11 ms·

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 h

• tptacek 10y ago
  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.
  • lettergram 10y ago
    > This was an interviewer working for Triplebyte? Yes, it was. > I thought their interviews were standardized. I don't know if you can standardize peoples personalities... The real issue here (in my opinion) was the guy was not a good interviewer. > Can you tell us more about the experience, and what they asked? I honestly don't remember, they asked about active record (as I do some web dev), but also stuff related to describe on the spot some SQL queries and why one would be faster than the other. All of that appeared fine, the real issue was our debate related to computer vision (where my research was done). Sorry, I can't really dive more in, but it was probably a year ago.
    • Judgmentality 10y ago
      > the real issue was our debate related to computer vision Oof. I feel like computer vision is a particularly misunderstood field. In a way, it reminds me of statistics - I feel like people purposefully obfuscate things to make their results sound more impressive. The great thing about computer vision is you can almost immediately see through the smoke and mirrors - ask for a live demo. I'm amazed how many people refuse to show me a demo of something that is inherently meant to be viewed.
    • tptacek 10y ago
      Did you feel like there was a point to the questions they asked you? If you were being as rigorous as you could about designing the interview they delivered (I know your memory on this is hazy), what do you think they'd be trying to learn about you from the interview? Did they give you homework challenges? Did you clear those but then bomb the interview?
• cbau 10y ago
  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.
• poikniok 10y ago
  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.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • ammon 10y ago
    We did not reimburse you for expenses?! Can you email me: ammon@triplebyte.com
• ammon 10y ago
  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 ammon@triplebyte.com.
  • varenc 10y ago
    It's reasonable to want to defend yourself and set things right, but I don't think you should be sharing specific notes from an interview where the interviewee had a pretty reasonable expectation of privacy. (unless you already got permission?)
    • drwl 10y ago
      ammon seemed like he made a good choice on balancing what to share and what not to share.
      • lettergram 10y ago
        I agree with you, he could have been exceededingly harsh. He shared what he did and overall I'm not displeased, it was honest and didn't make me look too bad (which again, he could have done I'm sure) On the other hand, sharing my info publically is not professional. I shared what I viewed as unprofessional, without specifics regarding interviewer or even questions. He shared my technical expertise and much more specific details regarding my question(s) and interview. That kind of goes along with my original point, it seems abrasive and leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Quite honestly, it probably damages their reputation more by responding. Why would someone want to interview somewhere, where they know if they criticize, their interview could be made public.
• zug_zug 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
    • sillysaurus3 10y ago
      Notably absent from that list is "Are we verifying we're doing a good job as interviewers?" It doesn't matter how good the interviewer feels the candidate is, or whether a design was picked from a decision tree. All that matters is whether the candidate can do the work at actual companies. I think people here are reacting to irrelevancies during the interview process -- questions which cannot possibly be reflective of a candidate's real-world competency. (When was the last time you shifted a gigabyte of memory? And even if you did, that's not what companies are going to employ people to do. So why ask the question? Are you sure it isn't trivia?)
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• sfilargi 10y ago
  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..
  • dnautics 10y ago
    My sentiments exactly, although I've heard even worse (not through Triplebyte) - people put through 6! onsite interviews, so I can't help but feel like I circumvented something. I think though that this is to be expected, because Triplebyte is selling an alternative narrative to the hiring and recruiting folkways of the Valley and many companies will be trying to fit a square peg into a round hole around what Triplebyte is doing.
  • pfarnsworth 10y ago
    This is my opinion as well. If it doesn't eliminate the onsite interviews at target companies, then there's no point using them whatsoever.
    • ummonk 10y ago
      I don't understand this. Do you expect to get hired at companies without ever getting interviewed by them? Triplebyte culls out as much of the process as you can realistically expect to be culled i.e. everything before the final onsite interviews. For me personally though the main value was in getting contacted by companies that wouldn't have otherwise contacted me. I would have been willing to go through technical phone screens for those companies if needed, but not having to do so was an extra bonus.
      • sfilargi 10y ago
        > Triplebyte culls out as much of the process as you can realistically expect to be culled i.e. everything before the final onsite interviews. Which is what? A short chat with the recruiter and an 1 hour phone interview. With TripleByte instead you get something like, an online questionnaire, 1 two-week project and one 4 hour video interview. (Please correctly me if I don't have it exactly right). How is this an advantage if you still have to do a call with the recruiter/company, and then on-site interviews? > the main value was in getting contacted by companies that wouldn't have otherwise contacted me That alone is a solid reason to use Triplebyte.
• rckrd 10y ago
  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.
• aganders3 10y ago
  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.
  • ummonk 10y ago
    As far as I know, no company uses Triplebyte exclusively. It just provides a backdoor to onsite interviews with several companies (which was really useful for me cause coming from a non-traditional background I wasn't getting any callbacks from my direct applications to selective companies). There isn't really any downside to giving Triplebyte a go, aside from a few hours of your time.
• interview42115 10y ago
  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?
• vikiomega9 10y ago
  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.
• bogomipz 10y ago
  >"he just said, No, you're wrong, you don't know what you are talking about." 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.
• exit0 10y ago
  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.
• jeremyis 10y ago
  I had a great experience with them ~5 months ago. Very professional and smart... (fwiw I passed the interview)
• cheez 10y ago
  I was gonna ask: was it ammon? And sure enough, yes it was. Ammon is a smug dude, no doubt about it. Edit: to be clear, I passed the interviews.