Ask HN: How does a Triplebyte certification factor into a resume? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does a Triplebyte certification factor into a resume?

7 pointscrazypython5 comments

Triplebyte gives out certifications for the top 10% of quiz takers on their platform. Since the top 20% are eligible for their interview process, that puts me at the top half (50%) of engineers on their platform.

I passed the Triplebyte Android certification, but in addition to my general software experience, I only prototyped an android app. (It didn't have real functionality.) I passed the Triplebyte Android certification, but in addition to my general software experience, I prototyped an iOS app and made a fully functional iOS app. (Well, it's a React Native app, but I used iOS libraries and wrote special Objective-C to bind them together.) I also passed the Triplebyte Generalist and Frontend certifications.

As a recruiter or hirer, how does a Triplebyte certification factor into a resume? As a developer, did you pass the certification and how much experience did you have?

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As a SDE (IC, not management) that has been involved in hiring "yes/no" questions, I've found that everything else (and how well they interview, and code samples) is still much more determinant.

- If they have the certs and they look decent on code samples or architectural questions, it's probably fine, but the certs have little to no impact on this

- If they only have the certs but no personal projects, no contributions to open source, absolutely no code samples, the certs are probably just for show and pointless

I've seen numerous cases where people have every single edX/Triplebyte/whatever cert in existence but are orders of magnitude worse than a first year CS student.

NB: HR usually forces basic screening of anything before I see it; including basic recruiter given online coding tests/basic algorithm stuff.

I personally hate whiteboarding, and I hate whiteboarding others. I usually do deep what-if questions, akin to asking for things like explanations of tree shaking or promises vs async/await for frontend devs, or figuring out if they know how to actually use devtools for anything like profiling, memory usage, service workers, etc. I've found that this usually results in better selection (and more tolerable teammates) compared to whiteboarding where you can kind of just rote-memorisation the test while having absolutely no idea how to do anything.

As a frontend example, someone that has done performance profiling and analysis, heap snapshotting/sampling and the ability to read them (yes, those tabs in devtools that for some reason almost no one uses) has a significantly higher chance of being knowledgeable, IMO.

Not on the topic of the OP, but would you be interested in a quick interview (10 mins) on your experience of screening and evaluating developer candidates? I'm building https://profiled.app and I'd love to get some more insight from experienced developers involved in hiring.

You can email me on emile@profiled.app if so, otherwise feel free to ignore.

I have a long train of personal projects as well as the certificates. The certificates were very easy for me because of my technical competence and broad practical experience with a variety of technologies. I have deep (read: production) experience in JavaScript and Python, the rest I am a mere curious hobbyist.

What about people who you found via Triplebyte platform, but did not have the certificate?

I don't use Triplebyte. But basically a TLDR would be that your skills will already be speaking for themselves at that point, the cert means nothing.

> top 10% of quiz takers on their platform

I think certifications should not be given with the criteria of "top X%", but should have a clear score threshold (above X score).

Because even knowing the hardness of their test would not give me clear indication as to how the candidate actually performed. Only relatively.

Based on this I usually give very less weight to certificates like that.

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