Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

On a side note, I took the 20-30 min front-end exam that is referenced in the article and a few things bug me (in case anyone from TripleByte is reading):

1. I did "exceptionally well" but I don't know how many I got right or in what percentile I fell in. Why? Firstly, I'm immediately suspect if I actually did that well. For all I know, the "top percent" could just be anyone in the top 50%. And the top 50% only gets 10 questions right. But more importantly, I already stated in the beginning I was taking it for fun, so why can't I learn what I got wrong so I can improve? I imagine there were areas I got wrong that were repeated, which brings me to my next point...

2. Why so React-centric? I happen to use it but plenty of people use Angular or Vue. You can't expect them to know about the React events lifecycle.

3. Okay, so I don't live in SF or NYC. But I know some of those bigger companies have offices in Boston, where I do live. Why can't you make that work if you already know what companies are in your pipeline and which offices they have? Seems super expensive and wasteful to lose out on a great engineer when you know your list of 200 companies totally has an office not in SF or NYC (e.g. Facebook).

4. Okay, so I want to work remote. Why can't I just take your final Google hangouts exam so that way you have on file "okay cool this person is great, we can fast track this person." If you green light companies who are remote-friendly, you don't have to worry about this issue. Plus isn't TripleByte a YC company, working with other YC companies? I know for a fact that GitLab is also YC and is a remote-friendly company. Not to mention you've advertised for remote engineers! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15066073

I dunno, given that the article is all about touting how effective the 30 question exam is at screening out candidates, you'd think you'd want to do something useful with that quiz instead of locking people out, even if they don't fit your current criteria.

(Original article author here.)

Feedback is important, so after the interview, everyone gets detailed personal feedback on every section, regardless of the outcome. We get much higher resolution data after the interview (part of the point of my article).

You may have hit a few React-specific questions, but getting those right is certainly not required.

As far as Boston/remote: interviews are expensive for us, so it makes sense to interview engineers who are excited about working in places where lots and lots of our companies are hiring today. Currently that's SF or NYC. When we expand, you'll be able to pick up from that step.

> after the interview, everyone gets detailed personal feedback on every section, regardless of the outcome

Wait, what? I never received any feedback _at all_

After our two-hour interview everyone should get a detailed feedback email - I write them. If you did our two-hour interview and didn't get detailed feedback, let me know and I'll look you up and figure out what went wrong.

And yet this is far from the first complaint I have seen of you folks not giving candidates the respect of following up with them after they invested their time. The response is always something along the lines of "let me check what happened..."

This seems like a regular complaint I read here on HN when your company posts your latest blog entry for discussion. There is at least one other person on this same discussion with the same experience as well.

We interview a lot of software engineers every week. In my experience, the missing feedback email is rare, and the fix is almost always getting an updated email address, or finding our feedback email randomly caught in a spam folder.

I don't see why the volume matters here, basic courtesy should be baked in to the process.

I would think that if someone has spent 3 or 4 hours interviewing over the course of 3 or 4 weeks then its probably a good assumption that email address that is being used for scheduling is up to date. I would also think that the average software engineer who is anticipating feedback regarding interviews knows to look in their spam folder.

To clarify, my statement is true for every engineer who goes through the Triplebyte technical interview in our regular process, i.e. to get matched to jobs at the companies we work with.

(That was not your situation -- contact support@ to follow up in private.)

thanks, @support emailed

Well, I did email @support yesterday and also checked my spam folder, just in case. Still nothing.

update: it has been fixed very quickly, and I'm a fan of triplebyte as a result

They also don't assess creativity or problem solving which I consider rather essential to software engineering. Based on my limited knowledge of TripleByte tests I would expect that only drones make it through their screens.

Why would you give them all that data for free?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com