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Comment by Harj | Hacker News Reader

Triplebyte founder here, we're managing the application process for this. We wrote some more here about how we're running our process: http://blog.triplebyte.com/announcing-triplebyte

If you have any feedback or thoughts, we'd love to hear them.

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I quite liked the application process, it was very smooth. I'm interested to see how the rest of the process goes – since the two interviews are just chatting about projects I've worked on and having someone watch me code, it doesn't seem to stressful. (Let's be honest – it's sometimes hard to get me to shut up about projects I've worked on or want to work on...)

I'm particularly interested in this as a startup filter. There are a lot of startups out there, many that I don't know about. I'm wondering if Triplebyte could help me find something I'm interested in by filtering out startups that I'm unlikely to be interested in. If they can do that, I'll be a huge fan, and if they can't (because I'm too picky), then it's not too time-consuming or stressful a process to have tried it.

> I'm particularly interested in this as a startup filter. There are a lot of startups out there, many that I don't know about. I'm wondering if Triplebyte could help me find something I'm interested in by filtering out startups that I'm unlikely to be interested in.

That's exactly what we're going to do. There's an increasing number of tools to help investors find startups to invest in and the same should exist for applicants, since that's essentially what they're doing with their time.

I'm curious what info you derive from "watching someone code". I've hired a lot of people over the years and found what works best for me is to just talk to them, no coding.

But if you're in a screen share and wathicng someone code and watching them make mistakes, type poorly, or sit there thinking with the cursor just blinking isn't this sort of an interpretive performance art that you're trying to then judge objectively?

How do you avoid being biased to hiring only people who type fast? (There seems to be this obsession with lines of code per minute to the detriment of effective functionality per week in our industry.)

How do current YC companies fill-in non-technical positions? Are there plans in near-future to cover these positions too?

This is a huge need as well

That's something we could definitely expand to in the future. For now we're focusing on programmers both because that's the biggest need and it's likely a big challenge just becoming experts at that.

I really like the idea, I just completed the programming questions. I understand that you can't have the test in every conceivable language but I feel like a few of the questions were too pythonic for really no reason at all.

Do most YC startups use python ?

Which ones? We're thinking about offering all the questions in a bunch of languages, and letting people pick.

I liked the process. However there's no real feedback, does the fact that we reached the phone call mean that we succeeded at the "test" or not?

How do you guys compare to HackerRank?

or gradberry?

Our online programming questions are more FizzBuzz than the challenges and puzzles HackerRank use to test skill. We're doing most of our work in the interview process and looking at ways to make that more effective and less adversarial. We think the hiring process is broken enough that there is likely enough room for multiple different approaches.

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