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My Triplebyte Experience (pre-onsites)
My Triplebyte Experience (pre-onsites)
Some background: I’m a backend software developer finishing up my first year at a small company, and have been looking to move to somewhere with more traditional technologies (and that doesn’t use windows as a primary OS). I graduated with a degree in physics, and accidentally stumbled onto a love of software development and linux while screwing around in my free time. I accidentally ended up learning a significant amount from my time around my CS friends, and well here I am.
About a month ago I stumbled onto Triplebyte online, and decided to take a shot. I had certainly seen a bunch of ads over time, and a friend had mentioned it to me about a year ago when I began my job search. I went and took the online quiz, only took about five minutes to complete, and then I got a message saying I did “exceptional well” and within the top few percent of test takers.
This then led me to a portal where I could schedule a practice interview. On a whim I decided to try the practice interview the next day without much preparation, since there was a time slot open. The interview was two hours long and consistent of four sections, a coding section, a short answer session, debugging, and system design. The practice interview went mostly well.
From that practice interview I receive ~2 pages of detailed feedback with advice on what I could do to improve for the real final interview. They included links to many resources, and I read as much of it as I could over the next two weeks. Just for the practice interview alone, it was worth it as an early engineer without much developer experience.
After the practice interview there was a two week cool down period where I read all the blog posts they sent me, and as much of the longer material I could for my weaker areas. Then it was time to schedule a final interview. I scheduled the final interview. Final interview was the same format as the first interview.
After the final interview I soon received noticed that I passed the interview, and that I had been “accepted to Triplebyte”. I was assigned a “Talent Manager”, and had to fill out a profile. Once I filled out my profile, I was able to “go live”, where companies would be able to see my profile.
Shortly after being accepted to triplebyte I received a copy of “Cracking the Coding Interview” and later received a free Triplebyte jacket, along with a wireless charger.
After going live I was contacted by a few companies, and had pitch calls scheduled at them. The pitch calls were as advertised, no technical screening, and few questions asked to me. Mostly an opportunity for me to ask questions of the companies.
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My Triplebyte Onsite Experience
My Triplebyte Onsite Experience
Background
I’m a software developer who graduated about a year ago with a BS in physics from a state school.
I took the Triplebyte quiz a couple months ago, immediately did a practice interview, and then attempted the final interview two weeks later.
I passed, began the matching process, and started taking pitch calls. Pitch calls are calls from companies that mostly try to convince you to come onsite to interview. I ended up with four calls, two of which turned into onsite in the Bay Area, and one company which I never heard from again. The last company was not a company I was particularly interested in, and the feeling was mutual.
Travel
I recieved my travel plans a few days before the onsites. Leaving on a Monday for a Tuesday and Thursday onsite, and flying home Thursday night. I was put up in Hotel Whitcomb on Market Street in San Fransisco. (They cover flight, lodging and travel, but not food)
I flew out to the California Bay Area a day before the first interview. Shortly after landing I met with my “Talent Advisor” in person for the first time to discuss some interview strategies (non technical), and then went to the hotel for some shut eye.
The next morning I ubered to my interview, and so began my first west coast onsite interviews.
Interviews
Small ML platform startup
One interview was at a small ML platform place. The first social interview went fine, and at the beginning they asked me for salary expectations, which is the only time this has happened to me during an interview thus far.
After that was the first technical round. First technical round began with some social interview questions. Then they asked me the painting houses question, which is as follows:
You have a street of houses and want to paint each one a color, but you don’t want any houses next to each other have the same color. Each house has a different set of costs for each color. How do you paint the houses to minimize cost/write an algorithm to do so.
Totally bombed this one. Ended up picking apart the question and breaking it down into generating all possible valid color combinations, and ran out of time.
Next interview involved generating an h tree from a drawing that showed the relationships of length, and given a drawline method. Simple recursion, and easy to write out.
That same interviewer also asked me a system design question about displaying some basic information, and some hierarchical information on a webpage. This went okay, but my SQL and database skills are clearly lacking.
Next up was a system design question about designing twitter to handle popular users with tweets that need to go out to tens of millions of users. Was totally unable to answer this one. I don’t have an experience designing large scale systems, and don’t have the knowledge to know how to do so.
Lastly there was a short social interview, which concluded my first onsite from triplebyte.
They have not reached out to me since.
Large (~1000 people) startup
I signed an NDA, so I can’t really talk much about this interview unfortunately.
This one went good from my perspective originally, but it still became clearly to me I have some gaps in how I think about designing solutions to problems in real time. Some knowledge gaps also are related to OOP, and designing out nicely designed OOP solutions to problems.
I ended up receiving a rejection email the following week.
Lessons Learned
This was a brutal week and taught me some important lessons in skills gaps that I currently have. I’m actively working to fill in these gaps, and going to keep practicing algorithm questions (I already bought a new coding interview practice book).
I certainly also need more whiteboard coding experience with a timer. Doing white boarding questions with someone in real time is very different from doing them at a computer without paying attention to the clock, and being able to look things up.
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My Microinternship Experience
My Microinternship Experience
A couple weeks ago I did a “microinternship”. It was supposed to be a two day trial to see how I worked on a small project I was given at a company. They let me go at the end of the first day because I was struggling being productive in the codebase.
Background
I graduated about a year ago with a BS in physics. In college I ended up making friends with a number of CS majors, and now most of my friends have ended up being software developers.
I posted on Who Wants to be Hired in Hackernews, and ended up subsequently receiving an email from a small startup in California (not the Bay Area).
I had noted in my post that I already had some interviews in the Bay Area, and was hoping to schedule some more in CA.
Screening
They did two technical screens, a couple simple physics/geometry questions, and a simple coding question (find two numbers that sum to k). Something they did not screen was my C knowledge, which turned to be an issue. (I don’t know if I gave some false impression of my C knowledge, and tried to ask about it. They seemed to claim that it was just some sort of mistake). The second screen involved some questions mostly about testing the system.
Given my background, I have a number of knowledge gaps that I’ve been trying to find and fill in over time, but it’s difficult to know they’re there. Once I know where they are it makes it reasonable to learn the required materials, and ideally get some practice. However, these gaps exist, and I am not always able to identify them.
The “micro internship”
It was supposed to be two days, and they gave me a small project to work on.
The issues came that 1) I’m not as familiar with C as I needed to be for this 2) it took me a while to realize I needed to look at capnproto documentation, which was hugely useful, and really helped me start to understand things. 3) they were using some custom socket wrapper things, which made it harder to understand.
There was also some miscommunication where something I was writing ended up in an if, which I should have checked if the if was actually being evaluated. This was a silly mistake on my part and sucked up significantly more time than it should have.
Another silly mistake for me was handling of the mutex, which I believe I screwed up at least once.
Where I could have done better:
- looking at the capnproto documentation sooner
- searching through the code more for examples of the socket usage
Some other things were, I haven’t had to handle any meaningful messaging, especially at a low level with my current experiences. This is definitely a gap I need to work to fill.
I talked over it with a friend, he believes that it should have been doable, and I’m inclined to agree.
Unfortunately, I didn’t even get to the python part, which would have significantly easier for me, and where I may have been able to show off my abilities more. Also, unfortunately I was significantly more comfortable by the end of the day, which maybe meant the following day would have gone smoother, but they decided to let me go.
Caveats
This was my experience, and I’m not able to talk about things that I don’t know I didn’t know, and I’m probably forgetting some dumb questions I had to ask. There might have been things I was doing wrong even though I had been able to get things starting to work.
Conclusion
It was a hell of a learning experience, and it felt bad to fail in such a ‘fall flat on my face’ manner. It feels pretty awful having someone tell you you did so poorly they’re cutting the ‘interview’ process from two days to one. That being said, I’m actively working on these areas of weakness so nothing like this happens to me again, and so that I am prepared to face future challenges.
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