undefined | Better HN

0 pointscinquemb4y ago0 comments

in the comments:

dev)

> I forgot how to implement the zig operation in a splay tree.

employee at Triplebyte)

> To put some hard numbers to this: further down this thread, there's a post about how "any engineer" could answer a question the poster thinks is too easy. I looked up the question in our back end and, in fact, barely a third of people who take our quiz get it right (the correct answer isn't even the most common one!).

So there 1000 job matches and at most (("hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform" / 3) - 1000) who were incentivized to answer these contrived problems, did so correctly and still couldn't be matched.

So even among the large pool of engineers who have gone thru the process, met some arbitrary threshold of engineer-ness, there's still a huge mismatch between corporate/prospective employee expectations, that I'm not sure will be able to be overcome quickly even with these new initiatives, but it's interesting that they are being pursed now (not surprisingly after the shift in working environment after massive government restrictions on freedom uber alles).

0 comments

localcrisis4y ago

I agree. We tried using TripleByte for hiring but what they screen for and what matters are entirely different. A founder we knew got an angry missive from one of the TripleByte founders because they’d rejected candidates during a final culture screen. Apparently the only qualification should be whether the candidate can do contrived coding tests and programming jeopardy, but whether you actually want to work with them is beside the point!

cinquembOP4y ago

> Apparently the only qualification should be whether the candidate can do contrived coding tests and programming jeopardy, but whether you actually want to work with them is beside the point!

Yeah, different companies want different things and are ok with different things. My best experiences have been with companies that have taken less than 2 weeks to hire me with no testing whatsoever: just a couple of calls. Other companies want and only select for the contrived coding tests and programming jeopardy, and that's fine, but I want nothing to do with them at all.

I would be interested in using triplebyte if they explored something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27545446

Maybe even allowing 3rd parties to bet on specific hiring decisions (in addition to what is described in the link) could add another layer of incentivized feedback loops to the process (esp if the people making the hire/fire before 3 months are made known) and add another layer of market driven signals for them to pay attentions to. Maybe make it more expensive to chase certain types that are in higher demand, and less expensive to chase others types that are in low demand (not the salary to the employee, just the payment for filtering). Maybe less expensive for shorter refund windows, and more expensive for longer refund windows.