I forget if I posted about doing Triplebyte, but I failed their interview several months ago. It seemed heavily geared towards funneling web developers into jobs, and I am not a web developer. One big question they asked me was, given this hypothetical web application, what tech stack would you use to build it?

I'm like...uhh...Node? A database like mongodb or mysql? Throw redis in front of the database? Uhh...is that enough to make a web app?

I did well on the coding and debugging part, but a lot of the questions they asked me were on subjects I had little experience with (databases, web programming). I think I could have passed if I really nailed the other stuff, but I hadn't studied up on algorithms/data structures as much as I did before my more recent interviews so I only did okay on those.

I think triplebyte is a good first interview. It is super broad. It gives you a sense of possible strengths and weaknesses. If you pass they send you all kinds of swag and will fly you to the interviews.

I've referred a bunch of inexperienced people to it, none of them have gotten past the initial online test but that's good data too.

lol

Thank you so much. I can't wait to get started. I never thought I'd be doing any in Java, Scala, etc but I might just get that chance at this company. Their primary tech stack is angular frontend, java backend with some C++ thrown in for good measure.

Haha nice. I tried this today and also got 27.

Yeah, I'm glad I did it, it was definitely good practice for real interviews.

Anyone read this Developer Hegemony book? Larry I feel like this is way up your alley.

I'm only 40% in, but it is a solid read so far

Just ordered it, looks cool.

wait... what?

are those triplebyte screen shots before or after they give you the three timed (hackerrank style) questions? or did you get to skip those cause you did well on the multiple choice?

Those screenshots mean they did well enough on the multiple choice to jump to the final step -- a two hour session using hangouts screen sharing. There are three possible results to the multiple choice. Not many get to jump to the end.

nice. i was totally lost on most of those questions.

i made it to the three questions. the first two were really easy and the last (imo) was really stupid, something where a word has a number value and you have to figure out the distance to another word. there was a link to a wikipedia article that was supposed to explain wtf they were talking about. but with only some set amount of time it was a lost cause.

I didnt get any really hard questions or anything, I got 30 multiple choice questions after I clicked "front end" that were low to medium challenging that I apparently got through fine despite average saturday night intoxication levels. They were all timed from 2 to 3 minutes. Oddly it did start with a python question and "how do you get all the things in SQL" question, why I have no idea.

Sounds like the levenshtein distance algorithm. It's used directly in elastic search

Oh, I thought they being patronizing when I got that screenshot but I guess it was legit, lol

i did backend. this was quite awhile go but there were a bunch of java/c++/cs stuff that i just had no idea about.

Same here although I thi k I picked backend or something because I don't know front-end at all. Lot of the questions were still written in Javascript though.

I get a million ads for triplebyte and everytime I go to do it they ask me where I live and say they arent working in my area yet. Friends have done it and put other cities but it seems like it's better to wait to do it until you're actually trying to use it to find a job.

I have a big decision to make in about 2 years whether or not I want/need to move to the bay area. I won't ever get to FU money/TC without it I don't think and TBH it just makes sense especially as wife and I don't really need a house/schools as we're childfree. Unless I make another game/series of games and passive income gets to the $50-$100k/year type thing which I doubt would be easy.

Also its 20 degrees out and its not even thanksgiving..

I thought the whole schtick was that they fly you to SF and pay for your hotels?

If you have no kids it seems like a no brainer.

IDK I guess but isn't it still hour commutes and all that? Also no college degree (and I'm early 40s) makes me think its unlikely to get a staff/principal engineer job off the bat which I can almost certainly get in a year or two at my current place.

I have an application where I want to provide a web service that will execute arbitrary python code, reasonably safely. I don't want to go nuts on this. It won't be high throughput. How does this sound:

1. I don't need to allow completely arbitrary code, so I can probably disable imports and limit allowed calls using the "ast" library

2. I can probably run everything in a docker container. I'm not sure how easily I can completely disable the ability to access the "outside" from docker, but probably I can, so no network out and no mounting disks, etc. If they want to wreck my docker container, well, ok

I've looked into how places like codepad do it and that seems like a lot of work for my application.

What am I missing, that will come back to bite me?

Workshop some companies where you might want to work and check out rents in the area. Prepare for your jaw to drop but also consider that if you're making FU money to pay for that rent it might not be as bad as it sounds. It's only an hour commute if you're an hour away! If you wanted to look farther out, look at places along BART lines - the farther out you go (say, Dublin - I have a couple coworkers out there), you'll have a longer commute, but at least it's on a train and not a car in traffic.

If you are commuting using public transport instead of actively driving you can use that commute time to get work done, so it's not all bad.

OTOH, I moved to SoCal for a new job in July and I'm about a 30-60 minute commute depending on day of the week and time of day and am already pretty sure I will be paying the penalty to break my lease and pay an extra 1k/mo to be 5 minutes from work and get an extra bedroom. Going from a 5-10 minute commute in MN to the SoCal traffic has definitely sucked (although I LOVE it here otherwise).