Hacker News Reader

Comment by amorphid | Hacker News Reader

I think Triplebyte's initial technical screen is kind of lame. It focuses on solving problems that aren't all that interesting to me, and they start a countdown timer before I've even had a chance to read the problem. It feels like I'm competing against a microwave cooking someone else's dinner.

View on HN

I'm sorry you did not like our process! For what it's worth, we've tested a bunch of types of questions, and relatively easy questions answered quickly provide the highest accuracy / time ratio. We also cover a bunch of topics (to give everyone a chance to show their strength), so we don't expect everyone to do well on all the questions.

Yeah, I can understand that. I think you'll probably discover in the long run that you eliminate a whole bunch of people who might otherwise be good hires. It's kind of like only doing analysis on how your current customers like your product, while completely ignoring potential customers. And maybe that's for the best. It'd certainly better to build a recruiting tool that serves part of the market well vs. serving none of it well.

Here are a few things that kept personally me from completing the screening process (which I was checking out because I was a recruiter, and now I'm a developer):

- You don't (or didn't) support Elixir, which is what I've primarily been using for the last 12 months, so I spent a few minutes dusting off the "what's the syntax in Ruby" knowlegde

- I'm wasn't emotionally invested into applying, as I don't really know who you'll be connecting me with, and if I want to be challenged, I'll continue working on some personal code (which is what I did)

- Not having my glasses with me, and a bit of the ol' ADHD, made reading just a bit harder, so the countdown timer was basically reminding me the entire time that I couldn't read fast enough

Reply on news.ycombinator.com