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by towergratis 1823 days ago
The problem with Triplebyte IMHO is that what the originally promised, while a great idea and concept, it cannot scale. Also after interviewing with them for a role in their company I got to realize they don't know how to conduct interviews themselves.

I used them two times. The first one was very early on, where I was given a home assignment and interviewed on it by Aaron himself, if I am not mistaken. The dude was awesome at interviewing, and knew exactly how to probe to get a better understanding of your skills.

That was when they were promising that you can interview with them so you don't have to do technical interviews with the companies. I thought it was an awesome concept and could really reshape hiring in the tech industry.

Second time was a couple of years ago, where the model has already changed a bit. Passed the first round and one of the companies that I could interview for was triplebyte themselves.

What a disappointment! The only difference in the interview process than the rest of the companies was that they gave you a laptop and asked you to do practical coding instead of whiteboard generic algorithm solving.

Some of the interviewers themselves were junior members of the stuff with 0 experience in interviewing.

5 comments

I had a pretty bad Triplebyte experience myself.

Scheduled a practice interview and the only slot available was ~6AM my time. Nobody showed up and I wasn't informed that they wouldn't be showing up.

After reaching out about it -- they tried to tell me that my interview scored poorly, and that I would need to retry again in a few months. After some back-and-forth they realized both that it was practice interview and that the person didn't show up. So they rescheduled the practice interview.

When the interview did happen -- this was for ML stuff -- the interviewer was just no great. We spent so much time discussing the differences in terms we used -- mine largely coming from University, there's from I'm assuming their formal education -- that much of the interview was wasted. It literally came down to me deriving what we were not agreeing on for them to understand we were talking about the exact same thing.

I then had to reach out several times for my results, I'm assuming due to the fact that you're allotted one practice interview, and technically I had two(?). When I finally got my results I was again informed that my results were not good enough, and I'd need to wait to reapply. I gently informed them that it was practice interview, and the representative apologized their mistake.

When I reviewed my results... the interviewer didn't rate me too well, largely due to our differences in terminology. They also didn't like my coding style -- even though no one has ever complained to me before -- and rated the coding exercise poorly even though I was able to perform what was asked of me.

I just gave up.

Then several months later, I got an email about being TripleByte certified or whatever.

The whole thing was a really bizarre experience.

> The problem with Triplebyte

is that they say they have companies like Apple and TrueCar posting job listings and hiring but they actually never respond and all you get is offers for companies between 10-200 people in size (aka, startups)

I'm guessing this is your experience - was this more than a couple of months ago? We made some changes about ~6-8 weeks ago to how we order jobs to prioritize responsive companies much more than they were in the past. We also use responsiveness as an input to the "Likely To Accept" score shown for each job (here's a screenshot of a posting from my own prod-testing account: https://imgur.com/wSmGCEL).
This was my experience twice trying to use Triplebyte in the past 2 years.

It's a great platform, the indicator letting me know companies aren't going to respond is great.

It just doesn't fix the problem that... the quality of companies on Triplebyte aren't companies most senior/lead/architect/advisory level engineers are willing to settle for. I'm being unnecessarily harsh/biased. I'm sure plenty of people use the platform with great success. I've just come to accept "early/mid-stage startups" job offers from Triplebyte and not much else. Not necessarily "garbage" but... for sure lots of risk.

I did triplebyte most recently in mid 2019 and that was my experience as well. I used triplebyte as well as job searching on my own and I got a few offers from triplebyte, some of which seemed like interesting projects but couldn't offer a level of compensation that would make the risk worth it. I got two high-quality job offers from my own search, both of which were more compelling than any of the triplebyte offers and I am still with the company whose offer I accepted.

The "super week" of onsite interviews was interesting, probably increased my overall interviewing skill, but was probably one of the more stressful individual weeks in my life.

Yup happened to me. The experience they wanted to provide couldn't not be scaled up.
Just curious, what do you think a better interview for a software engineer should look like?

People hate overly abstract/CS-focused whiteboard problems (mostly for good reason), isn't practical coding the obvious better alternative?

Ammon not Aaron. Apologies