ammon

25 ms·

211.
by ammon 11y ago
This only applies if the take-home interview is obligatory. I agree that obligatory take-home interviews are unfair (I feel the same about trial periods). They work (they're probably more accurate than a standard interview), but they t
212.
by ammon 11y ago
Those sound like really bad take-home questions. I hope that better questions will improve the experience
213.
by ammon 11y ago
1 - We don't expect anyone to give up this much time. I realize that it's a big ask. However, a lot of programmers we've spoken too really want this option. Anyone who does not want to is totally free to go with the (faster)
214.
by ammon 11y ago
Triplebyte founder here. I can't be entirely sure until we give this a try, but the hope is we'll be able to tell if the candidate wrote the code by talking to them for 45-minutes about what they've done.
215.
by ammon 11y ago
That's a good idea. We'll start asking the companies about office plan!
216.
by ammon 11y ago
Yeah, we've been very busy. Sorry about this. We're focusing more on learning and less on throughput right now. We'll have more spots opening up next week. Send me an email at ammon@triplebyte.com, and I'll make sure we
217.
by ammon 11y ago
We got most of the data (more than half) from the founders of the companies directly. The rest we scraped. I bet there are a few on an MS stack, but it's a small percentage
218.
by ammon 11y ago
Interesting post. Talking and writing about yourself well, even when not matched with programming well, probably helps get job offers (and in many cases helps be a good employee). It's difficult to tease these two thing apart. I imagin
219.
by ammon 11y ago
Yeah, we're just using it to mean a asking a simple programming problem (of fizzbuzz difficulty).
220.
by ammon 11y ago
Lack of insight into false negatives is (I think) the major flaw in most studies of hiring engineers. For the analysis in this blog post, we just passed everyone thorough the screening, to avoid the issue. Going forward, we'll be passi
221.
by ammon 11y ago
I like that idea!
222.
by ammon 11y ago
Yeah, I can see that. I did not mean to be disrespectful. I actually generally like take-home coding exercises (and used them at my previous company). I'm just arguing testing a bunch of approaches.
223.
by ammon 11y ago
Yeah, I just mean "short programming problems of a difficultly similar to fizzbuzz"
224.
by ammon 11y ago
I think it's really on the interviewers (and us) to show that people who freeze in tech interviews would also do poorly in a job. It's probably sometimes true, but many times not.
225.
by ammon 11y ago
Measuring job performance is hard. A good analogy is measuring intelligence. The IQ test is clearly bullshit (it does not come close to reflecting the complexity and high dimensionality of human intelligence). That said, it's a useful
226.
by ammon 11y ago
I 100% plan to do that. It's a very exciting idea
227.
by ammon 11y ago
All candidates did both screens (quiz and fizzbuzz). The correlations were calculated against the same population. Now, I agree that survivor bias could affect the quality of these results (we know nothing about the significant % of people
228.
by ammon 11y ago
The problem is that you don't actually have a clear measure of who you're rejecting. Every company uses a similar argument to support their (very different in every case) interview process. The fact that it allowed you to build a
229.
by ammon 11y ago
A lot of people feel this way, and I see no reason why it can't be an option at more companies
230.
by ammon 11y ago
Well, that's hard. Standardizing evaluation (critical to reducing bias) requires that everyone (or a lot of people) see a similar problem. And when someone is working on their own time, I think it's important that there's not
231.
by ammon 11y ago
Yeah, we agree. We don't plan on asking everyone to do hours of work on their own. A lot of people don't have the time. However, we're also seeing a bunch of applicants who are good programmers, but become really stressed in
232.
by ammon 11y ago
Author here. We do do the interviews blind to earlier screening results. That's clearly vital. But you're totally right that job performance is the real thing that matters
233.
by ammon 11y ago
Hey! Author here. Yes, we did not know that the screening steps were meaningful, so for the first 300 applicants, we interviewed everyone, even people who performed badly. We then looked for correlation between screening step scores, and pr
234.
by ammon 11y ago
Hey, another Triplebyte founder here. This is something we've talked a lot about. To set a balance, we talk to people about a project that they've worked on in the past, and also have them pick a problem from a list, and work on i
235.
by ammon 11y ago
I see the problem. Experience is certainly valuable. But a resume also shows age and status. We're working to eliminate age discrimination (and other biases). That's part of why we do blind phone interviews.
236.
by ammon 11y ago
We're open to remote workers. There's a little less demand (not all YC companies are hiring remote workers), but we have no problem with it.
237.
by ammon 11y ago
Which ones? We're thinking about offering all the questions in a bunch of languages, and letting people pick.
238.
by ammon 11y ago
No, it's not. We think that understanding basic code should apply to everyone. That said, we're not trusting the fizzbuzz for now. We're going to talk to the first several hundred people who apply, then look for correlations
239.
by ammon 11y ago
Founder here. Yeah, sorry about that. We totally intend to work with people without visas (it's actually where the idea started). We're just doing a phased launch. Talking to lots of people on the phone is hard to scale. We'l
240.
by ammon 11y ago
Hey, founder here. Yes, we totally agree that things other than technical ability matter. Some of these things (productivity, ability to work on a team, communication ability) we think we can evaluate. Others (company culture) we can't

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