Comment by rezashirazian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rezashirazian | Hacker News Reader

If you want to work for a YC company apply directly to the YC company you want to work with. Say who you are, what you know and why you like this company. I also recommend not putting too much weight on arbitrary labels (trial and error programmer? child prodigy?)

I've been a happy engineer with a YC company for close to three years now. I have led various teams and contributed to many aspect of the overall product during my tenure. I have also interviewed more than twenty people and I can assure you, there is no one size fit all when it comes to finding candidates that succeed.

I also tried TripleByte a year ago, I figured it would be fun to see how they do things.

I got to the interview section after doing well on the online quizz however failed to go beyond that.

From my experience I can assure you that TripleByte has its own set of standards and values that may not match with you or the company you want to work with. They are overly interested in putting labels and pigeon holing candidates into specific categories that overlooks the fact that every individual is different.

YC is a big family with varied products, teams, and problems. There are no one size fit all formula or set of labels for ideal candidates or ideal company.

Your best route for success is to do the work yourself, find the company that interests you, directly connect with them and see how it goes.

Also if someone can explain to me what is trial and error programmer, or a child prodigy I would be grateful? Can a child prodigy be also an enterprise programmer? Is there any overlap between product programmers, pragmatic programmers?

>"I've been a happy engineer with a YC company for close to three years now. I have led various teams and contributed to many aspect of the overall product during my tenure. I have also interviewed more than twenty people and I can assure you, there is no one size fit all when it comes to finding candidates that succeed."

That's refreshing to hear, thanks. Your observations is in stark contrast to their proclamation that:

"If you’re a programmer interested in joining a YC startup, apply to Triplebyte and we’ll match you with the ones you’d be the best fit for."[1]

[1]http://blog.triplebyte.com/

We're certainly not the only way to join a YC company, or any company, and nor would we claim to be. The specific reasons why you'd consider using Triplebyte are:

(1) Companies are unlikely to reply if you contact them directly because your resume isn't impressive. Our entire screening process is background blind and we've built up enough credibility with companies for them to interview you if you do well on our process, when they otherwise would have rejected you based on your background.

(2) Finding new company options that are are doing interesting work but you haven't heard about. We spend a lot of time finding and partnering with early stage startups that haven't become well known yet.

(3) Saving time in your job search by identifying which companies are looking for your specific set of skills. We have a lot of data about what the companies we work with are looking for and can reduce the number of interviews you do where it becomes clear early on that you're just not the type of engineer they're looking for (e.g. they ask you complex algorithm questions on a whiteboard when your strengths are building and scaling web applications).

We're focused on doing these things well and our process certainly isn't perfect. There will be times where we match you with a company and you weren't a fit or when we don't match you with a company and you might have been a fit. Achieving 100% accuracy in something as complicated as hiring is likely impossible but we believe our approach is still a lot better than the status quo of recruiters reading resumes and making gut calls on who gets through to an interview.

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