What is the point of interviewing through TripleByte and going through their interview process, if I just have to interview with the YC company again? It's something I would completely avoid. I already know that almost 100% of the companies I send my resume to will respond, so what is the point of adding another set of interviews, which as the article points out, only adds a random level of success.
Several reasons:
1) people who go through us skip the screening steps and go straight to a on-site interview at the YC companies.
2) We've sent a bunch of people to most of these companies, and have a good idea what they are looking for. We help you avoid failing interviews for the reasons mentioned in this article.
3) Perhaps you have no trouble getting responses to your resume, but a lot of (strong) programmers do. We help them.
4) We help candidates negotiate offers.
I went through the initial TripleByte process earlier this year but was rejected. I passed the initial multiple choice programming test, but I failed miserably at the 1 hour programming exercise. I actually found the problem to be one of the more difficult algorithm type problems I've encountered in an interview situation. I am curious if the problems chosen by Triplebyte are representative of the typical types of questions for YC company interviews? I can't imagine they all have identical pre-screening processes, so how do you choose representative problems?
I think there is probably value for inexperienced programmers, or people that don't know how to properly write their resume, but for experience programmers, it seems like an unnecessary extra step. Going through a bunch of interview questions from TripleByte just to skip a 45 minute phone screen is absolutely unnecessary and not worth it, especially since you will have to go through the entire onsite anyway.
As I mentioned, I had about a dozen interviews, with both YC and non-YC companies, and had no trouble getting contacted directly by any company.
