zlacker

>>terafl+(OP)
I totally forgot about Triplebyte. Are they even relevant still? I remember back when it seemed like their ads were appearing everywhere and was a bit worried they were going to be the new way of hiring engineering talent. Seems like there's been nothing but crickets chirping for the last few years.

Why? My experience with them was pretty bad. I took their assessment for web development, I think I even did an assignment, and got put on a video call with someone from Triplebyte. He never cracked a smile. Suddenly I got asked a bunch of CS questions that really were not very relevant to web development, some of which were entirely inappropriate like sorting a binary search tree. I even told the guy that I thought I was getting those questions wrong and he just scowled and said "well you just don't know when you're going to use this stuff." "My point exactly," I thought.

Ultimately I got rejected.

The whole idea that you can boil down a candidate to some coding challenges and a video quiz is bad. I do like the idea of streamlining the hiring process for developers, but there's more to it than knowing a bunch of stuff, because that can be gamed. And quizzing me on irrelevant material was a bad move. A firm like Triplebyte won't be as good at interviewing a candidate as the employer itself, and may even keep perfectly qualified candidates out of view from all employers affiliated with them.

>>ravens+l8
It's worth noting that Triplebyte has completely pivoted since they did candidate pass/fail assessments.

I started using them about a year ago (first passively looking, then actively looking)

I really enjoyed the ability to be assessed on something besides Leetcode style questions.

I didn't take a job through their platform (though I did get one really strong offer), but even still, found the assessments incredibly useful, since they give you a percentile distribution of your performance for each topic-specific test.

After taking their assessments, when interviewers asked me how I am at, say, Python, I could tell them I have a hard time assessing my capabilities. "But hey, I took this standardized test that says I'm in the 85th percentile, not sure how good of a metric it is" (and not mentioning that I think I'm OK at best, at Python)

It's the only way I've found to get a measure of your talents compared to the rest of the field (even if it might not be reliable/useful)

A lot of the companies that interview through Triplebyte also skip LC mediums because they have a different signal about your potential suitability as a candidate.

>>pcthro+nh
I question the ability to boil down engineering talent into something that can be represented as a "percentile distribution"

Way too much of engineering is non-quantifiable. Putting a number to someone's skills is bound to be reductive at best.

>>malfis+ok
No doubt it is reductive. It kind of has to be - real people are just way too high-dimensional for a single score. But it does correlate pretty strongly with success at onsites. We have a lot of hard data from the ATSes of companies that hire through us, and engineers with high scores on our assessments pass onsites at several times the rate of engineers without them (~2x onsite pass rate, ~7x total hire rate, which is a huge delta!).

Speaking as someone who doesn't like being reductive, I've had to make my peace with the fact that "flawed" can still be "way better than the status quo". And I really do think we do much, much better than the status quo of companies putting a bunch of top schools in as linkedin keywords.

If you're familiar with data science a bit - think of it as trying to project out the first couple principal components of your skills. It won't account for the whole data set, but you can go a long way with just those first couple components.