Triplebyte (YC S15) raises $3M

As someone who went through the process of Triplebyte (which ended up not working out because of my visa situation), I have nothing but good to say about them. The interview questions were great: straight on point and no trickery that tries to measure some "ability to ask questions and clarify requirement". The interviewer didn't get bored half way of the interview (and actually do try to understand what you're doing). The process was quick, Harj was very responsive in answering questions and resolving any issue.

Technical-wise, I like the idea of having multiple questions of different types to choose from: I live half way in Lisp land so recursion isn't a problem to me. But I don't do much concurrency except actor model so a lot of programmers will do better than me in writing thread-safe code etc. I think it also helps that they do enough interviews to pick out good problems: it's generic enough to be solved by (reasonable) general knowledge of programming. Too often I've seen interviewer in companies forgetting that algorithm is much like puzzle: you look like genius if you've seen it before, and an idiot if you haven't.

Rationally speaking, as a recruiting firm their incentives align with the candidate. But Triplebyte seems to optimize their automate/basic filter and process enough to deal and treat every candidate with reasonable effort from their part. Normally, it gets really annoying real quick when you realize that the interviewer is looking for any excuse to cross you off the list -- which unfortunately happens way too often.

I hope they will be able to scale it up. If I ever be able to get back to the US, I can imagine using them from both sides of the funnel.

I have to say that as an employer TripleByte's quality of candidates and the way they interacted with us has been absolutely amazing.

Many recruiters try to throw candidates at us to see what sticks so we end up rejecting a lot of candidates, but I think with TripleByte we proceeded with on-site's in almost 100% of the cases.

I have never been shattered like I was by my triplebyte interview. Twenty years of programming and they can tell I'm not a programmer in twenty minutes.