new source of relevant
applications to tap in.

I think triplebyte is actually a good investment.

------
bitL
I'll bite: Isn't using scientific methods in HR similar to stock trading? I.e.
you need to predict how well a given person would fit within a company; you
can't really capture significant soft abilities like who-knows-whom, which
might have significantly bigger impact on profitability of the project than
any individual/technical contribution if you purely optimize for profit. You
also need to take into account company's strategy, environment that is
changing etc.

~~~
dsacco
_> I'll bite: Isn't using scientific methods in HR similar to stock trading?_

As it happens, stock trading is a bad example of something scientific methods
do not improve :)

~~~
bitL
Alright :) But it won't help you detecting emerging trends until it's late
already, and in hiring you likely cut away people like Steve Jobs if you
measure them scientifically. But if your goal is predictability, hiring
replaceable corporate drones, then maybe...

------
pmuk
Has anyone on here used them from the employer side?

~~~
pmuk
So I just tried to signup as an engineer and it says... "Unfortunately we're
currently only able to work with people with legal status permitting
employment in the US. We hope in the future to help set up visa sponsorships."
So looks like it's only for US companies at the moment.

~~~
dominotw
did you respond to wrong comment?

------
thingsilearned
Such a great service. Recruiting with real value add for both candidates and
the companies. We love Triplebyte at Chartio!

------
cvittal
>We'll also be expanding to support engineers and companies in new locations.

This is the most exciting thing to me. I would love to use Triplebyte to try
to find a position, but relocating is just not an option for me right now.

------
ChrisDiNicolas
I'm thinking about starting a company that is treating passing coding
challenges as a 'data problem'

------
lnnaie
let's connect that with their gene pool and there you have another way of
spotting super humans. although i'm not coming from india, congrats!

------
jasonwilk
Congrats Harj! Looking forward to this opening in LA

------
farnsworthy
We are bought and sold, again.

------
pankajdoharey
Marissa mayer literally ran yahoo into the ground, she has come to mean
disaster.

Marissa = Disaster. I hope she doesnt overemphasize her position as an
investor and again runs an enterprise into the ground.

~~~
a13n
Yahoo wasn't doing well at all before Marissa took over. Do you have some
compelling evidence as to why their continued demise was her fault?

~~~
pankajdoharey
When she joined yahoo in 2012, Microsoft was willing to pay $51 Billion for
Yahoo thats how the valuation was, But after running it for 4 years the
valuation reached a low of $5 Billion. She said she will turn it around. In
2016 she said she will turn yahoo around in 3 yrs. And very soon yahoo was
sold, she misguided a lot of stockholders with that statement. Also the blame
of a sinking ship goes to the captain as does the credit to the loot of a
pirate ship. If she didnt run yahoo into the ground then who did ?

~~~
alexandercrohde
I do actually want to give credit to this point. I have no strong feelings at
all on Marissa/yahoo, but if you join a company as a CEO and it loses 90% of
it's value, from a business perspective at the very least, you failed.

If you know the ship is sinking, then you should sell it right away (at 50B)
then invest that in index funds, and end up with +7% each year, instead of
-90% over 4 years.

