Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> The screening process happens background-blind

I don't get it. If someone's done has an incredible body of work behind them, why do you want to hide that from yourself?

Isn't it a great way to pick the best people out of the pool of applicants? 'Ah this person designed the new IR in Google's V8 - we should definitely talk to them'.

When I speak to potential hires the first thing I ask is 'tell me about the projects you've worked on - what have you built in the past'. Am I doing it wrong? Someone could be great at general programming and pass a coding test, but if they have no experience in my field what are they going to do for me?

View on HN

Having designed the new IR in Google's V8 is a very strong signal. The problem is that it's vanishingly rare to encounter someone who did that. The much more common case is companies just giving strong preference to anyone who has worked at Google, or graduated from a top 10 school. Again, these are real signals (the average skill of folks who have worked at Google or graduated from MIT is higher than the population at large). But, it's a very crude signal (there are plenty of bad ex-googlers, and great folks who went to a state school). In fact, because the vast majority of programmers don't have credentials, there are almost certainly more strong programmers without credentials than with. For that reason, we choose to specialize on directly identifying programming skill, without using credentials.

tl;dr Credentials carry signal, but recruiters at companies have gone overboard, giving that weight above all else. We push against that.

Previous work and achievements definitely carry valuable signal - we don't disagree with that. And relying on them makes sense for companies where the time of hiring managers is constrained and you need a quick way to identify the (likely) best people within a population.

Relying solely on those signals though acts to the detriment of skilled people whose best work hasn't been done at prestigious, name brand companies.

Our approach to removing credentials from our screening process is to prevent ourselves being biased by them and forcing ourselves to build a process that can find strong engineers who don't look good on paper. This is a win for the companies we work with as it expands the pool of talent they can hire from.

But for some things either you know how to do a job or you don't.

If I need someone to build me a compiler, there's no point sending me any number of job applications who did brilliantly on a coding test, if they have never built a compiler before.

(Of course sometimes it's great to build someone up from scratch, but you can't do that for an entire team all the time).

We work less well with very specialized positions. However, the approach of identifying strong general programmers, and then matching the ones who want to work on compilers with compiler jobs works surprisingly well (still often results in higher offer rates than the approach that companies themselves take of filtering first on compiler experience, and then checking technical strength)

> We work less well with very specialized positions.

Ah, all makes sense then.

>If I need someone to build me a compiler, there's no point sending me any number of job applications who did brilliantly on a coding test, if they have never built a compiler before.

Ok, then shoot me an email, and we'll build the compiler. I'd be happy to find a position that actually involves compiler work at all.

I think it depends on who you want to hire. Triplebyte does an excellent job of finding people who would otherwise fall through the cracks. For example, as someone without a traditional software engineering background (physics degree from a good state school and work experience in rocket science), I didn't know many people in the programming industry who could provide referals, and my direct job applications weren't getting through the resume screens.

Triplebyte has been really helpful for me there, and got me interviews with companies that care more about problem solving ability and are happy to hire someone like me who will learn on the job.

Someone who designed the IR for V8 would no doubt have no trouble directly getting interviews with whatever companies they want, and people look you who screen applicants based on experience shouldn't have much trouble finding such applicants. General problem-solving / coding ability on the other hand is not quantifiable on an ordinary resume / linkedin, and Triplebyte's system provides a good screen (within the limitations of a few hours of testing) to quantify that.

I think it's more about hiding college credentials than hiding the portfolio.

It would be great to allow programmers to show their portfolios, but that would likely enable interviewers to google them, giving away their backgrounds.

I have a few interesting projects in my portfolio that I am proud of, a reasonably high CS GRE score (a test which is unfortunately not administered any more), and a moderately good topcoder history. However, after being told by an HR person that they would not hire me because of the college I went to (a for-profit college) I started to view the relation between hiring and credentials as illegitimate. So for that reason I hope TripleByte catches on.

TripleByte only gets paid when their candidates go through technical engineering screens, so it's not surprising that they select for that to the exclusion of other factors. If you can't talk your way out of a paper bag, you spend TripleByte's time and reputation for no good gain.

Plus, people with a good body of work need less help getting interviews. TripleByte has less value add in that case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com