Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasmoth | Hacker News Reader

Slightly surprised -- and a little diappointed -- to see "academic programmer" as the least desirable archetype.

Also, not sure these archetypes do a great job of capturing the process-oriented/results-oriented divide that shows up in the opening anecdote (and which I agree is quite real).

View on HN

Which is interesting to me because if you go through the triplebyte process the impression you'll get is that they are looking for a very academic/textbook CS student who can balance a binary tree on a whiteboard while verbally explaining the operational complexity of an unladen swallow.

From my perspective, there is an impedance mismatch between the triplebyte process (heads-down algorithm nerd) and the findings that they are presenting here (product-focused, culturally well rounded hacker, been around the block a few times and has experience in other startups).

> looking for a very academic/textbook CS student who can balance a binary tree on a whiteboard while verbally explaining the operational complexity of an unladen swallow.

This doesn't describe academic programmers. In my experience, academic programmers tend to be glorified essay writers who can just barely produce parseable syntax if left alone for a few hours.

Just what exactly are they working on in academia?

Hopefully Triplebyte will take this data to heart and change their interview process (or even customize it per archetype). If you want a very product focused engineer asking algorithmic questions is almost pointless. Heck, most of the time even knowing what big-O is doesn't matter. What matters more is how fast and effectively you can execute and if people can understand the code you write.

You must remember that the candidate is not Triplebyte's customer. The hiring organization is their customer. They need to balance their credibility with hiring orgs against their desire to redesign the whole process. They're a newer company, so they naturally will start with what is credible with their clients - whiteboarding being part of that. Over time, I agree, I'd like to see a shift, but that will require buy-in from their clients. If Triplebyte does a good enough job, eventually clients will simply not worry about the mechanics of Triplebyte's screening process and just trust that candidates they pass through are of high quality. At that point, Triplebyte can do whatever the hell it wants in screening provided that quality doesn't dip, and I'm sure that's exactly where they want to go. There is an unbelievable amount of corporate inertia, from startup to fortune 500, in fundamentally changing the hiring process. I wish them the best, and honestly hope they get there.

I was wondering much the same thing. It seemed inverted. Maybe it's just a filter they use, and they don't actually discriminate against non-academic or highly-technical types if they cannot answer those kinds of questions?

Having not got into programming by pursuing CS in university and instead kind of taking the old "hacker" route, that kind of thing always hangs around my neck when job hunting.

I've finished CS at Uni and I can tell you that now a few years down the line, I don't remember stuff. I only remember what I practice everyday, so if I am to pursue changing jobs I'll need to go off and recap what I've done at Uni. Same applies to a friend of mine that has over 15 years of experience, has a Uni degree in CS... and he had to go read Uni stuff that he's done 15 years ago just to go get another gig... his github repo has good projects and 1 project that has been stared for more than 4k times, he has an outstanding stackoverflow account etc but thats not enough... he still goes to companies and ask him to balance binary tries on the whiteboard to prove his worth...

Makes me wonder if I should feel encouraged or not! Thanks for the note.

I'm on a team with somebody who studied CS at the same university where I studied English for a time, and just the same we tend to have a reciprocal knowledge share occuring just the same.

It's getting that initial in where the degree seems to cover a great divide.

Agreed.

A cursory glance of glassdoor suggests this as well - balance a binary tree, huffman encoding, bloom filters etc.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Triplebyte-Interview-Que...

The goal of our process is to identify which areas of strengths and weakness an engineer has. We do have a section where we ask algorithm and data structure questions to test academic/textbook CS knowledge but we also have sections testing very different skills e.g. practical web programming, debugging and low level systems.

We've helped many engineers who didn't perform well in the algorithm/data structure section still find jobs at great companies because we work with many companyies who don't care about those skills (as evidenced by not evaluating it during their interview). This is one of the main ways we can help engineers have a better job search process, if textbook CS knowledge is not your strength we won't match you with companies who evaluate that during their interview.

I've done hundreds of interviews, and for me I can usually tell that a candidate with a PhD and no real work experience will be amongst the worst pure coders I come across, so I think it's a fitting stereotype. I'm sure there are exceptions but it's pretty clearly a signal for me. But I never look at candidate's resumes before I interview them to avoid any biases, since the companies where I have interview ed for, for better or worse, they care more about the whiteboarding or architecture answers rather than work experience.

I think the important part of their "academic programmer" was the "without experience" part. People coming out of academic settings tend to have very significant gaps in skill and experience that need to be addressed before they can be really productive. Sometimes this isn't a smooth process at all.

Can only assume it's primarily the commercial experience aspect, rather than any particular connotation.

From my experience that is generally because academic = not hacker. By not hacker I mean that they find it hard to slam something together quick and dirty.

My experience has been, if anything, more-or-less the opposite. The good academic programmers I've known have been very focussed on solving the problem at hand, perhaps without a particularly "engineered" feel to the code (relatively large functions, not necessarily a lot of exposed abstraction, etc.). It's a style I've got a fair bit of respect for, and absolutely would count as "hacker" (in a positive sense)

Pretty sure that's what Triplebyte's academic archetype is getting at. Also pointing in broadly the same direction:

http://yosefk.com/blog/why-bad-scientific-code-beats-code-fo...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com