Byteboard assesses for on-the-job engineering skills

This replaces &quot;pre-onsite interviews&quot;; in other words, it looks to fit into the same spot as HackerRank --- a hurdle you clear for the privilege of enduring a company&#x27;s interview gauntlet.<p>The serious, playing-to-win version of this approach replaces <i>most of the on-site interviews</i>, and generates results that are more trustworthy than those interviews. It takes less time from candidates, reduces inconvenience, and yet is cheaper and faster to run for the company. I&#x27;m still amazed more people haven&#x27;t figured this out and run with it.

The post seems to say a lot about how Byteboard will provide a more insightful, less biased experience for recruiters through a project-based interview process. But I don&#x27;t see any concrete examples of what that looks like in the post. I looked at the website linked (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;byteboard.dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;byteboard.dev</a>) and didn&#x27;t find anything too specific there either.<p>Does anyone have an example of what a Byteboard interview looks like, maybe a sample project? I feel like there are some details missing here about what makes Byteboard as helpful as the article says it is.

&gt; Byteboard evaluators—software engineers with up to 15+ years of experience<p>So evaluators have literally any level of experience? Can we, as a society, please agree to stop using this actually meaningless &quot;up to X or more&quot; language?<p>I get that they want us to have the impression that the evaluators have experience, but it seems like they weren&#x27;t confident enough to commit to any real statement to the effect. E.g. most evaluators have at least 10 years experience. Even &quot;at least 1 evaluator has 15 years of experience&quot; would be a stronger statement, although it would be more obviously empty.

As always, anchoring the already broken interview system by introducing even more wacky gimmicks to the process. Let&#x27;s hope this one stands to be a refreshing sign that they are looking for ways to both improve the process and their own stand in the industry when it comes to recruitment, as giants like them seem to lead the way when it comes to this process.<p>However, until they actually test it out for themselves, both they and the talent pool are not going to have a clear idea on whether such practices work well to improve the hiring process and hence source the right people.<p>But whatever maybe interviewing and the process of recruitment is bound to have some false positives&#x2F;negatives which are completely fine given the fact that the pool is humungous and that the candidate may in the future seek to establish themselves by improving upon their lack of skill by filling in their knowledge gaps and the companies should provide adequate support and morale boosts for such employees, those who strive to achieve better knowledge and skillset given enough time and backing.

I don&#x27;t follow. This is developed and being run by Google, but it doesn&#x27;t seem Google is attempting to use this to improve their own interviewing processes. Is it implied in this blog post somewhere? I would be really excited to see this in practice.

Looks like this mainly replaces the pre-onsite or phone screen interviews?<p>Sure, it makes things easier for the interviewer since they&#x27;ll get better candidates but does this change anything for the interviewee?<p>They&#x27;ll still have &quot;to find time to comb through my college computer science books, practice coding theory problems like implementing linked lists or traversing a graph, and be prepared to showcase this knowledge on a whiteboard.&quot; All that is up for game during the brutal onsite interviews.

For software engineers we ask to bring a piece of code with them that they wrote. It can be anything. At the interview they first show what it does, and then we go through the code together. We ask some questions about why they implemented it a certain way. When doing that you can already see how people think and if they wrote it theirselves. It’s pretty interesting also to see what keeps other people busy. It removes a part of anxiety because they have written it themselves.

Maybe I am just too junior of a programmer ( after all these years... ) to admit it to myself but I perform so terribly on technical interviews. Seemingly simple things I blank on. The stress is palpable and I can&#x27;t function. I think with time, and practice I&#x27;ll get better. Hopefully.

So many feelings on this. My co-founder and I worked on this problem for awhile (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.headlightlabs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.headlightlabs.com</a>) before pivoting to something else.<p>Truthfully, I came away a bit jaded about the whole culture around technical interviews and whether most companies actually have a genuine desire to change their interview process.<p>Still, we both really want to see something like this succeed. My current bet is still on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.woventeams.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.woventeams.com&#x2F;</a> but very interested to follow this as well.

Personally my best interview experience has been with Automattic. Having a text based interview on Slack where I could take the time to collect my thoughts, removed my anxiety almost completely.

Interesting, the day Google starts using this for their own engineering hiring I will believe it&#x27;s worth pursuing.

This is coming from a company with one of the worst interview&#x2F;recruiting experiences. I had to do two separate onsites just to determine what level I was, then &gt;5 team-matching interviews. I finally went with a different company.

It&#x27;s interesting how there are so many different solutions and even entire companies focused on &quot;fixing&quot; parts of the hiring funnel. Byteboard looks to be targeting the technical validation part of the funnel which means they overlap with companies like Triplebyte. However, the approach is vastly different and seeks to tackle different pain points.<p>What I wonder though is whose pain points are being alleviated: job seekers or employers?<p>While it sounds like this is better for job seekers than technical interviews, it actually sounds like it will compound the pain. Specifically because this is yet another method of validation one must pass to even be considered for a job. Take the various hurdles a typical job seeker must overcome:<p>1. <i>Get through the initial filter.</i><p>Referrals, networking, and recruitment companies are potential solutions. Byteboard just tacks on another item to this list that must be checked off. It does not replace having to do any of these other things.<p>2. <i>Pass the technical screen.</i><p>Crack open those college textbooks, cram leetcode, shore up your portfolio, and now, also pass the Byteboard test. Unless <i>every</i> company uses Byteboard <i>or</i> Byteboard guarantees eventually getting you a job, this again doesn&#x27;t replace anything.<p>3. <i>Pass the onsite.</i><p>Culture fit is culture fit. That one is unavoidable and reasonable. However, everyone knows that onsites still contain a technical portion. Sometimes a significant one. Byteboard only replaces the pre-onsite screening portion of the interview process. That means GOTO Step 2. You still need to study and pass the onsite technical interview.<p>The copy reads well initially. Digging deeper though, it starts skewing much more heavily towards employers:<p>* employers get a better technical screen (filters better)<p>* employers save time (no resume filtering + technical screening)<p>* employers save a lot of time (fewer, higher quality onsites means fewer hours spent by the team interviewing candidates)<p>Which all leaves me wondering, what is the value proposition to a job seeker?

When I did interviews, it had nothing to do with the person. I designed a standard test like for windows admins I would have them dcpromo, setup dns, setup ip address, install wsus on the alternate port. I only had 5 steps on the sheet. I was even upfront about that they can ask for any help or google it because I want to see their troubleshooting process.<p>The reality is that there&#x27;s far more steps actually required than that. I want to see if they were going to go through all the details; ask what all the details were, etc.<p>But even more importantly, the entire time I&#x27;m talking video games and tv and movies and cars. I&#x27;m trying to distract them from actually doing the steps. Even better is that as the steps escalate, the more difficult to steps become until you make it to WSUS and you literally cant install wsus successfully. Ask Microsoft, not me, why wsus is so terrible.<p>The fun thing about this interview process is that it&#x27;s not trivia bullshit. Like &quot;explain the role of a windows server&quot; or &quot;what is a windows domain&quot; or &quot;How do you backup active directory&quot; this is all ridiculous questions that dont gauge if someone knows anything about anything.

Super interesting product. I wonder how they will tackle the plagiarism problem that a lot of project-based products in this space have.<p>I also think there is a lot of unconscious bias in the technical interview in most companies and not a lot of people like to admit it. We have a similar take on the problem in our own product: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;codesubmit&#x2F;were-all-a-little-biased-a474969e7de8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;codesubmit&#x2F;were-all-a-little-biased-a4749...</a><p>The trend is definitely going into project-based assessments, at least here in Europe. I think most candidates would prefer that kind of assessment if companies started to invest time developing them. Most of the time they are either a nonsensical mix of brain-teasers or just take way too long to complete.

I would personally prefer project based&#x2F;code based assessments any day. Algo based tests are indeed pointless and glad other people also see the point.

I think AMZN and many others already do this. Pre-onsite leetcode&#x2F;hackerrank&#x2F;algo grind.<p>If I&#x27;m understanding this correctly, hardly anything new in the space.

How is this different from TripleByte, except maybe that it actually requires more of your time?

amazon seems to be changing thing stoo with &quot;shortened hiring events&quot;. haven&#x27;t tried it yet but it seems to address the same issues.

Any plans to have practice ByteBoards?

Does this compete with Triplebyte?

I’ll put it here again specifically because this thing comes from Mountain View.<p><i>Employers should be required, by law, to compensate interviewees for their time at a rate equivalent to the job for which they are interviewing.<p>(Macdonald’s, Goldman Sachs, line cook, VP legal, same law, everyone, everywhere)</i>