[sigfubar]

You failed your Triplebyte interview because you neglected an extremely important aspect of the job: communication. You made assumptions about the ask which turned out to be grossly out of tune with those of the interviewer. In the real world, engineers are often left holding the bag when other participants of the process leave out important details. It’s our job to ask questions and establish the boundaries of each problem before diving into a solution.

[komali2]

As verbatim as I can remember our interaction:

Me: "I'm going to just put some user input checks here, no guarantees they'll actually input X or O, yea?"

Interviewer: "Oh, don't worry about that, assume for now that you'll get X on X's turn, O on O's turn."

Later:

Me: "Normally I'd extrapolate this to a function, so let me just - "

Interviewer: "For now, just focus on getting the program to response to the next user input."

Me: "Ok... well the fastest way to do that right now is just copy paste this code down here."

Interviewer: "That's fine."

But, it turns out, it was not fine.

I felt I was bamboozled.

[halfjoking]

Triplebyte sounds like a bad girlfriend.

When she says "don't worry about it" or "that's fine", you can't take her word for it.

You need to be psychic and understand her needs without her saying anything.

[dang]

Please don't do this here.

[gizmo385]

> engineers are often left holding the bag when other participants of the process leave out important details

That sounds like a process problem and not an engineering problem. If I've been given requirements, I'm going to trust that my project managers and stakeholders have done the due diligence to understand their request.

Also you've got to realize that different developers tackle issues in different ways. Not every engineer is going to be super talkative while they're in the mud trying to get something to work until they've hit a wall that they don't feel like they have enough information to overcome. I think expecting an engineer to sit there and talk through every aspect of their reasoning WHILE working is fundamentally counter to the way that most engineers perform their day-to-day jobs.

[chrshawkes]

Not in a 30 minute interview.