Comment by munchbunny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munchbunny | Hacker News Reader

Having gone through Triplebyte's interview process, I'll propose another interpretation: Triplebyte's interview is on aggregate biased against Java and C# developers. I'm not accusing Triplebyte of "being biased", but rather pointing out that Java and C# tend to correlate to a skill set that Triplebyte's test process values less.

My experience of Triplebyte's interview process is slanted towards frontend/backend developers of web apps. Fortunately for me, that was my background. However, in the team I currently work with, the team is in aggregate heavily C# with only secondary experience in web frontend/backend development. That's because their expertise is in low level security. Several developers on this team are exceptions to the "don't roll your own cryptography" adage.

They're all competent developers, but the version of Triplebyte's coding test that I took (and passed) would be in unfamiliar territory for people in this team. That's fine since most of Triplebyte's clients are probably looking for web frontend/backend skills, but I think this means that Triplebyte's test shouldn't be seen as an objective measure of programmer skill, just an objective measure of fit for Triplebyte's clients.

That was annoying me the entire time I was reading this, the entire article has an unspoken assumption that their interview process couldn't possibly be responsible for any discrepancy in the data.

I recall reading something to the effect that the most competent developers by Triplebyte's metrics used vim and Ruby on a Mac. That sounded too much like the typical hipster startup dev to be a coincidence, which got me wondering: is that really a snapshot of the best developers out there, or is it just what Triplebyte, hence their clients, are selecting for?

Well, what they hiring for, their questions in a specific language, how and who is evaluating the answers, the fact that a person is looking to work for them vs other companies are all biases. Nobody should try to extrapolate their results to the whole population of software engineers.

That said, Visual Studio is really on the rise. I used to think VSCode was late and could have never catch up with the Sublime's and Atom's ecosystem. So after trying it, I went back to my editor of choice. Lately though I went back to VSCode and I think it is pretty good out of the box and very good when you install the right plugins.

VSCode is only on the rise because alternatives are really bad. Meanwhile, it offers good defaults, and decent latency on modern hardware but for me it is just a glorified syntax highlighter.

VSCode becoming so popular should not tell us it is a great product, but that most modern alternatives suck.

So almost as if it's a relatively good product when compared with the alternatives

It is sad when all the alternatives are the same problems.

I want low latency and very very fast browsing through pages of code. Sublime text wasn't so bad, with support for VI bindings. But it did not offer more than just opening VI.

I lost most hope for innovation there.

I will stick to the terminal until something serious arrives.

So no software should ever get any credit, just because they are doing a better job than their competitors?

I don't know if this counts, but it might, me and several friends and people I know who have all been doing Java for 10-15 years... are all writing typescript now. And using VSCode to do so.

Further, it looks like the questions are biased towards Ruby devs.

Interesting. With quick googling, I think these are the founders' GitHub pages?

Harj Taggar https://github.com/kwi

Guillaume Luccisano https://github.com/harj

I think the names and URLs are not matched up correctly. But other than that, yes.

Could you give some examples? I keep seeing annoying Triplebyte ads popping up and not sure what it is.

What kinds of examples are you asking for? Like specific parts of the interview?

https://triplebyte.com/interview_guide

I click on their ads every single time, using incognito mode, whenever I see them, just so that it costs them money. Their ads are completely deceitful in my opinion and nothing but clickbait.

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