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.