3 ms·
Triplebyte's flaw is like that of many other take-home tests: they favor people who lied about how long it took. When I did it, I had to implement a regex pars
by tribythrowaway 9y ago
Triplebyte's flaw is like that of many other take-home tests: they favor people who lied about how long it took.
When I did it, I had to implement a regex parser. I knew intuitively that the state machine approach was best, but if I read up on state machines and coding them, I would bust the 3 hour limit, so I did the best I could to deliver something working within the three hours.
Feedback: "Obviously the state machine approach is better, which you didn't use. You're not qualified."
Guess I should have just lied and gotten placed like the ones who did.
- tptacek 9y agoTime limits on these kinds of things don't make much sense to me.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoThe state machine approach can't handle perl-compatible backreferences (since true regular expressions can't use them), which apparently some people want. That's feedback you can defend yourself from to some degree. When I implemented a regex parser for Triplebyte, the time limit was much longer than three hours, and I did use state machines. The feedback I got was "we thought you wrote a great, full-featured regex parser, but we need someone who comes off better in interviews".
- tptacek 9y agoYou can already see that this is a broken technical qualification process. If you can "defend yourself" from a demerit on the challenge's rubric, you have a subjective process. The smooth talkers will glide past regardless of their abilities, and the gifted developers that don't have interview skills will get washed out by it at random. If there's a point to outsourcing technical qualification, it's exactly to avoid this kind of problem!