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Comment by compumike | Hacker News Reader

Senior engineers usually come to us for one of two things:

1) Finding a really early stage startup. We spend time finding the most interesting and fastest growing startups, and given the difference in outcome between the median startup and Airbnb, it's worth spreading the net as wide as possible.

2) Executing a broader job search (including larger companies) faster.

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Does Triplebyte do anything other than get past the phone screen these days? Because that value proposition is really low. Saving 30 minutes on a phone screen isn't very valuable. Bypassing the absurd CS trivia interviews would be. If you could somehow convince your clients that a technical interview with Triplebyte is an acceptable proxy for their technical interview, so that on-sites are more about personality fit and synchronization of expectations, that would be valuable.

To me the biggest source of anxiety with these interviews is the hyper-focus on academic trivia that isn't applicable to almost all of engineering work being done there (where "there" is literally any company, including Google). It's one reason I'm looking to move into management and up the technical track: I'm tired of "are you a good code monkey" interviews.

Yeah, we do more than let people skip phone screens (although don't undervalue skipping phone screens and take-home projects at 8+ companies). Companies really do look for different things in interviews. Not all companies look for CS trivia. So in your case, if you went through our process, we'd suggest 20 or so companies that look for more practical / architecture skills (depending on your skillset). Because we do this, engineers who go through our process get job offers at about 2X the rate of engineers who go through regular channels (we avoid the cases where engineers who don't like CS are rejected for being bad at CS)

It's not even about skill at CS. I have no problem in that regard. I just see it as a stupid, irrelevant hazing ritual.

Worth going through a couple hours of that for the 150k prize at the end?

What I remember seeing on hacker news is people blogging about spending three to six months of their free time making sure they can answer every single question on leetcode, that's a lot different from a one time, one day interview.

Not really, no. I have a better "prize" at my current employer, and I didn't have to go through that hazing ritual to get here. I'm not working on toy webapp garbage for social media, ads or the like, either. Even if that weren't the case my answer would remain the same: encouraging juvenile hazing ritual nonsense is not something I care to do.

Also, it takes a lot of time and effort outside of work to keep that undergrad CS trivia readily available for discussion in an interview. So it's not just "a couple of hours."

I’m not sure what you’re unhappy about. You’re fulfilled at your current job, not looking for a new one where this kind of interviewing happens, so what’s the problem at hand?

Unfortunately the CS trivia is necessary. In a previous job I interviewed people who snuck past the phone screen and would have wasted a ton of interviewer time if some CS-101 questions hadn't exposed near total ignorance of the highlights on their resume. My favorite was the guy who applied for a job as an air traffic routing researcher and after 20 minutes of computational geometry questions said, "Wow, tough, do you do a lot of math here?" Yeah dude. This is NASA. We do a lot of math here.

> Unfortunately the CS trivia is necessary.

No, it isn't.

If you interview at NASA, the CS questions being asked better damn well not be trivia.

The first few are. If you can't pass them, you don't get to waste anybody else's time.

Triplebyte is doing an absurd CS trivia interview themselves, so you don't have to it multiple times.

I went through triplebyte. I was a little under the impression that going through there, you skip to the final interview. Which is true, but I thought the final interview was the final, final fit-type interview. Instead I got treated to a literal eight hour slog of whiteboard leetcode-style questions with a system design question and a twenty minute lunch in between. Really an incredibly exhausting week of interviews, though some weren't as harsh as I described above, they were with small startups who had coding problems but seemed more interested in culture fit.

for feedback to anyone at triplebyte reading this: had a chance to chat with multiple companies, many of them thought triplebyte was just an online coding quiz then off to on sites. I'm sure management-type people knew the process was more involved, but the lower-level? people definitely seemed dubious about triplebyte's value.

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