
Triplebyte expands its recruiting platform beyond YC, signs up Apple, Facebook - artsandsci
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/triplebyte-expands-its-recruiting-platform-beyond-yc-and-signs-up-apple-and-facebook/
======
lettergram
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.

~~~
zug_zug
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.

~~~
ammon
We actually put a bunch of effort into consistency/repeatability checks. Every
interview is recorded (video), and we re-watch and re-grade a percentage of
them to measure the consistency. A long-term experiment we're running is
comparing qualitative scores (code quality, good process, how good did the
interviewer feel the candidate was) with quantitative features (which tests
passed, how long did it take, what design--picked from a decision tree--did
the candidate take). We calibrate the qualitative scores with the recorded
interviews. So far, quantitative scoring is winning (when judged against
predicting interview results at companies). We're waiting, however, until we
can see which better predicts job success.

~~~
pfarnsworth
It sounds like your ability as an interviewer is pretty poor. There are
several examples of the same smug behavior. What sort of training have you
gone through to ensure that you're actually an appropriate and qualified
person to be interviewing?

~~~
Harj
I'm his co-founder and this comment is unnecessarily personal. Ammon has done
over 900 technical interviews
([https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/5y95x6/i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/5y95x6/i_am_ammon_bartram_and_i_have_done_900/))
and there's one negative reference to him specifically on this thread.

~~~
pfarnsworth
Nah, you can't use forum threads as proof. You need to do the analysis
scientifically, which based on the feedback, it sounds like you need to do.
You don't bother quantifying the ability of you and your interviewers, you
just assume you're great.

------
chrisper
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?

------
anp
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.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
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 :-/!

------
Harj
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.

~~~
tedmiston
A year or so ago you guys published the post _Who Y Combinator Companies Want_
([http://blog.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies-
want](http://blog.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies-want)) and _A
Taxonomy of Programmers_ ([http://blog.triplebyte.com/a-taxonomy-of-
programmers](http://blog.triplebyte.com/a-taxonomy-of-programmers)), both of
which were quite interesting and insightful in terms of data.

How do the types of engineers Apple or Facebook want compare to that?

~~~
ammon
So, those are not (unfortunately!) the primary way that we match engineers
with companies. It comes down to questions about how important it is that
engineers are strong in academic CS (some organizations think very, others
think it's useless fluff), how important programming speed is (some companies
think very, others want to see careful testing and think speed is sign of
shallowness), or whether it's important that engineers are strong in http /
web systems (some think this is the core of what most engineers do, others
want problem solving and intelligence and think web programming is teachable).
Some companies want the best engineers, regardless of english level. Others
value communication over engineers. It's simple stuff. But getting the data is
HARD (companies themselves don't know how much they differ), and matching
engineers on these criteria significantly boosts pass rates.

~~~
tedmiston
That sounds excellent. What's the best way for an engineer to share their own
values with respect to these attributes? For example, is there a way for me to
say, "I prefer cultures which emphasize code quality ahead thoroughness and
with an above average communication style"? (I haven't used Triplebyte yet.)

I totally understand if this is part of the secret sauce and the answer is
"just use it".

------
blitmap
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:

[https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-
snippets/blob/master...](https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-
snippets/blob/master/connect-four.coffee)

[https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-
snippets/blob/master...](https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-
snippets/blob/master/stock-prices.coffee)

I had fun but I felt like they got more out of it than I did.

------
dsk139
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?

~~~
marme
the draw they have for engineering talent side is that you do preliminary
interview with them and then move straight to on sites with companies they
recommend you to. It means you can have 10 on sites without having to do 10
phone screens

~~~
canistr
This sounds like it's optimizing for the wrong component of the interview
process. I've never had issues with spending time on phone screens because
they are one of the main ways in which I screen companies I'm interested in.

It's the technical interviewing portion that's a pain to have to re-do over
and over again. Especially if it involves travelling across the country to do.
Engineers are ultimately looking at company and engineering culture to choose
between.

The other thing is that for some engineers, they might perform well in one on-
site versus another for many reasons such as the questions asked, interviewer
rating, or something as trivial as mood. Seems like Triplebyte giving people
one-chance makes this difficult.

Ultimately, I feel the main crux of hiring/interviews/finding the right talent
is training. If the industry is over-fitting on people who can pass
whiteboarding, then why aren't there more startups focused on this aspect? Not
just passing interviews (e.g. outco.io), but actually focused on training
systems design and algorithms. Universities don't do that in undergrad or grad
school.

~~~
pmiller2
I very much agree with all of this. To me, the main draw of Triplebyte was "no
whiteboarding." I suck at whiteboarding, so I went through the project track.
And, yes, there was no whiteboarding, but what do they replace it with? Live
coding. Yeah, like that's going to go any better. I'd have been better off at
the whiteboard where I could at least fudge the syntax a little.

------
zitterbewegung
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.

------
chrisseaton
> The screening process happens background-blind

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?

~~~
Harj
Previous work and achievements definitely carry valuable signal - we don't
disagree with that. And relying on them makes sense for companies where the
time of hiring managers is constrained and you need a quick way to identify
the (likely) best people within a population.

Relying solely on those signals though acts to the detriment of skilled people
whose best work hasn't been done at prestigious, name brand companies.

Our approach to removing credentials from our screening process is to prevent
ourselves being biased by them and forcing ourselves to build a process that
can find strong engineers who don't look good on paper. This is a win for the
companies we work with as it expands the pool of talent they can hire from.

~~~
chrisseaton
But for some things either you know how to do a job or you don't.

If I need someone to build me a compiler, there's no point sending me any
number of job applications who did brilliantly on a coding test, if they have
never built a compiler before.

(Of course sometimes it's great to build someone up from scratch, but you
can't do that for an entire team all the time).

~~~
ammon
We work less well with very specialized positions. However, the approach of
identifying strong general programmers, and then matching the ones who want to
work on compilers with compiler jobs works surprisingly well (still often
results in higher offer rates than the approach that companies themselves take
of filtering first on compiler experience, and then checking technical
strength)

~~~
chrisseaton
> We work less well with very specialized positions.

Ah, all makes sense then.

------
throwawayact01
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.

------
SeeDave
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!

~~~
thaumasiotes
> they gave me solid feedback on my strengths and what concrete actions I
> should take if I choose to reapply in the future.

I applied through their project track. It was described as a low-pressure way
to write your code ahead of time and talk about it in the interview.

The interview was, instead, about making changes to my project while Ammon
watched. (Also, there was a request to derive a formal proof while Ammon
watched. I didn't get it.) After which I got a rejection saying that my
project was great but my interview performance was so poor that they wouldn't
move forward.

I complained that this wasn't actionable feedback, but the only way they ever
responded to that complaint was "I stand by that", from someone other than my
interviewer. Am I wrong to consider "you do poorly in interviews" hopelessly
vague?

They contacted me, much later, to ask me to be a test subject for a new
interview. New interviewer asked me about hash tables, and I responded to his
questions with this information:

\- Hash tables are the generalization of an array to being indexed by
"whatever you want" rather than an integer; they have similar performance
characteristics to arrays.

\- If a hash code is larger than the size of your hash table's backing array,
you would generally handle that by storing the item at index (hash_code %
array_size).

\- When two objects have the same hash, one strategy is to store them in
"buckets", linked lists of everything present in the table at that hash key;
another strategy is quadratic probing (where when the index you want is full,
you repeatedly square the index until the space you're looking in is empty).
Quadratic probing has the downside that when you delete an entry from the
table, you have to leave a placeholder in the backing array saying "something
used to be here".

\- If a hash table gets too full, you generally create a new backing array of
double the size and rehash everything into the new backing array. The size
doubles rather than increasing by some constant amount so that the amortized
time requirement for inserts will be constant.

\- Amortized time complexity for a set of operations is the average time
complexity per operation (not in expectation, but as measured after the
operations have happened).

He also asked me about red-black trees. I could say that red-black trees were
a self-balancing binary tree with the property that the length of any path
root-to-leaf in the tree was within a factor of two of any other path, and
that I wouldn't be able to write a red-black tree off the top of my head.

New interviewer, believing that I would be interested in reapplying to
triplebyte, did give me feedback on what concrete actions I should take in
order to do so. Specifically, he said I should focus on studying red-black
trees (OK, fair enough, I guess) _and hash tables_. I thought I had pretty
good coverage, purely within the interview, of hash tables. Is that wrong?

~~~
sillysaurus3
_New interviewer, believing that I would be interested in reapplying to
triplebyte, did give me feedback on what concrete actions I should take in
order to do so. Specifically, he said I should focus on studying red-black
trees (OK, fair enough, I guess) and hash tables. I thought I had pretty good
coverage, purely within the interview, of hash tables. Is that wrong?_

Your hash table knowledge is perfectly fine. So is your red-black tree
knowledge. Roughly zero percent of programmers implement those during the
course of their job, so knowing their characteristics is more than enough.

~~~
thaumasiotes
My question was more along the lines of "there's a lot about red-black trees
that I could know, but don't. What does he expect me to know about hash tables
that I hadn't already told him?"

~~~
sillysaurus3
It's helpful to remember that nobody knows how to hire good candidates (it's
an unsolved problem) so everyone has their own favorite, ineffective
techniques. This results in a lot of puzzling behavior, like being told you
need more red-black tree knowledge.

There's probably no way to know what they were looking for, short of asking
them directly. But you have at least two options: (a) roll your eyes at anyone
who tells you that you need more knowledge about red-black trees or hash
tables to be an excellent engineer, or (b) realize it's a game, and play it
with a passion.

Both routes are perfectly valid, and personally I prefer route (a). But if
you're deciding to do route (b), you could study as much as you can on the
subjects, quiz yourself on various trivia related to red-black trees, look up
related interview questions, etc.

This is a bit of a tangent, but from a motivation standpoint, I've found it's
optimal to think of interviews as a lottery ticket with 10% chance of winning
regardless of your ability, rather than an as an obstacle that can be failed
due to lack of ability. There's no reason to be discouraged when someone
rejects you in a world where people reject engineers for reasons that are
essentially random.

------
utmachina
CURRENT CANDIDATE REVIEW

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
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.

------
jameside
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.

------
xursabgyn
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.

[1] [http://kellysutton.com/2016/10/20/visualizing-a-job-
search-o...](http://kellysutton.com/2016/10/20/visualizing-a-job-search-or-
how-to-find-a-job-as-a-software-engineer.html)

------
blackkettle
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.

~~~
kwi
Ah good catch! Can you email me your phone so we can test and fix it:
guillaume@triplebyte.com

Thanks!

------
soneca
I wish they expand the process to recruit remote and outside of the USA.

~~~
gaastonsr
They don't hire remote? I remember they have a strong bias to recruit for Bay
Area companies but I remember being asked if I'm looking for remote work too.
So maybe they do.

~~~
soneca
Last time I started the signup process (2 months ago maybe), when I selected
the "remote" option, there was a message informing me that they didn't recruit
remote. Same with location (USA only).

Nice UX informing it so upfront anyway.

------
drwl
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.

