Can we all just agree that job interviews are the worst?
It begins with the resume, where you’re supposed to somehow represent all your hopes and dreams in a single, concise document. This usually results in you including all manner of arcane items, like the fact that you were President of the World of Warcraft Explorers guild in high school (it demonstrates your leadership abilities), or that you have a college minor in Fencing. Even though these facts have nothing to do with the job you’re after, you want the interviewer to get a full sense of who you are.
Then you must endure the interview process itself, in which you get asked all manner of ridiculous questions.
Why are you the best person for this job?
Because I’m a team player who values collaboration, business synergy and [insert any other business jargon word].
What are your strengths?
I’m good with people. I like spreadsheets. I make a mean ham barbecue. And I can recite all the major characters from Harry Potter.
Inevitably, the interviewer will ask you the dumbest question of them all: what is your greatest weakness?
An honest answer to this question would be something like, “I have poor social skills and and am usually hung over between 5pm and 5am.”
But no one ever answers honestly. The typical answer is something like, “Sometimes I just care too much about my job.” Riiiigggghhhttt.
Once the interview is complete, you wait three weeks only to be told that they hired someone else who was either more skilled than you or wore a better suit to the interview.
Like I said, job interviews are the worst.
UNLESS…
You happen to be interviewing with Triplebyte.
Triplebyte cares about one thing and one thing only: can you code like a badass bat out of Hell?
Or, as they put it on their website: “We don’t care where you went to school or which companies you’ve worked at. We only care if you can code. If you can, we’ll do everything we can to find you the best startup to work at.”
The process works like this:
- Apply to Triplebyte.
- Book 15 minute call with Triplebyte.
- Do a technical interview with Triplebyte.
- Be connected by Triplebyte to a Y Combinator startup.
No somewhat true resumes. No absurd interview questions. Just you demonstrating to Triplebyte that you were born to code.
The technical interview is straightforward. You select a particular programming project you’ve done that you are particularly proud of. Maybe you select the brilliant database application you built. Maybe you select the Star Wars simulator you coded. The project simply needs to demonstrate that you’re awesome at coding.
You talk to Triplebyte about that project, and then they ask you questions about it. After that, Triplebyte asks you a series of increasingly complex programming questions to gauge how well you understand the coding process.
Assuming all goes well and you don’t have a complete nervous breakdown which leaves you curled up in the fetal position, Triplebyte will work to get you hired in a Y Combinator startup. If you get a job offer, Triplebyte will help you navigate salary issues using their salary and market data.
Triplebyte doesn’t care about your education history or where you went to high school. They don’t care that you graduated with a 4.5 GPA. They simply want to connect the best engineers to solid startup companies. They’re seeking to upend the hiring process by focusing on the strengths of engineers, not their weaknesses.
If other companies would follow the same process, the world would be a saner place. Apparently investors agree, as Triplebyte recently secured $120,000 in funding.
