throwaway12324

> I use interview projects to learn new skills and domains

There probably lies the disconnect. For me, interview projects should assess how well I could perform in the position I'm applying to. And thus, if nothing else, interview projects should be relevant and practical.

It seems to me that Triplebyte's project choices were made based on how interesting developers might find them, and sheer technical challenge. Some might appreciate this, but personally, I'd rather learn new skills and challenge myself on my own terms.

Evaluation is only a very small part of my complaint. The choice of projects that were offered, and the scope of the projects are what really need to be revisited (finishing the project wouldn't have been a problem for me if there existed a project that was relevant to my work that could be completed in 3 hours).

In terms of project choices, to me, it seems like you guys erred on the side of choosing projects developers would find interesting and challenging technically over projects that are practical and accurately represent the kinds of work most developers will actually be hired to do. I'm not going to post the details here for obvious reasons, but out of the four projects offered, only the multiplayer game was even remotely relevant to front-end/back-end or even application development in general, which are areas that probably account for the vast majority of development work available from startups. I realize there needs to be a balance to be stuck here, but in my humble opinion, as a recruiting firm, you should be erring on other, more the practical side in terms of project choice. I applied to Triplebyte to find a job, not to fulfill my intellectual curiosity (I can do that better on my own time without needing someone to assign projects to me).

In terms of project scope, I'm not really qualified to comment on the other choices, because they were way outside my area of expertise, but the multiplayer game definitely didn't feel like a 3 hour project. As suggested in another reply, I really hope you guys can actually give the project a try yourself and see what level of completion can reasonably be expected from three hours of work on something like that. Take whatever times reported by candidates who have successfully completed the project with a grain of salt, because people will have a tendency to understate the level of effort they spent to make themselves look more efficient (no matter how much you tell them you don't care). Here's another possible idea for making projects that take reasonable amounts of time to complete: just take your traditional interview questions and slightly extend them a bit with extra features, and simply expect better polish, architecture, test-coverage, and overall code quality, etc during the code review.

Anyways, my experience with Triplebyte's take-home interviews definitely didn't leave a great impression, but I still recommend you guys to my friends and colleagues because I do want to support what you guys are trying to do. Hopefully you can take some time to revisit some of the issues people have mentioned and make the necessary improvements. I'm happily employed now, but I'd love to give Triplebyte another try the next time I'm looking for work. =)

Ironically enough, Triplebyte's own take-home projects were some of the worst I've ever had, and did a horrible job of respecting the candidate's time.

When I went through the their take-home interview process, there were 4 projects to choose from, with only one having anything remotely to do with my area of expertise (it was a multiplayer game, and I was looking to work as a web front-end/full-stack developer). For all their talk on how you should select a practical project to talk about because it correlates better to ability to get real work done, it's really rather ironic just how utterly academic and unpractical the projects they offered were (that game was literally the most practical one on the list).

Now they tell you that you're expected to spend at most 3 hours on the project. This might be true for some of the other more academic projects on the list if you had any expertise in the respective areas, but it definitely wasn't true for the multiplayer game project I chose, which had a non-trivial front-end and back-end component, for which testing alone could easily take 3 hours (Or maybe I'm just bad, which is definitely possible, but I've asked many of my more experienced peers how long they think a project like this might take for them, and the lowest estimate I got was a whole work day of 8 hours).

Now they also tell you that it's OK if you don't finish the project. There was also a second part to the interview where they may ask for extensions to the original project, where they'd give us more time to work on it, so I assumed if we don't finish, they'd ask for us to finish the original spec along with some extensions for the second interview. Since I had already finished the front-end component for the game, and had worked on the project for well over the expected 3 hours, I decided to call it a day and work on preparing for some of the other interviews I had that week.

However, that it was OK to not finish the project for the first interview might have been an outright lie. I won't ever know for sure because I was rejected after the first interview for not finishing the back-end as well as being unable to resolve some performance issues the interviewer pointed out (which at no point in the interview did he even ask for me to fix, so I assumed fixing that performance issue would also be a part of the extension). Incidentally, I went back to the project a while after the interview and resolved the performance issue in 5 minutes flat.

The whole process just left a rather bitter taste in my mouth, which was all the more disappointing because I went in with great hopes after reading all their great blog posts on HN. For anyone else considering Triplebyte, I'd highly recommend going with their traditional interview route until someone at Triplebyte can confirm the process has changed for the better. At least with that route, if you get rejected, you'd have wasted less time in the process.