17 ms·

Triplebyte expands its recruiting platform beyond YC, signs up Apple, Facebook

116 points by artsandsci 10y ago

Harj 10y ago
It's been interesting working with larger companies through Triplebyte. When we started, we were mostly working with smaller startups making early engineering hires. The challenge for these them is letting engineers know the company exists and why it's interesting. Bigger companies like Facebook don't need to let engineers know they exist, a huge number of engineers have already applied to them at some point. What they've realized is the way to hire more is to find the good ones that are sitting in the resume review stage of the hiring process, not getting looked at because they don't have stand out credentials. One thing that's struck out to me in a surprising way about the average startup hiring process compared to larger companies is speed. We've found the larger companies are actually faster to move on the first step of booking a call to speak with our candidates. This completely reverses when it gets to bringing someone onsite and making offers though. Bigger companies take longer to do both and this is where startups have a hiring advantage.
- djcapelis 10y ago
  How does the matching process work on the other side? How do you figure out the correct interview loop and position to match a candidate with when you're working with large companies that have so many different groups inside them?
  - ammon 10y ago
    This differs substantially by company. Some companies have one general interview process, and handle team/role assignment after making offers (for some reason this is common at very large companies and very small companies). Other companies (often midsize) have different interview tracks for different open roles. In that case we just treat each interview track like a different company. We gather an initial guess about what the track wants by talking to the hiring managers, and then refine this with feedback data on candidates. We've found that bringing up example interview questions and asking if it's important that candidates can answer them is the best way to get at what skills an organization values. There's still a lot of noise in this (a hiring manager can't speak perfectly for the the entire organization), so we refine it over time.
- itsdrewmiller 10y ago
  Why do you think that is? Dedicated staff for the early funnel compared to "not my real job" specialization further down?
- tedmiston 10y ago
  A year or so ago you guys published the post Who Y Combinator Companies Want (http://blog.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies-want http://blog.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies-want) and A Taxonomy of Programmers (http://blog.triplebyte.com/a-taxonomy-of-programmers http://blog.triplebyte.com/a-taxonomy-of-programmers), both of which were quite interesting and insightful in terms of data. How do the types of engineers Apple or Facebook want compare to that?
  - ammon 10y ago
    So, those are not (unfortunately!) the primary way that we match engineers with companies. It comes down to questions about how important it is that engineers are strong in academic CS (some organizations think very, others think it's useless fluff), how important programming speed is (some companies think very, others want to see careful testing and think speed is sign of shallowness), or whether it's important that engineers are strong in http / web systems (some think this is the core of what most engineers do, others want problem solving and intelligence and think web programming is teachable). Some companies want the best engineers, regardless of english level. Others value communication over engineers. It's simple stuff. But getting the data is HARD (companies themselves don't know how much they differ), and matching engineers on these criteria significantly boosts pass rates.
    - tedmiston 10y ago
      That sounds excellent. What's the best way for an engineer to share their own values with respect to these attributes? For example, is there a way for me to say, "I prefer cultures which emphasize code quality ahead thoroughness and with an above average communication style"? (I haven't used Triplebyte yet.) I totally understand if this is part of the secret sauce and the answer is "just use it".
  - conjectures 10y ago
    The taxonomy is interesting, but flawed. What founder wouldn't want a Child Prodigy on their team, someone who's 'going to found a company when they're older'? Someone with hustle and chops but happy to be a junior member. Likewise who'd want an 'idiosyncratic' Academic? Ignoring the fact that massive tools like Scala are some academic's project. Or that Google was founded by two PhD students... Obvs the former is going to get many 'yes please' and the later 'umm, maybe'.
- dnautics 10y ago
  I had relatively quick (1 week time turnaround) onsites with "big companies" thorough triplebyte. Startups were relatively quick to 'weed me out' as someone with less experience. One of my frustrations was that I was not sure if triplebyte was effectively communicating my junior engineer status to the big companies; one of the companies was pitched to me as a company that had a history of being ok with taking on someone and indoctrinating them in their way of doing things and then turned me down with a reply that they were looking for a senior engineer. In retrospect I kind of realize that Triplebyte is really more targetting as a service for more senior positions (at least for now) but I think this is a great move for Triplebyte to get a bigger marketshare and wish them luck.
- ummonk 10y ago
  >What they've realized is the way to hire more is to find the good ones that are sitting in the resume review stage of the hiring process, not getting looked at because they don't have stand out credentials. Yup, I was one of those people whose resume kept getting sucked into the review black hole due to lack of stand out credentials. I understand companies are swamped with applications and need some way to screen applicants even before phone interviews, but it was rather frustrating knowing I would do perfectly fine if I only I were given an interview. Triplebyte was an immense help here (just today I accepted an offer from Asana that I got through Triplebyte). I'm really a fan of your philosophy and what you're trying to do to improve tech hiring, and strongly recommend people (especially those without great conventional resumes) to give Triplebyte a go.
lettergram 10y ago
Having interviewed with TripleByte, I think this is a bold and poor decision. Upfront, I didn't pass a TripleByte interview I had (one of the few companies I haven't passed). My interviewer showed up late initially, then took a break and showed up 10 minutes late after the break. Further, the interviewer nit picked super irrelevant details, and acted exceedingly smug and condescending. Some of the stuff he told me I was wrong about was related to my research. Even after attempting to explain it several times, he just said, "No, you're wrong, you don't know what you are talking about." I then literally brought up the paper and sent it to him, before he said something along the lines of... Oh, well I guess that is right. Overall, it was one of the worst interview experiences I have had, and I don't believe they are good way to recruit. Hell, I even passed all their coding questions with flying colors. It was the silly video conferencing interview with a smug engineer who really made the interview fall apart.
- tptacek 10y ago
  This was an interviewer working for Triplebyte? I thought their interviews were standardized. Can you tell us more about the experience, and what they asked? I'm super interested in this.
  - lettergram 10y ago
    > This was an interviewer working for Triplebyte? Yes, it was. > I thought their interviews were standardized. I don't know if you can standardize peoples personalities... The real issue here (in my opinion) was the guy was not a good interviewer. > Can you tell us more about the experience, and what they asked? I honestly don't remember, they asked about active record (as I do some web dev), but also stuff related to describe on the spot some SQL queries and why one would be faster than the other. All of that appeared fine, the real issue was our debate related to computer vision (where my research was done). Sorry, I can't really dive more in, but it was probably a year ago.
    - Judgmentality 10y ago
      > the real issue was our debate related to computer vision Oof. I feel like computer vision is a particularly misunderstood field. In a way, it reminds me of statistics - I feel like people purposefully obfuscate things to make their results sound more impressive. The great thing about computer vision is you can almost immediately see through the smoke and mirrors - ask for a live demo. I'm amazed how many people refuse to show me a demo of something that is inherently meant to be viewed.
chrisseaton 10y ago
> The screening process happens background-blind I don't get it. If someone's done has an incredible body of work behind them, why do you want to hide that from yourself? Isn't it a great way to pick the best people out of the pool of applicants? 'Ah this person designed the new IR in Google's V8 - we should definitely talk to them'. When I speak to potential hires the first thing I ask is 'tell me about the projects you've worked on - what have you built in the past'. Am I doing it wrong? Someone could be great at general programming and pass a coding test, but if they have no experience in my field what are they going to do for me?
- kevinclancy 10y ago
  I think it's more about hiding college credentials than hiding the portfolio. It would be great to allow programmers to show their portfolios, but that would likely enable interviewers to google them, giving away their backgrounds. I have a few interesting projects in my portfolio that I am proud of, a reasonably high CS GRE score (a test which is unfortunately not administered any more), and a moderately good topcoder history. However, after being told by an HR person that they would not hire me because of the college I went to (a for-profit college) I started to view the relation between hiring and credentials as illegitimate. So for that reason I hope TripleByte catches on.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  TripleByte only gets paid when their candidates go through technical engineering screens, so it's not surprising that they select for that to the exclusion of other factors. If you can't talk your way out of a paper bag, you spend TripleByte's time and reputation for no good gain. Plus, people with a good body of work need less help getting interviews. TripleByte has less value add in that case.
- Harj 10y ago
  Previous work and achievements definitely carry valuable signal - we don't disagree with that. And relying on them makes sense for companies where the time of hiring managers is constrained and you need a quick way to identify the (likely) best people within a population. Relying solely on those signals though acts to the detriment of skilled people whose best work hasn't been done at prestigious, name brand companies. Our approach to removing credentials from our screening process is to prevent ourselves being biased by them and forcing ourselves to build a process that can find strong engineers who don't look good on paper. This is a win for the companies we work with as it expands the pool of talent they can hire from.
dsk139 10y ago
I'm a recruiter that is technical (js engineer) based in NYC. I don't see what TripleByte is doing that is that different from what a good recruiter can offer. Matching at very selective companies doesn't seem challenging. I don't work with Apple or Facebook, but in the past four months recruiting part-time I've had 15 placements. Over 65% resume submission to on-site rate. And over an 85% offer close rate (close counts if I get 3 offers for someone and they choose one). I can match relatively well without needing to put candidates through a day of tests and I save candidates time by sending them to selectively chosen companies (safety, fit, reach). And I spend a ton of truly understanding each unique process of the companies I work with. What makes Triplebyte actually unique? What are they changing about the industry? Are they actually reducing bias or is this a gimmick? Are they that different from a recruiting firm with strong lead generation?
- marme 10y ago
  the draw they have for engineering talent side is that you do preliminary interview with them and then move straight to on sites with companies they recommend you to. It means you can have 10 on sites without having to do 10 phone screens
  - dsk139 10y ago
    Hopefully someone good at matching doesn't need to send you to 10 on-sites to find you a good fit. That sounds exhausting and unproductive.
    - Harj 10y ago
      We've never had a candidate do 10 on-sites nor would we encourage someone to. That'd indeed be incredibly exhausting. We encourage them to be broad with the number of companies they do an initial pitch call with, then be selective about who they move forward with to an on-site.
      - ryandrake 10y ago
        Wow. Do you actually find that less than 10 on-sites is sufficient to obtain at least one offer? A >10% success rate seems very high to me, even with the vetting you provide. Admittedly I have only anecdotal data.
drwl 10y ago
Have you guys considered working with Udacity? They have a "plus" version that does offers placement guarantees or a refund. There might be a synergy there.
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anp 10y ago
As a general reply to a variety of the complaints in this thread: don't underestimate the task that triplebyte has in selling you to companies, especially since they have focused on candidates who might not even get an onsite interview at companies on their own. Their process also involves helping candidates skip a lot of the interview pipeline at several companies at a time, so that you can get better offers. This means that companies have to place a lot of trust in their assessment, and my personal experience (having gone through the process and gotten a job through them) is that they have to be very very rigorous to sell companies on their model. My interviews with triplebyte were definitely some of the hardest ones I had during my search, but they also focused on things I consider important in developing software in a way that no other interview pipeline I've been through has. It may be that my overwhelmingly positive experience with them is not reflective of most, but I think that's unlikely given the amount of work they put into standardizing their process. Being on the side of engineers in the hiring process does not mean they can take it easy on interviews, and my experience would suggest that whatever personal intensity you may feel in an interview with them is very likely to be outclassed by any decent sized sample of interviews at a big company. I'm definitely bullish on their model, and while the process isn't perfect I'm really excited to see them moving the needle on interview quality in the industry. I sincerely wish them the best with the expansion.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  I'm in Triplebyte's pipeline right now, and have had nothing but a great experience. The interview questions have been... not unusual? If people are complaining they're too challenging, I think I must have gotten lucky, because they seemed fairly normal to me. I believe my interviewer even told me that rather than finishing the whole programming problem, they were looking to see how far I could get and how I develop code. It's been a great experience so far, even though several of my favorite companies in the pipeline have gone incommunicado before I could even talk to them :-/!
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  - Harj 10y ago
soneca 10y ago
I wish they expand the process to recruit remote and outside of the USA.
- gaastonsr 10y ago
  They don't hire remote? I remember they have a strong bias to recruit for Bay Area companies but I remember being asked if I'm looking for remote work too. So maybe they do.
  - soneca 10y ago
    Last time I started the signup process (2 months ago maybe), when I selected the "remote" option, there was a message informing me that they didn't recruit remote. Same with location (USA only). Nice UX informing it so upfront anyway.
  - sudshekhar 10y ago
    Nope they don't hire remote (or anybody not having US VISA). I reached their phone interview but due to this constraint couldn't go further.
- hocuspocus 10y ago
  I'd rather have a non-broken interviewing process than involve yet another party to fix it. Too many companies are blindly following Google style interviews, we don't need even more of that outside of the Bay area!
zitterbewegung 10y ago
My experience with TripleByte is worse than I have had with recruiters emailing me. I tried going through TripleBytes process and answered the programming quiz. Then TripleByte changes their policy stating that I must do a project before I can proceed. I stopped the process there. Then after awhile when I try to login and try again after a few months it says that I am in some kind of pending state which I can't get out of. I gave up on the service after that.
throwawayact01 10y ago
I failed the 3rd round interview because I hadn't studied garbage collection. C# handles it for me, I could have learned, I just hadn't prioritized that yet and folks want to say now you aren't very senior. I was told I could apply again, but haven't been offered a chance to even after a couple of follow ups. The problem that ultimately stumped me in the 3 round was the exercise of drawing a spiral in a console window. Sounds easy, but when you are timed and nervous, almost impossible. After I bombed the 3rd round knowing the rejection was coming, I ended up successfully implementing it in Excel and VBA. Good coders are like a snowflake and I think TripleByte doesn't have a business if they buy that.
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chrisper 10y ago
I avoid Triplebyte like the plague. I passed their "online interview" and was marked as exceptional. I mailed the guy (forgot who he was, but his email address showed up on one of the pages) since I had some questions. He responded once and never again. Then they had the audacity to email me again a few month later to schedule a call to give feedback for their platform. Yeah sure, I am going to take extra time from my day to provide you feedback for no return. If they had sent it as a web survey, it would have been probably better. Finally, they can only schedule interviews on two days a week. Really?
SeeDave 10y ago
I had an awesome video-interview with Triplebyte in January but they didn't decide to move forward. No complaints though as they gave a solid heads-up on what to expect, my interviewer was super positive (I felt like he was actually rooting for me), and they gave me solid feedback on my strengths and what concrete actions I should take if I choose to reapply in the future. These guys are the real deal, so it's pretty neat that they're expanding out to big-names! I wish them the best!
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > they gave me solid feedback on my strengths and what concrete actions I should take if I choose to reapply in the future. I applied through their project track. It was described as a low-pressure way to write your code ahead of time and talk about it in the interview. The interview was, instead, about making changes to my project while Ammon watched. (Also, there was a request to derive a formal proof while Ammon watched. I didn't get it.) After which I got a rejection saying that my project was great but my interview performance was so poor that they wouldn't move forward. I complained that this wasn't actionable feedback, but the only way they ever responded to that complaint was "I stand by that", from someone other than my interviewer. Am I wrong to consider "you do poorly in interviews" hopelessly vague? They contacted me, much later, to ask me to be a test subject for a new interview. New interviewer asked me about hash tables, and I responded to his questions with this information: - Hash tables are the generalization of an array to being indexed by "whatever you want" rather than an integer; they have similar performance characteristics to arrays. - If a hash code is larger than the size of your hash table's backing array, you would generally handle that by storing the item at index (hash_code % array_size). - When two objects have the same hash, one strategy is to store them in "buckets", linked lists of everything present in the table at that hash key; another strategy is quadratic probing (where when the index you want is full, you repeatedly square the index until the space you're looking in is empty). Quadratic probing has the downside that when you delete an entry from the table, you have to leave a placeholder in the backing array saying "something used to be here". - If a hash table gets too full, you generally create a new backing array of double the size and rehash everything into the new backing array. The size doubles rather than increasing by some constant amount so that the amortized time requirement for inserts will be constant. - Amortized time complexity for a set of operations is the average time complexity per operation (not in expectation, but as measured after the operations have happened). He also asked me about red-black trees. I could say that red-black trees were a self-balancing binary tree with the property that the length of any path root-to-leaf in the tree was within a factor of two of any other path, and that I wouldn't be able to write a red-black tree off the top of my head. New interviewer, believing that I would be interested in reapplying to triplebyte, did give me feedback on what concrete actions I should take in order to do so. Specifically, he said I should focus on studying red-black trees (OK, fair enough, I guess) and hash tables. I thought I had pretty good coverage, purely within the interview, of hash tables. Is that wrong?
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xursabgyn 10y ago
My experience working with Triplebyte has been great. I found them through hackernews from a post about visualizing the timeline for a job search [1]. Unlike most people in this thread, I thought their interview process was much more relevant and tangible to real engineering applications than most companies I've interviewed at. I was not presented with any gotchas or arcane algorithms questions. Finally, the big draw to them as an engineer is that it significantly cuts down on the amount of time you spend on the phone with other companies before going on site. I'm still holding a job (hence the anonymous account), so looking for other opportunities was somewhat prohibitive to me. [1] http://kellysutton.com/2016/10/20/visualizing-a-job-search-or-how-to-find-a-job-as-a-software-engineer.html http://kellysutton.com/2016/10/20/visualizing-a-job-search-o...
jameside 10y ago
We've been using TripleByte (in addition to career fairs, etc.) at Expo for a few months and find it really good. Every candidate from TripleByte we've interviewed has been knowledgeable about many facets of software engineering, and it's been great to work with the one we've so far brought on board. One effect of using TripleByte is that we've been able to focus our interviews more on engineering design and seeing how someone thinks. Since we've found TripleByte's interviews for programming skills and knowledge to be quite good, we get to spend more of our time and the candidates' time on areas other than coding questions.
blackkettle 10y ago
The phone number validator on the signup page does not work correctly. Doesn't recognize or validate my valid Swiss phone number in any normal variation although it does correctly change the little flag to Switzerland.
- kwi 10y ago
  Ah good catch! Can you email me your phone so we can test and fix it: guillaume@triplebyte.com Thanks!
blitmap 10y ago
When I interviewed with Triplebyte I had applied to actually become part of their staff. I was told I'd go through the standard process and then afterward we'd talk about what Triplebyte does in-depth and what the responsibilities would be. Guillaume was kind, engaging, and interested in how I approached a problem. The Australian dude (Buck) took over toward the end and he was very dismissive - he didn't seem to care what I said. It was kind of a let-down because I had crawled his online presence when researching Triplebyte and I was interested in asking him about his charity contributions. I had a good time talking to Harj about buckling-spring keyboards like my beloved Model M in the in-between moments. I found out later I didn't pass the interview because my solution to the coding exercise didn't work at the end of the hour. We had continued past it and I thought I was safe because I was complimented on its organization and straight-forward interpretation. I finished it that night: https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-snippets/blob/master/connect-four.coffee https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-snippets/blob/master... https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-snippets/blob/master/stock-prices.coffee https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-snippets/blob/master... I had fun but I felt like they got more out of it than I did.
utmachina 10y ago
CURRENT CANDIDATE REVIEW First Round: Online quiz: pretty easy, very intuitive questions. Different languages, but concepts are language-agnostic. Second Round: Onsite (I live close by). One OOP coding question, Lightning round of very basic college CS concepts, and debugging session. First Round Matches: The company tries to match you with 10 companies; I got 5. All the companies were either YC or top-vc funded. I received responses from 3 companies; the startups move very quickly -- onsite within a week. However, I've interviewed with 2 of the 3. Did not get an offer from either (qualification and mismatch in culture-fit). PROS: - The team moves VERY fast when it comes to companies (really tough to think of PTO excuses) - Responsive - each candidate is assigned to a single talent manager - After the initial matches did not fit my liking or yield any results, my talent manager immediately started looking for new matches. CONS: - Initial matches were not what I was looking for/interested in. (hopefully being fixed). So far, the experience has been positive. Personally, the lack of stress of finding places to submit to is a huge plus.
- Harj 10y ago
  Yep signing up more companies to work with is how we can improve the likelihood we'll find enough matches that are both a technical skills fit and interest fit for every candidate. That's what we're working towards.
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- Harj 10y ago
  I'm sorry you had a negative experience and we're working hard to make sure it doesn't happen for anyone again. We started the company to help those people for whom manually submitting their resume to companies isn't an option. We don't use resumes as part of our screening process because we're looking to find skilled engineers without elite resume credentials. For them, submitting their resumes directly results in either silence or rejection. We've been able to find many of these engineers jobs at companies they'd never imagined they'd be able to work at. We just had a self taught engineer working as a pizza delivery person in Cincinnati, hired by Instacart - his onsite interview was the first time he'd met another engineer in person. We helped a recent high school graduate, who didn't attend college, get hired by Apple - his dream company. I'm the founder so I'm obviously incentivized to highlight these success stories and I don't claim that we've built a perfect process for everyone yet. We're working on a hard problem, judging the skill of other human beings in a fair way and vouching for them to companies that have maintained the same hiring process for decades and are resistant to change. Our approach is not perfect but it has had life changing outcomes for many people and we're doing our best to increase the % of all Triplebyte applicants that's true for.
  - schwolf 10y ago
    Slightly off topic question Harj, but is it suffice to say that there is a finite percentage of companies willing to spend a 25% placement fee on candidates through triplebyte? Surely the time will come again when startups will curtail their spending and thus leave limited options for candidates going through your process? Is it safe to say candidates whom solely use Triplebyte are limited to a fraction of the companies that they can otherwise get in front of via other means?
- dang 10y ago
  The user who posted this regretted it and asked us to delete it, so we've done so, and also deleted their name from Harj's reply.
flugargzaeg 10y ago
selection bias as a service :trollface:
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116 points by artsandsci 10y ago

Harj 10y ago

It's been interesting working with larger companies through Triplebyte. When we started, we were mostly working with smaller startups making early engineering hires. The challenge for these them is letting engineers know the company exists and why it's interesting. Bigger companies like Facebook don't need to let engineers know they exist, a huge number of engineers have already applied to them at some point. What they've realized is the way to hire more is to find the good ones that are sitting in the resume review stage of the hiring process, not getting looked at because they don't have stand out credentials. One thing that's struck out to me in a surprising way about the average startup hiring process compared to larger companies is speed. We've found the larger companies are actually faster to move on the first step of booking a call to speak with our candidates. This completely reverses when it gets to bringing someone onsite and making offers though. Bigger companies take longer to do both and this is where startups have a hiring advantage.

djcapelis 10y ago
How does the matching process work on the other side? How do you figure out the correct interview loop and position to match a candidate with when you're working with large companies that have so many different groups inside them?
- ammon 10y ago
  This differs substantially by company. Some companies have one general interview process, and handle team/role assignment after making offers (for some reason this is common at very large companies and very small companies). Other companies (often midsize) have different interview tracks for different open roles. In that case we just treat each interview track like a different company. We gather an initial guess about what the track wants by talking to the hiring managers, and then refine this with feedback data on candidates. We've found that bringing up example interview questions and asking if it's important that candidates can answer them is the best way to get at what skills an organization values. There's still a lot of noise in this (a hiring manager can't speak perfectly for the the entire organization), so we refine it over time.
itsdrewmiller 10y ago
Why do you think that is? Dedicated staff for the early funnel compared to "not my real job" specialization further down?
tedmiston 10y ago
A year or so ago you guys published the post Who Y Combinator Companies Want (http://blog.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies-want http://blog.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies-want) and A Taxonomy of Programmers (http://blog.triplebyte.com/a-taxonomy-of-programmers http://blog.triplebyte.com/a-taxonomy-of-programmers), both of which were quite interesting and insightful in terms of data. How do the types of engineers Apple or Facebook want compare to that?
- ammon 10y ago
  So, those are not (unfortunately!) the primary way that we match engineers with companies. It comes down to questions about how important it is that engineers are strong in academic CS (some organizations think very, others think it's useless fluff), how important programming speed is (some companies think very, others want to see careful testing and think speed is sign of shallowness), or whether it's important that engineers are strong in http / web systems (some think this is the core of what most engineers do, others want problem solving and intelligence and think web programming is teachable). Some companies want the best engineers, regardless of english level. Others value communication over engineers. It's simple stuff. But getting the data is HARD (companies themselves don't know how much they differ), and matching engineers on these criteria significantly boosts pass rates.
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    That sounds excellent. What's the best way for an engineer to share their own values with respect to these attributes? For example, is there a way for me to say, "I prefer cultures which emphasize code quality ahead thoroughness and with an above average communication style"? (I haven't used Triplebyte yet.) I totally understand if this is part of the secret sauce and the answer is "just use it".
- conjectures 10y ago
  The taxonomy is interesting, but flawed. What founder wouldn't want a Child Prodigy on their team, someone who's 'going to found a company when they're older'? Someone with hustle and chops but happy to be a junior member. Likewise who'd want an 'idiosyncratic' Academic? Ignoring the fact that massive tools like Scala are some academic's project. Or that Google was founded by two PhD students... Obvs the former is going to get many 'yes please' and the later 'umm, maybe'.
dnautics 10y ago
I had relatively quick (1 week time turnaround) onsites with "big companies" thorough triplebyte. Startups were relatively quick to 'weed me out' as someone with less experience. One of my frustrations was that I was not sure if triplebyte was effectively communicating my junior engineer status to the big companies; one of the companies was pitched to me as a company that had a history of being ok with taking on someone and indoctrinating them in their way of doing things and then turned me down with a reply that they were looking for a senior engineer. In retrospect I kind of realize that Triplebyte is really more targetting as a service for more senior positions (at least for now) but I think this is a great move for Triplebyte to get a bigger marketshare and wish them luck.
ummonk 10y ago
>What they've realized is the way to hire more is to find the good ones that are sitting in the resume review stage of the hiring process, not getting looked at because they don't have stand out credentials. Yup, I was one of those people whose resume kept getting sucked into the review black hole due to lack of stand out credentials. I understand companies are swamped with applications and need some way to screen applicants even before phone interviews, but it was rather frustrating knowing I would do perfectly fine if I only I were given an interview. Triplebyte was an immense help here (just today I accepted an offer from Asana that I got through Triplebyte). I'm really a fan of your philosophy and what you're trying to do to improve tech hiring, and strongly recommend people (especially those without great conventional resumes) to give Triplebyte a go.

lettergram 10y ago

Having interviewed with TripleByte, I think this is a bold and poor decision. Upfront, I didn't pass a TripleByte interview I had (one of the few companies I haven't passed). My interviewer showed up late initially, then took a break and showed up 10 minutes late after the break. Further, the interviewer nit picked super irrelevant details, and acted exceedingly smug and condescending. Some of the stuff he told me I was wrong about was related to my research. Even after attempting to explain it several times, he just said, "No, you're wrong, you don't know what you are talking about." I then literally brought up the paper and sent it to him, before he said something along the lines of... Oh, well I guess that is right. Overall, it was one of the worst interview experiences I have had, and I don't believe they are good way to recruit. Hell, I even passed all their coding questions with flying colors. It was the silly video conferencing interview with a smug engineer who really made the interview fall apart.

tptacek 10y ago
This was an interviewer working for Triplebyte? I thought their interviews were standardized. Can you tell us more about the experience, and what they asked? I'm super interested in this.
- lettergram 10y ago
  > This was an interviewer working for Triplebyte? Yes, it was. > I thought their interviews were standardized. I don't know if you can standardize peoples personalities... The real issue here (in my opinion) was the guy was not a good interviewer. > Can you tell us more about the experience, and what they asked? I honestly don't remember, they asked about active record (as I do some web dev), but also stuff related to describe on the spot some SQL queries and why one would be faster than the other. All of that appeared fine, the real issue was our debate related to computer vision (where my research was done). Sorry, I can't really dive more in, but it was probably a year ago.
  - Judgmentality 10y ago
    > the real issue was our debate related to computer vision Oof. I feel like computer vision is a particularly misunderstood field. In a way, it reminds me of statistics - I feel like people purposefully obfuscate things to make their results sound more impressive. The great thing about computer vision is you can almost immediately see through the smoke and mirrors - ask for a live demo. I'm amazed how many people refuse to show me a demo of something that is inherently meant to be viewed.

chrisseaton 10y ago

> The screening process happens background-blind I don't get it. If someone's done has an incredible body of work behind them, why do you want to hide that from yourself? Isn't it a great way to pick the best people out of the pool of applicants? 'Ah this person designed the new IR in Google's V8 - we should definitely talk to them'. When I speak to potential hires the first thing I ask is 'tell me about the projects you've worked on - what have you built in the past'. Am I doing it wrong? Someone could be great at general programming and pass a coding test, but if they have no experience in my field what are they going to do for me?

kevinclancy 10y ago
I think it's more about hiding college credentials than hiding the portfolio. It would be great to allow programmers to show their portfolios, but that would likely enable interviewers to google them, giving away their backgrounds. I have a few interesting projects in my portfolio that I am proud of, a reasonably high CS GRE score (a test which is unfortunately not administered any more), and a moderately good topcoder history. However, after being told by an HR person that they would not hire me because of the college I went to (a for-profit college) I started to view the relation between hiring and credentials as illegitimate. So for that reason I hope TripleByte catches on.
ThrustVectoring 10y ago
TripleByte only gets paid when their candidates go through technical engineering screens, so it's not surprising that they select for that to the exclusion of other factors. If you can't talk your way out of a paper bag, you spend TripleByte's time and reputation for no good gain. Plus, people with a good body of work need less help getting interviews. TripleByte has less value add in that case.
Harj 10y ago
Previous work and achievements definitely carry valuable signal - we don't disagree with that. And relying on them makes sense for companies where the time of hiring managers is constrained and you need a quick way to identify the (likely) best people within a population. Relying solely on those signals though acts to the detriment of skilled people whose best work hasn't been done at prestigious, name brand companies. Our approach to removing credentials from our screening process is to prevent ourselves being biased by them and forcing ourselves to build a process that can find strong engineers who don't look good on paper. This is a win for the companies we work with as it expands the pool of talent they can hire from.

dsk139 10y ago

I'm a recruiter that is technical (js engineer) based in NYC. I don't see what TripleByte is doing that is that different from what a good recruiter can offer. Matching at very selective companies doesn't seem challenging. I don't work with Apple or Facebook, but in the past four months recruiting part-time I've had 15 placements. Over 65% resume submission to on-site rate. And over an 85% offer close rate (close counts if I get 3 offers for someone and they choose one). I can match relatively well without needing to put candidates through a day of tests and I save candidates time by sending them to selectively chosen companies (safety, fit, reach). And I spend a ton of truly understanding each unique process of the companies I work with. What makes Triplebyte actually unique? What are they changing about the industry? Are they actually reducing bias or is this a gimmick? Are they that different from a recruiting firm with strong lead generation?

marme 10y ago
the draw they have for engineering talent side is that you do preliminary interview with them and then move straight to on sites with companies they recommend you to. It means you can have 10 on sites without having to do 10 phone screens
- dsk139 10y ago
  Hopefully someone good at matching doesn't need to send you to 10 on-sites to find you a good fit. That sounds exhausting and unproductive.
  - Harj 10y ago
    We've never had a candidate do 10 on-sites nor would we encourage someone to. That'd indeed be incredibly exhausting. We encourage them to be broad with the number of companies they do an initial pitch call with, then be selective about who they move forward with to an on-site.
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      Wow. Do you actually find that less than 10 on-sites is sufficient to obtain at least one offer? A >10% success rate seems very high to me, even with the vetting you provide. Admittedly I have only anecdotal data.

drwl 10y ago

Have you guys considered working with Udacity? They have a "plus" version that does offers placement guarantees or a refund. There might be a synergy there.

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anp 10y ago

As a general reply to a variety of the complaints in this thread: don't underestimate the task that triplebyte has in selling you to companies, especially since they have focused on candidates who might not even get an onsite interview at companies on their own. Their process also involves helping candidates skip a lot of the interview pipeline at several companies at a time, so that you can get better offers. This means that companies have to place a lot of trust in their assessment, and my personal experience (having gone through the process and gotten a job through them) is that they have to be very very rigorous to sell companies on their model. My interviews with triplebyte were definitely some of the hardest ones I had during my search, but they also focused on things I consider important in developing software in a way that no other interview pipeline I've been through has. It may be that my overwhelmingly positive experience with them is not reflective of most, but I think that's unlikely given the amount of work they put into standardizing their process. Being on the side of engineers in the hiring process does not mean they can take it easy on interviews, and my experience would suggest that whatever personal intensity you may feel in an interview with them is very likely to be outclassed by any decent sized sample of interviews at a big company. I'm definitely bullish on their model, and while the process isn't perfect I'm really excited to see them moving the needle on interview quality in the industry. I sincerely wish them the best with the expansion.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
I'm in Triplebyte's pipeline right now, and have had nothing but a great experience. The interview questions have been... not unusual? If people are complaining they're too challenging, I think I must have gotten lucky, because they seemed fairly normal to me. I believe my interviewer even told me that rather than finishing the whole programming problem, they were looking to see how far I could get and how I develop code. It's been a great experience so far, even though several of my favorite companies in the pipeline have gone incommunicado before I could even talk to them :-/!
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- Harj 10y ago

soneca 10y ago

I wish they expand the process to recruit remote and outside of the USA.

gaastonsr 10y ago
They don't hire remote? I remember they have a strong bias to recruit for Bay Area companies but I remember being asked if I'm looking for remote work too. So maybe they do.
- soneca 10y ago
  Last time I started the signup process (2 months ago maybe), when I selected the "remote" option, there was a message informing me that they didn't recruit remote. Same with location (USA only). Nice UX informing it so upfront anyway.
- sudshekhar 10y ago
  Nope they don't hire remote (or anybody not having US VISA). I reached their phone interview but due to this constraint couldn't go further.
hocuspocus 10y ago
I'd rather have a non-broken interviewing process than involve yet another party to fix it. Too many companies are blindly following Google style interviews, we don't need even more of that outside of the Bay area!

zitterbewegung 10y ago

My experience with TripleByte is worse than I have had with recruiters emailing me. I tried going through TripleBytes process and answered the programming quiz. Then TripleByte changes their policy stating that I must do a project before I can proceed. I stopped the process there. Then after awhile when I try to login and try again after a few months it says that I am in some kind of pending state which I can't get out of. I gave up on the service after that.

throwawayact01 10y ago

I failed the 3rd round interview because I hadn't studied garbage collection. C# handles it for me, I could have learned, I just hadn't prioritized that yet and folks want to say now you aren't very senior. I was told I could apply again, but haven't been offered a chance to even after a couple of follow ups. The problem that ultimately stumped me in the 3 round was the exercise of drawing a spiral in a console window. Sounds easy, but when you are timed and nervous, almost impossible. After I bombed the 3rd round knowing the rejection was coming, I ended up successfully implementing it in Excel and VBA. Good coders are like a snowflake and I think TripleByte doesn't have a business if they buy that.

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chrisper 10y ago

I avoid Triplebyte like the plague. I passed their "online interview" and was marked as exceptional. I mailed the guy (forgot who he was, but his email address showed up on one of the pages) since I had some questions. He responded once and never again. Then they had the audacity to email me again a few month later to schedule a call to give feedback for their platform. Yeah sure, I am going to take extra time from my day to provide you feedback for no return. If they had sent it as a web survey, it would have been probably better. Finally, they can only schedule interviews on two days a week. Really?

SeeDave 10y ago

I had an awesome video-interview with Triplebyte in January but they didn't decide to move forward. No complaints though as they gave a solid heads-up on what to expect, my interviewer was super positive (I felt like he was actually rooting for me), and they gave me solid feedback on my strengths and what concrete actions I should take if I choose to reapply in the future. These guys are the real deal, so it's pretty neat that they're expanding out to big-names! I wish them the best!

thaumasiotes 10y ago
> they gave me solid feedback on my strengths and what concrete actions I should take if I choose to reapply in the future. I applied through their project track. It was described as a low-pressure way to write your code ahead of time and talk about it in the interview. The interview was, instead, about making changes to my project while Ammon watched. (Also, there was a request to derive a formal proof while Ammon watched. I didn't get it.) After which I got a rejection saying that my project was great but my interview performance was so poor that they wouldn't move forward. I complained that this wasn't actionable feedback, but the only way they ever responded to that complaint was "I stand by that", from someone other than my interviewer. Am I wrong to consider "you do poorly in interviews" hopelessly vague? They contacted me, much later, to ask me to be a test subject for a new interview. New interviewer asked me about hash tables, and I responded to his questions with this information: - Hash tables are the generalization of an array to being indexed by "whatever you want" rather than an integer; they have similar performance characteristics to arrays. - If a hash code is larger than the size of your hash table's backing array, you would generally handle that by storing the item at index (hash_code % array_size). - When two objects have the same hash, one strategy is to store them in "buckets", linked lists of everything present in the table at that hash key; another strategy is quadratic probing (where when the index you want is full, you repeatedly square the index until the space you're looking in is empty). Quadratic probing has the downside that when you delete an entry from the table, you have to leave a placeholder in the backing array saying "something used to be here". - If a hash table gets too full, you generally create a new backing array of double the size and rehash everything into the new backing array. The size doubles rather than increasing by some constant amount so that the amortized time requirement for inserts will be constant. - Amortized time complexity for a set of operations is the average time complexity per operation (not in expectation, but as measured after the operations have happened). He also asked me about red-black trees. I could say that red-black trees were a self-balancing binary tree with the property that the length of any path root-to-leaf in the tree was within a factor of two of any other path, and that I wouldn't be able to write a red-black tree off the top of my head. New interviewer, believing that I would be interested in reapplying to triplebyte, did give me feedback on what concrete actions I should take in order to do so. Specifically, he said I should focus on studying red-black trees (OK, fair enough, I guess) and hash tables. I thought I had pretty good coverage, purely within the interview, of hash tables. Is that wrong?

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xursabgyn 10y ago

My experience working with Triplebyte has been great. I found them through hackernews from a post about visualizing the timeline for a job search [1]. Unlike most people in this thread, I thought their interview process was much more relevant and tangible to real engineering applications than most companies I've interviewed at. I was not presented with any gotchas or arcane algorithms questions. Finally, the big draw to them as an engineer is that it significantly cuts down on the amount of time you spend on the phone with other companies before going on site. I'm still holding a job (hence the anonymous account), so looking for other opportunities was somewhat prohibitive to me. [1] http://kellysutton.com/2016/10/20/visualizing-a-job-search-or-how-to-find-a-job-as-a-software-engineer.html http://kellysutton.com/2016/10/20/visualizing-a-job-search-o...

jameside 10y ago

We've been using TripleByte (in addition to career fairs, etc.) at Expo for a few months and find it really good. Every candidate from TripleByte we've interviewed has been knowledgeable about many facets of software engineering, and it's been great to work with the one we've so far brought on board. One effect of using TripleByte is that we've been able to focus our interviews more on engineering design and seeing how someone thinks. Since we've found TripleByte's interviews for programming skills and knowledge to be quite good, we get to spend more of our time and the candidates' time on areas other than coding questions.

blackkettle 10y ago

The phone number validator on the signup page does not work correctly. Doesn't recognize or validate my valid Swiss phone number in any normal variation although it does correctly change the little flag to Switzerland.

kwi 10y ago
Ah good catch! Can you email me your phone so we can test and fix it: guillaume@triplebyte.com Thanks!

blitmap 10y ago

When I interviewed with Triplebyte I had applied to actually become part of their staff. I was told I'd go through the standard process and then afterward we'd talk about what Triplebyte does in-depth and what the responsibilities would be. Guillaume was kind, engaging, and interested in how I approached a problem. The Australian dude (Buck) took over toward the end and he was very dismissive - he didn't seem to care what I said. It was kind of a let-down because I had crawled his online presence when researching Triplebyte and I was interested in asking him about his charity contributions. I had a good time talking to Harj about buckling-spring keyboards like my beloved Model M in the in-between moments. I found out later I didn't pass the interview because my solution to the coding exercise didn't work at the end of the hour. We had continued past it and I thought I was safe because I was complimented on its organization and straight-forward interpretation. I finished it that night: https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-snippets/blob/master/connect-four.coffee https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-snippets/blob/master... https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-snippets/blob/master/stock-prices.coffee https://github.com/blitmap/coffeescript-snippets/blob/master... I had fun but I felt like they got more out of it than I did.

utmachina 10y ago

CURRENT CANDIDATE REVIEW First Round: Online quiz: pretty easy, very intuitive questions. Different languages, but concepts are language-agnostic. Second Round: Onsite (I live close by). One OOP coding question, Lightning round of very basic college CS concepts, and debugging session. First Round Matches: The company tries to match you with 10 companies; I got 5. All the companies were either YC or top-vc funded. I received responses from 3 companies; the startups move very quickly -- onsite within a week. However, I've interviewed with 2 of the 3. Did not get an offer from either (qualification and mismatch in culture-fit). PROS: - The team moves VERY fast when it comes to companies (really tough to think of PTO excuses) - Responsive - each candidate is assigned to a single talent manager - After the initial matches did not fit my liking or yield any results, my talent manager immediately started looking for new matches. CONS: - Initial matches were not what I was looking for/interested in. (hopefully being fixed). So far, the experience has been positive. Personally, the lack of stress of finding places to submit to is a huge plus.

Harj 10y ago
Yep signing up more companies to work with is how we can improve the likelihood we'll find enough matches that are both a technical skills fit and interest fit for every candidate. That's what we're working towards.

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Harj 10y ago
I'm sorry you had a negative experience and we're working hard to make sure it doesn't happen for anyone again. We started the company to help those people for whom manually submitting their resume to companies isn't an option. We don't use resumes as part of our screening process because we're looking to find skilled engineers without elite resume credentials. For them, submitting their resumes directly results in either silence or rejection. We've been able to find many of these engineers jobs at companies they'd never imagined they'd be able to work at. We just had a self taught engineer working as a pizza delivery person in Cincinnati, hired by Instacart - his onsite interview was the first time he'd met another engineer in person. We helped a recent high school graduate, who didn't attend college, get hired by Apple - his dream company. I'm the founder so I'm obviously incentivized to highlight these success stories and I don't claim that we've built a perfect process for everyone yet. We're working on a hard problem, judging the skill of other human beings in a fair way and vouching for them to companies that have maintained the same hiring process for decades and are resistant to change. Our approach is not perfect but it has had life changing outcomes for many people and we're doing our best to increase the % of all Triplebyte applicants that's true for.
- schwolf 10y ago
  Slightly off topic question Harj, but is it suffice to say that there is a finite percentage of companies willing to spend a 25% placement fee on candidates through triplebyte? Surely the time will come again when startups will curtail their spending and thus leave limited options for candidates going through your process? Is it safe to say candidates whom solely use Triplebyte are limited to a fraction of the companies that they can otherwise get in front of via other means?
dang 10y ago
The user who posted this regretted it and asked us to delete it, so we've done so, and also deleted their name from Harj's reply.

flugargzaeg 10y ago

selection bias as a service :trollface:

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