27 ms·

Rethinking Triplebyte

• dawnho 5y ago
  Interesting idea. But it seems like there’s room for abuse - won’t engineers, who are unhappy that they didn’t get an offer, just report companies? Don’t you just become Yelp in that case, full of reviews from salty customers? How are you going to get useful data when you’re worried about that?
  • ammon 5y ago
    This is certainly an issue. As you say, it’s a problem on yelp and glassdoor. It’s why most nightclubs have low yelp ratings (people they exclude give them low scores). There are a few things I think we think we can do: 1) Look at relative data, not raw ratings. Written reviews or raw numerical scores are what show the nightclub effect the most. What we care about is a ranking of companies (showing the better companies first in search results). This may not be as impacted by the problem. If sour grapes from people who failed interviews overwhelm other signals, we can only look at the scores from people who pass (or normalize the two groups separately). 2) Ask very specific questions (and maybe provide dummy options to attract sour grapes). I suspect that questions like "did this company say they could meet at $250 salary and then offer you less?" will get more accurate answers than "does this company have a toxic culture?". (We do actually want to get culture data, but I want to be really specific about the culture questions we are asking). 3) Use objective facts, not subject opinions. For example, we can tell when a company ghosts a candidate (because they reply through a proxy email that we control). So we're listing the 'ghost rate' for each company.
    • kangnkodos 5y ago
      Addressing ghosting is great! You should add something to Rethinking Triplebyte to indicate you are doing this.
    • dharmaturtle 5y ago
      IIRC I wrote about 30 custom cover letters to Triplebyte companies... about 2-3 responded. My response rate to cold emailing/applying to ~10 F# companies is literally 100%. To be fair though, the TB applications occurred right at the start of Covid, and my F# job applications well into Covid. Anyway, a ghost rate would be greatly appreciated.
    • marcinzm 5y ago
      In my experience toxic companies will essentially force employees to give good feedback through either social pressure, incentives or threat of repercussions. You can see this quite clearly on Glassdoor where a bad review is followed by five very similar good reviews within a week for some companies.
    • TulliusCicero 5y ago
      > I suspect that questions like "did this company say they could meet at $250 salary and then offer you less?" will get more accurate answers than "does this company have a toxic culture?". I'm pretty sure many salty people will just lie anyway, to punish the company. Source: I've been on the internet a long time. I think this model of 'punishing' companies would've worked when you had a high bar for being on the platform in the first place, but if anyone can get on there, you'll have a lot of low quality candidates who are very mad that nobody will take them, and they'll overwhelm the reviews. Remember that there's a survivorship bias at work: the lower quality people will take longer to get hired, which means they do a lot more interviews, which means a lot more reviews on your platform. Essentially, it's a reverse meritocracy when it comes to evaluating companies.
• minimaxir 5y ago
  The overall idea seems like Glassdoor with extra steps.
  • ammon 5y ago
    The difference is that I think we're in a position to actually change behaviour (require companies to not do bad things like ghost candidates, lie about salary).
• throwaway273575 5y ago
  Will this newfound respect for users' privacy be backed up by a contract or some other legally-enforceable commitment, or do we all have to worry about when you decide to pivot again in another couple years?
  • ammon 5y ago
    I hadn’t thought about this from a legal contract perspective. I like the idea of making our commitment enforceable. Do you have ideas of what you'd want in a contract?
    • htrp 5y ago
      Practically, you wouldn't be able to have any type of contract enforceable in court. It would be a nice touch though.
• acarl005 5y ago
  I got my job through TripleByte. I consider it my dream job. Honestly, I loved the experience with TripleByte. I got a bunch of interviews to happen at the same time. Having them all together increases our bargaining power. It's hard to get the processes with different companies to coincide if you're just waiting around for recruiters to reach out. I already felt like it gave me the power. I'm sad to hear it's changing, because I would've used it again. I've also referred tons of people out of genuine liking of the service. Not sure if I can recommend it anymore. Still, I'm very thankful for what they did for me. I hope their new style works out.
  • ammon 5y ago
    I'm really glad that the old process worked so well for you. When it worked, it was pretty great. We are losing something with this pivot. The problem is that the old process did not work for far more people than it did. For every wonderful experience with a TM there were 10+ engineers who we screened out. That’s why we made this change.
    • hprotagonist 5y ago
      > For every wonderful experience with a TM there were 10+ engineers who we screened out. maybe (and i know that this is an outré thing to say these days) that was the point.
      • meowface 5y ago
        I think it probably was the point, but I'm guessing the primary issue with it was that it turned out to be harder to profit with that strategy. To use a rough biological analogy, I think it's generally a lot easier to have a big, rapidly growing company if you take an r-selection rather than a K-selection approach.
• wayoutthere 5y ago
  In 2021, you don’t even have to search for engineering jobs. You either start out with a shortlist of companies and roles or a recruiter reaches out to you and kicks off the process. Maybe this would be useful for folks just starting their career, but on the hiring side of this, in the last year I haven’t made an offer to a candidate who didn’t already have at least one other offer on the table. Overall I think there are a lot of misconceptions about how people are hired from the recruiter side — which is why most of these platforms see the recruiter as the target customer, not engineers. I get that y’all are trying to change that, but without insight into the hiring practices at any given company (e.g. my company gives a lot of latitude for salary negotiations but every hiring manager negotiated differently) it’s going to be hard to pull a signal from the noise.
  • crooked-v 5y ago
    While the constant supply of recruiter contacts and even direct internal company contacts I get is nice, I repeatedly see the sort of basic issues as mentioned in the piece of concealment of or lying about pay (or incredibly broad pay ranges), entirely leaving out information about a job's location even when it's on the other side of the country, trying to offer entirely inappropriate junior positions that I'm never going to be interested in... all stuff that has zero cost to a hiring manager but wastes my time. I could see a lot of usefulness in something to push back against that in a structured way.
    • wayoutthere 5y ago
      On the recruiting side (I’m not a recruiter but a director making a lot of hires), we actually do the opposite all the time — we post relatively senior positions then downlevel whoever we hire to fit their experience level. A lot of people think more highly of themselves than the employment market does. We look at the job posting as a brand marketing — all we’re really trying to do is get you to apply and fill the funnel. The whole hiring process is designed to be a calibration on role, cultural fit, compensation, etc.
      • htrp 5y ago
• jawns 5y ago
  Some Hacker News context and discussion from last year around the "fiasco" that CEO Ammon Bartram mentions in this blog post: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public (1543 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology (1030 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037
• edgyquant 5y ago
  I'm an engineer who was introduced to a startup via triplebyte. I liked the platform because I went through a technical interview to even be allowed to connect with companies (one that a lot of my peers who are junior level weren't able to pass.) I guess my first thought is that doesn't this defeat the initial purpose of Triplebyte? If you allow everyone in, regardless of if they are qualified to be a senior level engineer, will this not just be another job hunt platform where (when I look for another job) I'd still have to do another technical interview at the company itself? How will companies know now who has been vetted as qualified and who is just lying on their resume? Maybe it's shitty to think this way but there is already a ton of sites out there that allow me to send my resume (or allow a company to view mine) before starting a traditional hiring process that Triplebyte prevented, allowing companies to connect with qualified high level engineers and know the person would fit their skill needs. The way it was companies mainly were just testing for cultural fits, etc.
  • dsr_ 5y ago
    When you're coming close to market saturation, you can't maintain unicorn-style growth rates. TripleByte wants that growth rate more than anything else: therefore, this.
  • jawns 5y ago
    Exclusivity and rapid growth don't normally go hand-in-hand, so one would expect that at some point, the company would have to bend on one of them, and it makes sense that they decided to bend on exclusivity. Facebook followed a similar course early in its history, and what allowed it to rapidly grow was diversifying its value prop. When it was exclusive to Ivy Leaguers, the draw was the meet other people at your school. When it was exclusive to college students, the draw was to meet other people at your school. But then when it became open to the world, it became much more of a general-purpose social networking site. That's the course Triplebyte will likely need to navigate if it wants to be successful in the long run.
  • crooked-v 5y ago
    I'll broadly second this. As an experienced dev, what kept Triplebyte on my radar was being able to at least theoretically cut past the initial round of 'can you actually fizzbuzz or are you just lying about it' that most companies need to filter out the people with inexplicably good resumes but no practical skills.
• Leoeer 5y ago
  So, I'm personally pretty unhappy with this change, because part of what made triplebyte valuable (and gave y'all the hundreds-of-thousands-engineer userbase) was the _path to competence-signalling_ which avoided credentials that your platform gave, given the quiz -- companies knew that someone being on triplebyte was a strong signal, and engineers had a path to signalling competence that was one-to-many. Eliminating that signal for goals that...seemingly don't require it (why does this new job platform require eliminating the assessment?) seems unwise, IMO
  • ammon 5y ago
    So, we ARE keeping the quiz (and companies still trust it as much as they did in the past). It's just not mandatory.
    • Leoeer 5y ago
      this seems like it's just diluting the signaling value of being on the platform? (and seems like it'll quickly create an upper and underclass of quiztakers vs nonquiztakers)
      • ammon 5y ago
        There's some risk of that. But I think that we can make it work. Basically, the model I have is that there are many different ways that an engineer can signal competency to a company and get a job. One way is doing well on our quizzes. But another way is having impressive experience at a good company, or a lot of open source contributions. Any one engineer might be really good, but look bad on one of these metrics (someone who gets stressed and does poorly on tests, or someone who has mostly worked for the government and does not have side projects). This happens a lot. When we ONLY ranked engineers by our assessments, we just missed people. The goal now is to let people show skill in any of these ways.
        • Leoeer 5y ago
          Well, I hope you're right and will keep an eye out (and will regardless be Fasttrack-ing in 6 months when I'm looking for FTE work, so I'll see firsthand :p)
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  I haven’t actually gone through the TripleByte process, but my impression of the value of the platform to engineers was that only the at least minimally capable ones could be on there. Does this not mean that even if you apply from TripleByte that you now still need to go through FizzBuzz and all that?
  • erik_seaberg 5y ago
    > Going forward, our assessments are a purely optional means by which engineers can show their skills to employers (who overwhelmingly tell us that they trust our scoring) So it sounds like the hiring manager can choose to skip a fizzbuzz call when they know you already passed.
• qchris 5y ago
  By far the most exciting thing about this announcement is this feature: "Detailed information on what a recruiter did with your application." I've been wishing for something like this for years. Especially for early-career engineers or people from non-traditional backgrounds, this is insanely valuable because it helps you to know avoid wasting time on applications that will never go anywhere; avoid typing in your resume, line by line, into another form after already submitting your pdf. Avoid writing a cover letter to a job that's already been filled. Avoid applying to a posting that's really just out there for a company to "gauge" interest, not for filling a real role. If an application is rejected, fine. But getting a follow-up request 7 months after submitting a resume into a black hole is ridiculous, and I think any system that decreases the information asymmetry between the applicant and the employer that allows people to intelligently approach their career search is going to be tapping into something truly valuable.
  • Aperocky 5y ago
    When I graduated I submitted around 50 applications to open jobs around where I live, to almost no feedback at all. I'm in this industry and doing well because of recruiter reaching out to me (multiple times) and not vice versa. The whole idea of applying for jobs just doesn't seem to work at all.
    • gip 5y ago
      My experience is similar but at a differet level of seniorty. I've applied to ~15 jobs for engineering manager and got 1 answer. On the other end a recruiter reached out to me and I'll be doing the final interview with their VP next week. I don't think we can draw conclusion at that stage (we are a dataset of 2..). But I'd love to have access to the LinkedIn dataset to figure out if applying for jobs is broken at scale.
      • ipaddr 5y ago
        Waiting for a recuitor to call you limits your potential but makes the process easier for you. Applying yourself takes a lot of work but you get to select who you want and to target a bigger group which. But it's messy, ugly , stressful and filled with rejections for no reason.
• dvt 5y ago
  I'm personally very excited to see this change by an industry leader! I think that there's a seismic shift waiting to happen w.r.t. engineer hiring. The "old guard" of hazing, quizzing, and gotcha-style interviews are slowly losing ground. The most friction when switching jobs is the interview process -- and the question is why? I've been writing code for a decade+ now, working on startups, for known tech companies, public open-source, and have written a freakin' book! But, oh, my bad, I couldn't figure out a solution to your optimization question. I forgot how to implement the zig operation in a splay tree. I might simply not function well under pressure. Maybe I'm having a bad day. Companies are missing out on literal geniuses by using outdated hiring practices. And, I get it, Google doesn't care. Amazon doesn't care. (There's an argument that they should.) They're huge and get X,XXX applicants daily. But why are small startups using the same hiring methodologies? It quite literally makes no sense. They're shooting themselves in the foot. I'm very passionate about this, and I'm working on a book on how to hire engineers. Maybe I'll actually finish it one of these days :)
  • cinquemb 5y ago
    > And, I get it, Google doesn't care. Amazon doesn't care. (There's an argument that they should.) And yet they will still email you, year after year… as a dev that's worked in finance/academic research labs and for low funded/bootstraped startups all over the world for the past 10 years… I'll never get into these big companies because I simply try to find companies that need work done yesterday, see my experience (maybe reach out to past corps i've done work for), and give me an offer for at least a short term contract (and these big companies will never do this). The worst is when I've think I found an interesting company (that on more than one occasion, publicly likes to complain about not having enough devs… lol), start talking a bit and they send me a triplebyte link… maybe it will be different this time, but I doubt it because these behaviors are too ingrained in a lot of corporate processes (even if its mostly "big co does this, me small co must copy"-NPC type thinking)…
  • hellcow 5y ago
    For what it's worth on the hiring side, applicants lie (or more charitably, wildly overestimate their own abilities) all the time. Of resumes I see, 50% of them will not show up on time to their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz. Past companies and open source contributions are not perfect indicators. I've seen people with stellar resumes fail to even know the syntax for an 'if' statement in any language of their choosing. I've had people absolutely ace takehome exams, yet in person don't know how to write a function. False positives are also much more expensive than false negatives, so companies would rather accidentally weed out good candidates than risk hiring bad ones.
• jchiu1106 5y ago
  Without passing the minimum bar, how does Triplebyte distinguish itself from other 1000 platforms where people post resumes? Also, dissing those who have passed the bar as "engineers who like tests" is disrespectful. When they first launched, passing the bar makes you (in their words) a highly qualified engineer, and now passing the bar means nothing except that you only "like tests"...lol Fundamentally, I think this invalidates Triplebyte's business model. Companies don't really care if someone passes your tests. They still put you through LC type interviews onsite. They simply save a phone screen.
  • rachofsunshine 5y ago
    > Without passing the minimum bar, how does Triplebyte distinguish itself from other 1000 platforms where people post resumes? We still have the quiz, and we still show performance on it prominently on your profile (provided you've chosen to share those scores). In fact, we've put a lot of energy into improving the trust companies place in our quizzes over the past year precisely because we think that skills data is important. > Also, dissing those who have passed the bar as "engineers who like tests" is disrespectful. When they first launched, passing the bar makes you (in their words) a highly qualified engineer, and now passing the bar means nothing except that you only "like tests"...lol Heh, yeah, that's fair, at least to a point. Our quizzes are predictive. We know this from a lot of objective data, it's what you'd expect subjectively, and companies do tell us that they trust and value that data. That does not mean that our tests have no bias towards certain personality types. Different people respond differently to testing, and that does have a differential effect, not because our tests are bad but because testing is inherently somewhat artificial. I actually taught test prep before joining Triplebyte years ago, so I've been this first-hand: it was not uncommon for a student who'd been doing well in practice sessions to crumple under the pressure of the real thing. That doesn't mean the test is bad, it just means that some people fare better on tests than others for reasons other than just their raw ability. When we say "likes tests", that's more what we mean: not that that's the only reason someone does well on a test, but that people who perform well in isolated, pressured environments do better relative to their skills than others.
    • ALittleLight 5y ago
• yangez 5y ago
  > We want to be the job search platform that puts engineers in control. I love this, but I'm curious about the incentives here. Triplebyte only makes money from companies, not engineers. In the long run, can engineer-centric intentions override a business model based around companies and recruiters staying happy? I hope so!
  • teachrdan 5y ago
    This exactly. Their messaging is over the top "we help engineers get leverage over companies!" I have to wonder what Triplebyte is telling the companies who actually pay them all their money. Triplebyte has always seemed scummy and this obvious--and unacknowledged--contradiction makes me trust them even less.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      They could just simply be telling companies that they have the engineers, and other job boards do not.
      • rachofsunshine 5y ago
        That's part of it. We do also have differentiating features on the company side. It's not like we're abandoning the idea of building features for companies or anything. The job search, like other matching problems, is often not zero sum. So building (say) a better search interface for companies benefits engineers as well, because both sides of the market have an interest in a good match. What we're saying here is that in the cases where things -are- zero sum, the power - and therefore the incentives - lie with engineers and not with employers.
  • ammon 5y ago
    Companies do pay us. But I think that our real long-term incentives still pull toward building what engineers want, not what companies want. I think that platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed have just gotten this wrong, because they focus on all jobs (not just engineers), and because demand for engineers is stronger than it has ever been. Take a look at this thread from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27501675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27501675 Our bet is that LinkedIn is going to fragment. They are just not creating a hiring process that most engineers like. People tend to either get ghosted, or overwhelmed with low-relevance inbound (almost no one gets the "right" amount of attention). Companies need to go where the best engineers are, not the other way around. So I think our long-term incentive is to fix these problems. In any case, I'm committed to giving this a try. There is danger that we get pulled toward building for companies. I want top guard against this by being public about what we're doing, and "showing our work" as we go.
• reillyse 5y ago
  I see a lot of people in the comments describe triplebyte as a “market leader” and discuss how good they are. I can’t believe how gullible everyone is especially on a startup forum. Let me spell it out to y’all, nobody pivots and changes their entire business model if they are crushing it. So the implication is that triplebyte are not crushing it. So, this probably has gone the same way as lots of other tech startups. They’ve raised a bunch of money spent it all on ads , distorted the market for a while (usually just the advertising market) and now are on the way out. No matter what fluff or spin they put on it, that’s what’s happening.
  • twphysicsphd99 5y ago
    i felt the same way, astroturf marketing
    • pc86 5y ago
      That's not what astroturf means.
      • twphysicsphd99 5y ago
        the word astroturf doesn't matter this post is marketing with commenters associated with the company
        • pc86 5y ago
          If you want people to take your point seriously you should probably learn how to communicate it.
          • twphysicsphd99 5y ago
            what does astroturf mean?
            • CRConrad 5y ago
• cornellouis 5y ago
  If you're not vetting the candidates, it seems like that's bad both of candidates and companies.
• sickygnar 5y ago
  I'm salty towards the platform because they rejected me a few years ago, and my ego has barred me from using them again despite their outreach. I was also very unhappy when I heard about the public profiles. I don't want people to see that I interviewed poorly, or to have any kind of public record of that. I'm a decent engineer, I swear! I had some bad luck. My nodejs build broke after a recent update on my machine, which I didn't realize until right before the interview. During a test with a different language, I tried to define a constant with the same name as a built-in function and ran into a vague compiler error (something about missing parentheses, ugh). This language has case-insensitive function names to compound the confusion. I unfortunately looked up how to define a constant in the docs. Their conclusion was that "I was uncomfortable in the language," despite having used it for 10 years. There was some other feedback which I felt was inaccurate, I think I just had a bad day, and obviously didn't convey my knowledge and experience well. I could see why a recruiter would hard pass on me for some of the stumbles, since their main goal is to forward candidates who interview well. It hurt to get rejected.
  • kumarjsingh6 5y ago
    Your preferred language was nodejs after all
    • sickygnar 5y ago
      hah, fair enough.
  • x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
    >..My nodejs build broke after a recent update on my machine, which I didn't realize until right before the interview I mean, you went into a combat scenario, and chose a weapon absolutely notorious for jamming.
• toomuchredbull 5y ago
  I have not signed up to triplebyte because I don't want to do their screening, but this doesn't make it better. It defeats the purpose.
• guessmyname 5y ago
  TripleByte is awful. Take a look at the question they just asked me when I was doing their General Coding Assessment: What is the output of the following function? (1m 12s) function foo(a, b) { a += 1 b.push(1) } const a = 0 const b = [] foo(a, b) console.log(a, b)
  • dang 5y ago
    What's bad about that? It's obviously testing understanding of scoping and side effects. It's not hard if you understand those things and confusing if you don't, which seems like the kind of question you'd want on a "general coding assessment", no? The only thing that bugs me about that question is that "the output of the following function" is confusingly worded. It's the sort of question that a competent candidate might get nervous about and start to overthink: wait, that isn't a function, it's a code snippet. The function here is foo – so maybe they mean "what's the output of foo"? But then what does "the output of a function" mean? I suppose they mean return value? Is this a trick question to see if I remember what push returns? Damn it, does it return the entire array or just the pushed element? That's what my mind usually does with questions like that and I'm far from the only one. Since the goal of the test is to screen for basic competence, it ought not to filter out people who could answer the question perfectly fine if it were being asked clearly, but who also perceive corner cases and ambiguities. Such a skill should make you more likely to pass such a test, not less. Therefore the question ought to say something like "What does the following code snippet write to the console?"
    • guessmyname 5y ago
      > What's bad about that? The timer is what is bad about this. I do not care about the question. As you say, any competent programmer could solve this in a few seconds, if they are proficient, or minutes if they are not. In my opinion, they should not put a count down because they are interrupting the programmer’s flow. If they really want to measure time, they do it without interrupting the programmer, hide the timer, let them take as much time as they want/need to solve these problems. Then, at the end of the quiz, show them how long it took them to give a proper solution, and take in consideration that time to score them. If Alice solved 10 problems in 10 minutes, and Bob solved the same problems in 15 minutes, maybe there is something there that is worth highlighting in their profiles. Maybe Alice is able to analyze this type of questions much faster than Bob, and if that matters to the recruiters or potential employers, then allow the candidate to use that in their favor. However, if Bob actually knew the answer, but they ran out of time to select an option, that seems unfair.
• towergratis 5y ago
  The problem with Triplebyte IMHO is that what the originally promised, while a great idea and concept, it cannot scale. Also after interviewing with them for a role in their company I got to realize they don't know how to conduct interviews themselves. I used them two times. The first one was very early on, where I was given a home assignment and interviewed on it by Aaron himself, if I am not mistaken. The dude was awesome at interviewing, and knew exactly how to probe to get a better understanding of your skills. That was when they were promising that you can interview with them so you don't have to do technical interviews with the companies. I thought it was an awesome concept and could really reshape hiring in the tech industry. Second time was a couple of years ago, where the model has already changed a bit. Passed the first round and one of the companies that I could interview for was triplebyte themselves. What a disappointment! The only difference in the interview process than the rest of the companies was that they gave you a laptop and asked you to do practical coding instead of whiteboard generic algorithm solving. Some of the interviewers themselves were junior members of the stuff with 0 experience in interviewing.
  • MuffinFlavored 5y ago
    > The problem with Triplebyte is that they say they have companies like Apple and TrueCar posting job listings and hiring but they actually never respond and all you get is offers for companies between 10-200 people in size (aka, startups)
    • rachofsunshine 5y ago
      I'm guessing this is your experience - was this more than a couple of months ago? We made some changes about ~6-8 weeks ago to how we order jobs to prioritize responsive companies much more than they were in the past. We also use responsiveness as an input to the "Likely To Accept" score shown for each job (here's a screenshot of a posting from my own prod-testing account: https://imgur.com/wSmGCEL https://imgur.com/wSmGCEL).
      • MuffinFlavored 5y ago
        This was my experience twice trying to use Triplebyte in the past 2 years. It's a great platform, the indicator letting me know companies aren't going to respond is great. It just doesn't fix the problem that... the quality of companies on Triplebyte aren't companies most senior/lead/architect/advisory level engineers are willing to settle for. I'm being unnecessarily harsh/biased. I'm sure plenty of people use the platform with great success. I've just come to accept "early/mid-stage startups" job offers from Triplebyte and not much else. Not necessarily "garbage" but... for sure lots of risk.
• hnxs 5y ago
  The best thing I got out of Triplebyte was a great piece of written negotiation advice, from a recruiting specialist that has, presumably, since been laid off.
• TuringTest 5y ago
  > We want to stop being a placement agency, and instead become a job search platform that leverages that unique power to create a better hiring process for engineers > Triplebyte has hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform, and that means we can flip the script on companies. The collective power of thousands of engineers is enough to change their incentives in a way that individual engineers cannot. > We can change their incentives directly by rewarding or punishing certain behavior. For example, companies aren’t normally incentivized to provide salary and culture data. But we can force their hand by promoting transparent companies in our search rankings. When a company’s access to thousands of engineers is on the line, their incentives are very different. The same goes for honesty: a company often has no reason to be honest with any one engineer, but we can disincentivize lying by making their behavior with one engineer affect their access to the next. So... a union? In digital, online format? I'm glad that someone there is now realising the advantages of joining forces to negotiate workers' conditions. It was about time high-tech engineers noticed this.
• Terretta 5y ago
  A benefit of Triplebyte to big enterprises not mentioned in Triplebyte’s discussion here: acting as engineering assessment proxy for engineering hiring managers stuck with pathologically risk averse enterprise HR departments. Often enterprise HR is paranoid of honestly evaluating anyone for anything, to the point that many HR teams tell one another and engineering hiring managers that it’s “illegal” to assess candidate abilities on the way in the door, at all. If you think about joining a dev team where no one checked if any candidate could FizzBuzz, you can imagine the workplace environment that can end up with. Triplebyte is able to provide engineering managers with a stack of pre-vetted resumes so an enterprise can interview by its lowest common denominator HR policies, while still having a prayer a team will at least be made of candidates who can code. The value of this to an enterprise stuck in this position is hard to overstate. Hopefully along with expanding the talent pool per this post, Triplebyte can figure out a way to get well paid for this ability to help land actual coders on actual dev teams despite enterprise HR. The need for this is huge. // I see a comment below from a Triplebyte PM about score matching: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27542621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27542621 … That would be slick: land candidates that genuinely raise the bar, but aren’t so far ahead as to be speaking a foreign language to the team. Of course, this would require also assessing the target team, and oops, we’re right back up against that HR policy…
  • akarma 5y ago
    Good point! There's an old quote: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Large companies tend to be more risk-averse, so if there are two companies you can use for a service — $PromisingStartup and IBM — large companies will generally make a decision that's optimal to the specific decision-maker, not optimal to the company. There are two options if you, as the buyer, choose either $PromisingStartup or IBM: success or failure. If IBM or the $PromisingStartup succeed, then you've done your job. If IBM fails, you can tell your manager "Who could've guessed! It's IBM!" If $PromisingStartup fails, you'll have a harder time explaining your decision, and the fault will be with you. The "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" idea is useful to look at every decision large companies make, whether it's pivoting, choosing a SaaS product, or hiring. TripleByte, in its current form, has been beneficial to candidates as well by giving enterprise employees a justifiable signal towards hiring them regardless of pedigree.
• akomtu 5y ago
  Here's an advice. The software engineering market, at least the upper end of it, doesn't need a email forwarding proxy middleman. What it needs is a club-like organisation that acts as a negotiator that leverages insider knowledge to get unreasonable parties on both ends to sign a contract. Good devs don't really search for jobs and don't really talk to random recruiters. They get a steady stream of sales pitches from friends of friends or former co-workers and leverage their fairly wide network to get insider info about companies they're considering to join to get a good contract. The "club" would be like a golf club address book with staff working to connect matching parties. It's surely not a dating site for programmers with ahem.. "AI" selling resumes to data brokers.
  • 908B64B197 5y ago
    Companies that are serious about finding software talent already sort of understand that and hire based on recommendation from high performers.
    • nunez 5y ago
      Hence the good ol' "We'll give you $5,000 for every engineer you refer to us...and there's no cap!" At least good companies do this anyway. Also, executive search recruiters kind-of do what you're describing. Exec leadership is a small-ish world, and the recruiting cycle for, say, a CTO can take months. However, there's a lot of commission on the other end of that. So recruiters basically act as brokers.
    • redisman 5y ago
      Meh. As someone who has moved around a lot this just sounds like friend nepotism. Based on this system I’d be a garbage tier developer since I don’t have friends in high places. I much prefer the imperfect systems that at least pretend to be fair and objective-ish.
  • stove 5y ago
    I very informally do this right now. I think of my role as a sports agent for top engineers. The engineers I work with pay nothing and the companies who want access to them give us no bullshit, all access interviews where we're not working with HR or recruiters. It works so well for both parties that I'm scaling it at the moment.
• xyst 5y ago
  Triplebyte was a dud for me. Way too many garbage startups recruiting. I have started to re-write my resume for each application and that has yielded much better results in terms of quality of the company and number of interviews. If you are submitting the same resume to multiple companies, you are doing it wrong.
  • cactus2093 5y ago
    FWIW, this isn't really true as you get some experience under your belt and have a stronger resume (meaning, having worked at companies that people know of with a clear story of how your own role made a big impact there). But glad you figured out an approach that worked for you!
• EDEdDNEdDYFaN 5y ago
  Interesting that they are effectively pivoting to do what Vettery (I guess now part of Hired) was already doing years ago.
• ninetax 5y ago
  I'd love to work with Triplebyte (as someone who's running a hiring process), but a while back they removed their option to work on contingency, and it's a difficult sell to fork over $X,000k for another source of engineers when it would just be one of 10 sources we already work with. Maybe I'm wrong here, but it gives me the impression that Triplebyte doesn't believe in it's ability to get candidates into jobs. If companies pay (a not small sum) when candidates actually get hired, then I feel that incentives are aligned. If it's an annual fee (with no option for contingency) then I wonder what incentive the company has to make sure what I care about (making a hire) is the thing they care about. 90% of the other major players (AngelList, Hired, etc) in the market offer this... so why not Triplebyte? Perhaps I'm missing something.
  • 908B64B197 5y ago
    For junior talent I found it's much better to simply fork the $X,000k to a serious school with a good engineering program and run hiring events or sponsor things. Or establish a relationship with a research lab in the school that's close to your area of expertise.
  • ammon 5y ago
    The main problem we had with the contingency model is that it resulted in companies using us for a few of their "hardest" hires, rather than as a bread-and-butter part of their recruiting. For example, almost no one wants to pay a contingency fee on junior or remote hires (because they are perceived as 'easier'). This made our platform kind of suck for junior and remote engineers. The subscription model is more of a commitment from a company (I understand why some companies don't choose to use us.) But it means that once a company signs up, they want to make as many hires as possible through us.
    • ghiculescu 5y ago
      That business model is optimising for large customers that are probably better equipped to replace you with something in house. And leaving the long tail of smaller customers on the table. I wanted to use triplebyte - but I only want to make 3 hires per year.
• ninetax 5y ago
  I feel that part ofthe thing they want to do is already done well by keyvalues.com Not that there's not room for another player in the space, but it's just a good example of how to do it well.
• eliblock 5y ago
  > We got jobs for over 1000 engineers That's a lot less than I expected.
• nightsd01 5y ago
  I am a self taught engineer without a CS degree, and I went through Triplebyte at the end of 2017. It was an absolutely incredible experience, and really helped me break into the industry, and I’ll always be grateful to them. I found an awesome startup to work at. And now, years later, I work at a FAANG company, working on tons of interesting problems. Thank you triplebyte, and good luck with the pivot!
  • voxtech 5y ago
    Same here, toward the end of 2015. I would not have a serious high-paying job right now if it wasn't for triplebyte. I'm sad to hear the process hasn't scaled because I think that it'd help everyone out if it had.
• f6v 5y ago
  Right, so the companies are still your client. But you somehow think you can strong-arm them because you have some CVs in your database. In the end, the job platforms end up serving the client's needs. And company stay the client.
• MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  A recruiting agency with a hundred thousand recruits in a database is not functionally any different than a call center with a list of leads they purchased and validated. Do not believe anyone who tells you they can force employers to change their methodology when it comes to salary and compensation revelation. Recruiting agencies are so far outside that wheelhouse that it's damned near scandalous to even pretend the statement has any validity. Also, I think it's important to differentiate staff recruiters from outside recruiters. Staff recruiters are HR people. They're on the job to shove square pegs into square holes. Outside recruiters are salespeople. They're on the job to explain why a round peg can reasonably fit in a square hole. This is your career. So act like it. If 10 different people were each going to give you a hundred dollars if you described yourself to them in a way that would obviously ingratiate yourself to them (person with cat photo, person with dog photo, person with photo of their kids, etc) most would immediately come up with reasons to make themselves1 appeal to their tastes. But people keep on submitting the same dumb resume over and over again and expect a different result. Accentuate the things in your resume that matter to the company you're trying to get a gig at. Yes, for each of them. If you would do it for a grand, you can do it for a career.
• bigbillheck 5y ago
  I tried out Triplebyte a few years ago on my last job search and did well enough on the quiz to bypass the technical screen. Long story short I bear no ill-will towards the people at Triplebyte but will not attempt to use them again.
  • jo_ 5y ago
    Another voice in the fray, I also did well enough to bypass the technical screen. Interviewed with four companies they recommended. Picked one. Still with them two(-ish) years later and an outspoken advocate. It's a tricky situation because you have to balance being accepting of people with non-traditional backgrounds while also making sure they can do the basics. I liked that TripleByte could condense DAYS of interviews into a few hours. In general, long tech screens are hard on people that can't afford to take off a full day, so it's tricky for people already working in crushing jobs that need a change. The TripleByte quiz worked nicely for this. On the flip side, if their tech screen is filtering people for reasons other than ability, it's removing possibly good candidates who deserve a shot at something. The new approach is sounding like it's trying to satisfy the latter, which is good for improving inclusivity, but won't be to everyone's liking.
• bowenyang 5y ago
  > Triplebyte has hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform, and that means we can flip the script on companies. The collective power of thousands of engineers is enough to change their incentives in a way that individual engineers cannot. Copying this from the article. Doesn't this sound like a union? Unions generally lead to mediocrity though.
• jrochkind1 5y ago
  > We got jobs for over 1000 engineers Triplebyte has existed for, what, 4 years? That actually doesn't sound like very many. > Triplebyte has hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform Hmm.
• foota 5y ago
  I've always thought triplebyte was interesting, I did a first online interview with them while finishing school but basically had an offer from a large company in hand by that time and haven't looked for a new job since. I think they should try and pull people who indicate they are interested into attractive job searches, I mostly care about compensation as long as a company is decent.
• titanomachy 5y ago
  The original TripleByte worked well for me. Even though I didn't have a stellar resume, I got the chance to talk to some really interesting companies. My TripleByte recruiter was helpful in deciding which interviews to take, and there was mutual fit at all the companies I went on-site with. I recommended TripleByte to several friends whom I considered reasonably skilled and currently undervalued. None of them passed the test, however, so they got little value out of service (except for the interview feedback, which at the time was unusually excellent). And I ultimately needed TripleByte less than they did, since someone who could pass the old TripleByte test also has a high chance of eventually passing on-sites at Google, Facebook, etc. So I understand the pivot, although it will certainly be harder to differentiate yourselves in this new space. Good luck.
• epberry 5y ago
  Credit to these guys for not giving up. Hiring engineers remains unsolved so if they're still in the game they still have a chance to ultimately solve it and reap the rewards.
• nunez 5y ago
  Who was the woman that wrote about how every "innovative" engineer recruiting platform eventually devolves into LinkedIn Recruiter? Because she fucking nailed it with Triplebyte. I used Triplebyte. I really liked it. The leads were not as great or as numerous as I was hoping, and I felt like I still had to do pseudo-technical interviews anyway. Fucking COVID, man. I hope this pivot works for them.
  • 2arrs2ells 5y ago
    Aline Lerner: https://blog.alinelerner.com/ive-been-an-engineer-and-a-recruiter-hiring-is-broken-heres-why-and-heres-what-it-should-be-like-instead/ https://blog.alinelerner.com/ive-been-an-engineer-and-a-recr...
    • nunez 5y ago
      Thank you!!!
    • usaar333 5y ago
      Fascinating post. I'm personally optimistic on interviewing.io - it's both more useful for candidates (interview practice) and stronger signal for recruiting companies, but this is such a difficult market to break into for reasons Aline describes well.
• Sr_developer 5y ago
  Me reading this announcement: "Jesus this guy writes and writes and says nothing. Wait, there was a link at the top to some sort of TL; DR, let me check on that to find out what the announcement is" > What are we pivoting towards? To explain, let’s talk about economics for a second. Nope, I give up.
• findjashua 5y ago
  tldr: they're pivoting from placement agency to job board i'm not sure about the viability of their "search criteria" though - things like test coverage, release cadence etc are team specific, so it's hard to define it at a company-level, other than maybe small startups
• asidiali 5y ago
  As someone who has been critical of TripleByte here on HN in the past, I appreciate the identification and acknowledgment of where things went wrong and why people were unhappy. This seems like a sincere pivot where the community was heard. Wishing TripleByte luck and success. I can also report I haven’t received a single TripleByte email since the issue was last brought up :) Thank you for standing by that.
• tdeck 5y ago
  I did a job search at the end of 2020. The biggest problem with engineering job searches is that they're a huge time sink. I'm a senior engineer with Google on my resume, so I don't have much trouble getting in the door or passing interviews, but the process is such a slog. If I were to take PTO for a week and cram my schedule full of job search, I could probably get 3-4 interview processes done per week. That's not a lot, considering that it's good to line up offers and that many people have limited PTO. Even if your PTO is "unlimited", it looks suspicious to be taking random days off for on-sites. What this means is that I try to keep doing my job and schedule phone screens and recruiter calls in the gaps when I know I won't get meetings. I try not to have to block time on my work calendar for these in case someone wonders "why does Troy suddenly have so many random meetings all of the sudden". The scheduling process with companies is a pain, they ask for 2-3 time windows for the phone screen, then often take a couple days to pick one. So I have huge time blocks reserved for them that I can't give to other companies I am interviewing with. It's stressful to try to slot all this in. Add to that the fact that recruiters want to do everything over the phone (which is very unnatural for me), so I have to also schedule little interruptions for 15 minute "chats" to "check in" and prepare me for the next round. I appreciate these things but at the same time, I'd appreciate fewer of them. When it comes to the actual interviews, some companies seem to be fine with one phone screen, some need 2-3. Sometimes they are an hour, sometimes 45 minutes. Some companies see that I work at Google and deduce that I might be competent enough to skip the phone screens entirely. I appreciate that. It's the same with on-sites. Some are a half day, and some are more of a full day. It's not a big difference in practice because I couldn't really take a half day off from 11-3. Many companies have a "no interview day" which is great for their employees but hard to work around, particularly if it falls on "non-suspicious" PTO days like Monday or Friday. Sometimes I wish we could just do several phone screens instead to make scheduling easier. I'm not sure how to solve this, but it's the biggest pain point by far and if someone could solve it I would absolutely use their platform. I want fewer phone calls, fewer hours of interviewing, and a clear understanding of the time commitment ahead of time. I also wish companies would be up front about WLB so I don't waste time interviewing, only to learn they work "maybe 50-55 hours a week". That's not a "little more" than 40 guys, that's more than 6 full work days every week. You can't just ask at the outset because some people perceive that as a red flag.
• samatman 5y ago
  My random Triplebyte anecdote is that I did good on the quizzes and gave a solid interview, but they declined to represent me. They were transparent about their reasoning: they saw me as somewhat of a specialist in parsing, and they didn't know how to place someone with that peculiar skillset. Which turned out fine. I found a job where my pre-computer programming work experience was relevant, and here a couple jobs later I'm working heavily with and on parsers. So. Count me as one engineer they rejected who doesn't hold that against them. I'm pessimistic about this pivot though, for a couple reasons. One, it smells desperate. Recruiting is sales, and in sales, desperation is the kiss of death. I can't read that blog post without coming away with the strong sense that if this doesn't work, it's over for them. If I can see it, anyone can see it. Two, companies aren't going to want to work with a firm that's allowing engineers to collect detailed information on douchey behaviour that the company might engage in. Does Triplebyte have the leverage and moxie to make them engage anyway? Probably not, see point one. I wish them well, because recruiting is awful, interviewing is broken, and engineers deserve to have a better time of it given how demand-driven the market is, and likely will remain for quite some time. Can't help thinking they'll be writing about their incredible journey within a year or two.
  • headgasket 5y ago
    Same thinking here. Can’t bite the hand that feeds. The thing is you have to chose a camp these days, it seems. Either the corp or the devs. If choosing devs, i think the biz model would work if it would be a meritocratic limited partnership that actually owns the new TB. As such the interviewer has skin in the game. Maybe like an Order? Or a League? The mission statement is not a match right now.
    • rachofsunshine 5y ago
      What companies want from us, more than anything else, is volume. They want to find as many engineers as possible and make hires. That's the thrust of the economic argument we're trying to make here: our incentives even with companies as our paying clients are to create an engineer-friendly platform.
  • nickysielicki 5y ago
• naimishviradia 5y ago
  I saw this change comming in the market. Every company which went IPO want to double the strength of the employees. I have a friend who got response from companies like Compaas/Affirm/Coinbase/Sofi also (Apex clearing after NSTB merger want to double it) and a lot more. My firend cracked interview and joined one of this and for others like me have no traction (6 months in) on the resume at all after using hired/linkedin/direct careers/cold emails. Doesn't matter you have github with real projects/portfolio with good responsive design ....... If this process is broken and we also don't know what are we doing wrong then how all them are going to find all these talent they need??
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• wantsanagent 5y ago
  I like this new direction but the stated power dynamics don't align with their history. The most popular kids in the room (FAANG) define the hiring process and some of them outright refuse to skip steps, which hurt Triplebyte's reach. If those co's get hidden on TB don't you think a ton of engineers will ignore the platform? In addition, as my username suggests, I really like the idea of a representative for Engineers during the job search process, but I also want to make sure I'm the customer of this representative. If I'm paying TB then I think the incentives are aligned. If they're just a job board then their new stance is opposed to the interests of their true customers (hiring companies) and that won't work out too well for them.
• halfofhalf 5y ago
  I had a great experience with Triplebyte's quiz and interview. I suppose I'm in the category of people from "nontraditional backgrounds"; I majored in English in college. Getting past resume screeners was an enormous relief and an important boost to my career. That boost will have compounding effects for the rest of my life; I love the job I got through Triplebyte.
• devwastaken 5y ago
  As always with posts about employment, the idea that there's higher demand than supply for engineers is a lie. The demand for highly experienced cheap engineers is high, the demand for junior developers is almost non existent. New CS grads struggle to find employment, there are tens of thousands of very capable devs in open source that cannot find employment. Nobody hears about it because only those that succeed are actually spending time on forums like these talking about it. We have a big problem in the culture of employing developers that is closely related to how the startup market operates. The market is willing to shovel money at a problem rather than spend time, therefore the market will pay someone with specific experience in their problem far more than pay someone less and have more time to learn the domain. This results in siphoning of experienced developers away from new developers, which artificially reduces the number of experienced devs. The market is creating the problem for short term profit, and then turning around, lying and saying "there's not enough devs".
  • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    > New CS grads struggle to find employment Sorry, but I call major bullshit on this. Sure, if you have a D average at a low tier school, perhaps. But if you are a competent coder who got good grades in school, I see many companies ready to hire new grads left and right (obviously folks who graduated during the height of the pandemic had different issues to deal with). I don't know if we're quite at the "anyone who can fog a mirror can get a job" stage like we were in the original dot com boom, but we're not that far away.
    • devwastaken 5y ago
      I know 3 of them. They only receive responses from jobs similiar to, but not actually software dev. Basically tech support jobs but you have to know the basics of a windows/bash command line. No dev work involved. Companies advertise they're hiring. Like they advertise that they're profitable, make the best products, and are better than their competition. That doesn't mean it's true. Many positions are "nice to have", so they will stay there until they get someone with far more experience on paper than they actually need - someone willing to get paid less of course. People lie, especially companies. That's the nature of the market. Even if we had 5x the devs than employers, employers would still say otherwise. This is because more competition between applicants means you can pay people less. Infact even during the dotcom boom my sister actually got a degree in "web development", and nobody wanted anything to do with her. I don't know who comes out with these lies about "high demand" employment but so far all I've seen is confirmation bias by those already employed - ignoring all the rest of the people who can't get anywhere, leave it behind, and go work at something else.
• bambax 5y ago
  One of the problem with recruiting is not just power imbalance but information asymmetry (or even plain lack of information). What Triplebyte is trying to do is give more information back to job seekers. But it will be limited to the companies they actually work with (and punishing your own clients sounds like a peculiar business model...) Why not build a Glassdoor for hiring, that would cover the entire industry? Anyone can go and describe the hiring process they went through, if they heard back or not, etc. Does such a thing already exist? If not, why not?
• ucm_edge 5y ago
  The candidate me likes cutting out some of the bullshit involved. The hiring manager side of me on the other hand continues to remember that mishires are expensive. I've also very skeptical in that once a month some staffing agency comes along, tells us they have some fancy heuristic for matching good candidates to our jobs, and then unleashes a tsunami of mediocre leads into our recruiting database. They'll then proceed to act upset and surprised when we don't want to intervene sixty percent of them and most of those we do interview wash out. I guess TB can somehow promise that a certain baseline technical competence is present, but even that's of moderate value. If I really need a candidate who is skilled at X, I might be willing to sacrifice some skill in Y because I already have two engineers strong in Y. I never found TB sufficiently granular in how you configure the automatic screens to allow for that. Secondly, it's totally useless in soft skill assessment. The cynic in me just sees a lot of this TB now trying to force you to expend internal resources to rank the unqualified people or people whose skill sets don't align with what you want (forcing you to respond with data on how you handled the application) because they can't crack the nut of doing it themselves. So they're going to leverage the customer's recruiting teams to code the data for them.
• bpiche 5y ago
  I would probably take this down if it was me but I can also appreciate TB's radical transparency and putting themselves out there for public criticism. Ever thought of building a recruiting recommendation software product, instead of just selling people? You have the data. edit: I want to be more constructive with my feedback. You have four years of data on hundreds of thousands of candidates. I don't know what the legal implications are regarding using that stuff as training data, but.. embeddings. doc2vec. Thank me later.
• andyxor 5y ago
  Another one bites the dust. my advice for triplebyte is to partner with leetcode and establish an industry-wide coding certificate, kind of like those SAT or GRE tests that you pass once and apply everywhere.
• gitgud 5y ago
  > Over time, these problems compounded. Engineers who we rejected held that against us (which was completely understandable). I was rejected when I did the quiz at university, trying to get a job. What made me a bit angry is how happily they rejected me with an automated email, after I put effort and time into doing their quiz... I didn't feel like recommending them, or even visiting the site ever again. Glad to see they're finally aware of how this approach doesn't benefit them as much as it could of if people were still invited into the system.
• dragon96 5y ago
  Interesting idea. I love the recognition of current hiring asymmetries. Some of the practices by companies simply shouldn't be tolerated, like the recruiter ghosting, opaqueness on salary ranges, exploding offers, misleading listings or qualifications, lack of feedback, etc., and I wonder if some of these can be solved by a company like TB that facilitates the hiring market and pipelining the process. So hiring through TripleByte would be conducted in some fixed-length time intervals (e.g. 1 month). Companies specify skills they're hiring for, interested engineers interview for the skills that TripleByte can screen for and supply a minimum salary (invisible to companies), and companies hiring that month bid starting at the min salary for the engineer with all other hiring companies. If the market determines the hiring timeline, recruiters can't put you on hold if they're interested-but-not-sure, and can't use exploding offer tactics. It also pushes companies to be more honest about salary ranges and required skills. TripleByte would be responsible for providing feedback rather than the companies.
• forbiddenvoid 5y ago
  Triplebyte was an interesting experience for me the time I tried it out. I got lots of calls and several onsites, but my lack of professional experience bit me on every single one of them. I felt like Triplebyte worked hard to create a good experience for me, but that overall the companies I interviewed with just viewed TB as another placement company. Other than getting to skip the fairly easy phone screen phase, I didn't feel like I got much value from the experience at all, and I had to put a lot of work into it.
• patothon 5y ago
  10 years ago, I built chooseyourboss.com from scratch for a client of mine (with one of my best friends). Our principles at the time were very similar to what Triplebyte is trying to do now: give power back to developers. We build a version of "hired" (did they die?) before "hired" even exist. A matching platform that was matching people with companies that was sharing both their desires and values. Small/big company. Consulting/Product company. How much $$ do you want? What technologies you're interested in? Where do you want to work? All of this anonymously of course. It was all fine and dandy, the company actually still exists and generates revenue, but I'm overall very bearish on the recruiting space. It's a sales game. It's a numbers game. And on top of this the people top companies REALLY want to hire aren't hanging out in these recruiting platforms. So as a platform you're only feeding average/average low candidates to companies, and in the meantime, companies that have in house or externalized sourcing resources get better results by going over linkedin and their employees network. It then becomes a financial game for companies. And platforms that are not linkeding rarely win.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    My problem with these platforms is that I never end up ‘matching’ with any companies because almost without exception their ethos is ‘cheap and fast’. The only way to change that is from the inside.
  • granshaw 5y ago
    Very insightful comment that I wish was higher up. The devs complaining here don’t know how tough a nut to crack it is to build a truly applicant-centric platform profitably.
• throwaway12323 5y ago
  This simplifies to incentives. Who pays Triplebyte? STILL THE COMPANIES. So unless there is a simple business model shift to charging the candidates, all of their words are empty. THIS is why they made the mistake of making profiles public, because they were thinking about their customer (THE COMPANIES) and not their product (THE CANDIDATES) "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." Tim Oreilly Tweet
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• akg_67 5y ago
  Should I bet that this pivot will also fail. I will suggest you go on a road trip outside SV, talk to company HRs, small company and startup leaders, education providers, engineering student, and entry to mid level engineers. Also broaden your “engineer” scope beyond software. “ In short, there is more demand for engineers than there is supply, and that makes engineers powerful.” This statement is very telling that TB leaders got tunnel vision, a very SV, startup, software centric tunnel vision. Let me rephrase your statement to what you really meant. In short, there is more demand for “experienced Software” engineers “in startups “ than there is supply “in Silicon Valley”, and that makes engineers “,with pedigree of FAANG or top schools or well connected,” “very” powerful.
• mdip 5y ago
  I clicked into this article knowing nothing about Triplebyte (not meant to insult), at all, and after reading the first paragraph, I'll admit I jumped to a whole bunch of conclusions, the worst of which was probably: I wonder what 'fad-diet' solution this company I've never heard of is pitching for either (A) getting me an engineer or (B) getting me a job as an engineer. Oh, let me guess, you're going to find those magical engineers who come from non-traditional backgrounds or magically making it possible to both "identify the top 5% of Ruby on Rails developers with no fewer than 2 years of React Devops Cloud Experience"[0]. Going from that, if you RTA -- I was pretty horrified to hear what they thought would be effective in this space. I realize you'll have to take my word for it that there were literal sentences in there spoken as "good ideas" that would have literally had me thinking "oh, so this company's some form of scam" had I happened upon them before they chose to reverse these ideas. I gotta say, public profiles, entrance exams in an attempt to "hack hiring"[2] don't know what this company is. I have to take everyone's word for it that they're somehow big in this space as I haven't looked for a job, nor been responsible for finding viable job candidates[1], so that's probably me. I was kind-of torn about his apology. It was really un?-professional (I mean that as a compliment but I can't find a way to say 'not corporate-fake' either in 'sorry-not-sorry', 'deflection' or with what appeared to be much concern for what the lawyers have to say on the subject. I don't know that the lawyers would have to say much on the subject but I'm told that this is often the reason why companies manage always manage to communicate "Sorry,... (assholes...)" every time they apologize. There's always that miserable thing, they're going along "We apologize to our customers ..." it's looking good "... for the inconvenience this outage has caused." Seems simple enough, except you've taken no responsibility -- the outage was to your software, or your hardware, running on wires that you pay for which you are supposed to have redundancy for, and all of this stuff is outside of your core competency but there are many companies who can help if you're willing to spend. And I'm sure when the issue happened, there was a key choice that had you spending a large amount of money and me getting a flight home; which you also chose to inconvenience me over. But Triplebyte wasn't Southwest. I think the author went a little over the top on the apology, almost crossing into the "trying too hard", except that the things he was apologizing for -- basically, being blind to some pretty obvious problems -- were kind of spot on. Please don't think I'm trying to throw some sort of slant compliment; I realize I sort-of sounded like a dick. There's no malice in that statement; I've been more blind to things I should have know that were right in front of me than a silly business model decision made too quickly. I am certain I have not apologized this clearly/bluntly. And the thing of it is, if it hadn't been done so well, I probably would have read the first two paragraphs, closed the tab and made a mental note to never touch them -- basically, having them go from "I don't know who they are" to "probably a scam". It's the risk a company takes when their apology gets attention beyond "people who (currently) care". I am not currently hunting, but I'm all around it on the "need to hire someone" side and I have no guarantee I'll keep my current job, forever. Thinking about it -- I've now read a very long post and written a very long comment about a company that I had never heard of and upon hearing about them, couldn't care less about their services (the space, yes, deeply). They'll probably be the first address I put into the bar if my needs change in the next year or so because I can't name a single other place I'd actually look. This guy might be an evil genius; if I suddenly have a strong desire to change employment in the next three months, I call witchcraft and there'll be pitch forks and hay, or...something. :) [0] I must have been in a really bad mood because HN has never been a place that promotes that crap to the level of this post, so that should have been my signal that there was something of value here, and I'm glad I stuck it out. [1] Mostly only interviewing; we have a pretty spectacular individual who has extensive knowledge about hiring for the rather broadly scoped kinds of work that just my tiny team in the 100-or-so company that employs me. I have a process that, though I am always tweaking, the major points are about as perfect a process. I've commented like this on that subject many times in the past if you want to be super bored. :) [2] I'm confident in my abilities as a software engineer; push comes to shove, there's many, many ways to make enough money to live reasonably in most parts of the US. I've never had problems making money writing software, either directly for an employer or on contract, independently. Neither my wife nor myself have completed a 4-year degree (though I was one semester away; long story), she did a job that does not require a degree -- became a Realtor -- before we met, six-figures in 2003? I think. The most Senior guys on infrastructure pulled that where I worked (they paid a little under average for the role/area but like 1-2%).
• blindmute 5y ago
  Triplebyte as an idea is great. As someone else pointed out, they are obviously not doing well financially, or they wouldn't have pivoted. I think their pivot will not work, though. They have gone from a unique thing that saves engineers lots of time (in theory at least), to another job board. How many of those do we need? How many companies would even want to partner with a place that forces them to give up so much of their own power? I don't see this one working out.
• pclmulqdq 5y ago
  I tried the triplebyte test when I was finding a job ~2 years ago. The test was biased towards web developers (which I was not), and I failed it. It was an infuriating experience and turned me off to the whole concept. I went on with my normal job searching process (which generally involved recruiters who reached out to me, and friends giving referrals). I landed a very nice job at a big tech company and swore to never touch triplebyte again. This is just an anecdote, but I would bet that many highly qualified engineers failed the test once and then they decided not to ever go back. If the test had told you why you failed or what to study, I bet I would have tried it again.
• didibus 5y ago
  Wait, so... Where's the money going to come from? Unemployed engineers wanting to find work? Also, are we sure there is a shortage of engineers, or simply a shortage of engineers that can pass the hiring interviews and qualifications? I think a lot of companies don't always mind waiting to find someone who passes there test, be it a newer grad, or an existing engineers that has now prepped up better.
• quickthrower2 5y ago
  I'm not sure a middle man is needed like this. Can't a company put a job ad on their site, publish the actual salary range, and make the interview process as short as possible? Standard job boards can help aggregate this. The "solution" to the big problem might be a 10 page PDF (for reasonable fee or free) to engineers on how to play the game to their own advantage. Of course no one really profits big from this enough to keep a startups lights on. But if all developers played the game well it helps everyone, even the few that don't play it (like a vaccine).
• ianwalter 5y ago
  I like this direction and I'm rooting for you now but it's tough when I can't even fill out the Basic Information section because of a bug in which the form won't submit even though there are no errors.
• gwbas1c 5y ago
  I almost applied to Triplebyte, but at the time they were Bay Area only, and I needed a remote job. The most important part of a job search is to avoid wasting time, so I stayed away. (But I would have used them if I was in the Bay Area.) What am I looking for? 1: I want my skills evaluated in a standard way by some neutral licensing board, just like engineers who build dams or surgeons. 2: I want job interviews based on mutual interest, not proving competency. 3: I want my colleagues to be certified, just like me. 4: I want legal standards in place that give me leverage against employers who are cutting corners, or managers who "know enough to be dangerous." Example: My wife, a doctor, had to go through an intense process to be certified. The vast majority of medical school graduates pass certification. She only applied for a handful of jobs. The interview was based on mutual interest because the certification process proved she was competent. All her colleagues are competent, and her hospital is well run. There are legal guidelines that make it hard for her hospital to cut corners or make her do something unethical.
  • NateEag 5y ago
    If your wife screws up anything significant, someone dies. For most developers, the worst they can do is bankrupt the company they work for, and even that usually requires multiple compounding screwups and a bad luck roll. I personally think the gap between our standards for doctoring and our standards for software development makes a lot of sense. I do think people building life-sustaining software should be held to a higher standard, but that's pretty rare.
• TeeMassive 5y ago
  I did a triplebyte interview once. I come from a Computer Engineering background, which was more or less spun off from Electrical Engineering. We learned a lot about low level stuff and signal processing, not so much about discrete math and algorithms. For me their interview was focused on Computer Science and Web development, which I didn't really do. The interview itself was nice and ok, the feedback was really appreciated (after all this more or less reflects what high paying programming recruiters are looking for). But I felt like there was no place for people with my background.
• Syzygies 5y ago
  After a bottle of wine I took their test once for fun. They made a number of attempts to reach me.
• zebnyc 5y ago
  Does anyone think that this will work? Call me a cynic but I have very little faith in reputation building companies /platforms which know which side one's bread is buttered. Anecdote: Recruiter R from Company A reaches out to me, we have a conversation and she says HM (hiring manager) loves your profile and wants to talk couple of days later and so we schedule a time slot to talk to HM. Next day, R calls and says HM wants to know why I left a previous employer X and I just blurted out the truth which was that X made it very difficult for me to take FMLA when my kid was born and I got pissed and left. Shortly after this I received a rejection message. This is classic discrimination as defined by EEOC. I replied to R and said this is discrimination and she denied it. I posted my experience on Glassdoor and my post was flagged and removed. Nowadays I am honest but not truthful.
• ping_pong 5y ago
  It's sad but interesting to see the pivot that Triplebyte is taking. As the top comment says, if they were doing great they wouldn't be pivoting, so it speaks volumes. I still don't understand exactly what benefits it brings to me as a programmer though. I'm about to start preparing for interviews with 25+ years under my belt, after not working for 2 years and I've accepted the double-edges nature of these interviews. I know I need to LeetCode for 3 months to be competitive and memorize as many of the answers as I can. I know that some companies will ghost but others will be forthcoming. I know that in big companies, different teams have different recruiting processes, so it's hard to put an entire company in a single basket. I have friends at all FAANG, and they are very open with their salaries and TC, so I don't know what Triplebyte would bring to the table besides friction, so be perfectly honest.
• 29athrowaway 5y ago
  I am not sure who are these engineers that Ammon talked to... but nowadays what most engineers I know do is visiting Glassdoor or Blind. There you can anonymously and openly discuss salaries, their opinions about companies, business units, teams, and even discuss interviews. If a company has a bad interview experience, a bad culture, or the management is impopular, if the work life balance is bad, or anything... you'll be able to read about that in those websites. For example, a recruiter contacted me last year regarding an opportunity for a fancy senior role at a large company (Sr Staff engineer)... I checked the Glassdoor reviews for that company and found many testimonies from people who were contacted with the exact same narrative, but at the end of the interview process they were offered vastly lower levels, so clearly that was their intention all along. Because of that, I assessed that interviewing there was going to be a waste of my time and I ghosted the recruiter. Developers win. Of course, you need to take some reviews with a grain of salt, but if everyone is saying the same thing, you will at least have a sample of what you are getting into. Having said this, I am not sure Triplebyte will ever be able to effectively solve or mitigate the problems Ammon is describing. It is possible that he needs to continue talking to developers, and I am not trying to say this in a rude way. There are also many more problems that need help fixing that Ammon did not describe. Having a conversation with a developer about different topics can give you some insights on the breadth and depth of the knowledge of a developer, and many interviews omit this. I think interviews should be "adaptive" tests, that get as progressively more difficult until you reach your limit.
• inThePendant 5y ago
  I applied through Triplebyte in 2015 & again in 2018, and got to know Harj & Ammon a bit. They, along with Gilluame, all struck me as remarkably smart and incredibly dedicated to their vision. So if after 6 years that lot haven't "cracked the code," that's reason enough to abandon hope for there ever being a sane recruiting process, anywhere. My takeaway from my experience finding a SW engr job was that actual technical capability was really only a second- or third-tier consideration in companies' hiring decisions. (This is often misaligned with the companies' actual business needs, but that's not what materially drives hiring decisions either.) So, although TB nailed TFOO the competence assessment & pre-screening problem, Amdahl's Law still applied to the whole enchilada. What TB should do is monetize their experience placing candidates over the last 5+ years and just sell training & maybe some standardized SaaS products to HR departments -- especially at startups! -- that regularly need to hire SWEs/SDEs (yes I'm a FAANG-er now). Because the real dysfunction in tech hiring originates & thrives in those departments, and...something about robbing banks because that's where the money is...
  • namenotrequired 5y ago
    > if after 6 years that lot haven't "cracked the code," that's reason enough to abandon hope for there ever being a sane recruiting process, anywhere. That capable people failed to make one solution work, doesn't mean no solution can work. Now they're going to try another.
• emosenkis 5y ago
  The concept sounds interesting but the execution seems lacking. I couldn't complete my profile because of spurious "check your inputs for errors" messages when I tried to click save on the very first section. Reloading the page several times didn't help though eventually a hard reload did. The project section silently lost an entry when I clicked save, presumably because I entered a year without a month. In the Java quiz, a question about generics failed to properly escape the angle brackets, making three of the four choices indistinguishable without reading the DOM. Question quality was quite variable.
• hkmurakami 5y ago
  I found Aline Lerner's assessment of new age recruiting services including Triplebyte to be informative. She may be wrong, and you may not agree with her take, but I do appreciate that she's not trying to bullshit the reader. "Triplebyte, to my mind, did an admirable job of trying to solve the credentialing problem. But their approach was not without shortcomings: 1) not everyone wanted to take their lengthy quiz, even though the quiz was well done, and 2) scaling up an army of interviewers, all of whom had to be trained in exactly the same way, was non-trivial and not cheap. These challenges were surmountable, but the challenge that wasn’t arose from the second issue that all companies had to face: lack of candidate autonomy, which was driven in part by a lack of faith in the credential. Once you passed Triplebyte’s assessment process, just like at Hired, you had to interact with a talent advocate (Triplebyte labeled them “talent managers,” but again they’re just recruiters). The talent manager would examine your background and short-list you for some companies of their choosing, where you’d then go onsite. You could have some input into which companies you spoke to, but it was limited, and if you didn’t meet the company’s (often somewhat arbitrary) criteria, no matter how well you did on the assessment, its doors were closed to you. As with Hired, having an army of recruiters AND interviewers working for you makes achieving SaaS margins impossible, and then, you’ve essentially become a tech-enabled recruiting firm (albeit this time one with much better performance data!). Just like Hired, Triplebyte eventually moved away from the auction marketplace model, fired most of their talent managers and interviewers, and fulfilled their destiny, becoming a glorified LinkedIn Recruiter clone. Recruiters could search for candidates, just like on LinkedIn Recruiter, based on their pedigree, languages known, and so forth. One thing Triplebyte still does differently, however, is to leverage their aforementioned coding quiz to annotate candidate profiles. (Presumably, they are using their historical interview data, from when candidates had to do BOTH, to predict how people will perform in interviews.) The limitation, of course, is that great people will be unlikely to take the quiz in the first place, especially now that it no longer fast-tracks them to an onsite." https://blog.alinelerner.com/ive-been-an-engineer-and-a-recruiter-hiring-is-broken-heres-why-and-heres-what-it-should-be-like-instead/ https://blog.alinelerner.com/ive-been-an-engineer-and-a-recr...
• blunte 5y ago
  After being enticed to take their quiz and achieving perfect or near perfect (I forget now) generalist score, I was marked as hotlisted for a tech interview position with them. Keep in mind, they solicited me for this. No response after getting the "wow, nice quiz result" email. No further emails. No replies for months to my gentle inquiries. Eventually they did reply, saying they were sorry but they didn't need help. I have significant doubts that they were hiring tech interviewers in the first place. I think instead they were gathering market data at our expense. Furthermore, there were detailed stories from users on Glassdoor about their internal policies and attitudes, mostly painting their leader as lacking scruples and leadership ability. Perhaps this was all fake, but if so it was really convincing and thorough. I'm curious if anyone has had legitimately good experiences with them.
• david-wb 5y ago
  A lot of research on interviews has shown they basically don't work. You just can't grill someone for a few hours and know how they're going to do on the job. For unemployed candidates, we should do away with interviews altogether and do paid 2-week trials instead. After the first 2-3 PRs it's pretty clear if someone has the skills you need and to what degree. It would also help the candidate decide if they like the company. Employed candidates are harder to evaluate and I don't think there's a single formula that will work for every company.
  • TulliusCicero 5y ago
    What I've read before is that the most predictive measures were an IQ test and a work sample test.
• sage76 5y ago
  The TLDR says : "There is far more demand for engineers than there is supply, and that makes engineers powerful in a way other professions are not." I can't believe this. I must be a garbage engineer then, because I found the US job market for software engineering roles to be absolutely soul crushingly difficult. I am not the only one, my friends did too. I have given up several times and then restarted job search. I have been grinding leetcode but companies want nothing less than complete perfection. I actually thought something like triplebyte would be useful, give a test once and have the score be valid for a couple of years, like a GRE for algos and data structures. I really don't get it.
• eterevsky 5y ago
  So, from what I understood from the article, the value of Triplebyte to the employers is that they are pre-screening the candidates. How are they planning to keep this value if they stop doing it?
• mikecoles 5y ago
  Triplebyte was worthless from the start. I, a non-developer, took their quiz a couple of years back. The exact wording escapes me though the gist was "You've done exceptionally well and have 'x' chance with interviews." They didn't give any details on where you actually stood. The quiz was taken as a joke as I know java and objects exist, but no clue how to use them so it appears everyone gets the same canned response which would result in some people receiving false hope about getting a great job.
• anm89 5y ago
  Was making everyone's info public part of "rethinking"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• say_it_as_it_is 5y ago
  Lots of astroturfing going on here. HN community is their targeted audience, so they're hammering this place hard with positive spin. This kind of aggressive marketing makes me really suspicious.
• seasily 5y ago
  The only good thing about TripleByte was the structured quiz and interview process. Everything else--inability to edit key portions of profile, the most boring set of tech jobs imaginable, very few companies on there--was a joke. The quizzes weren't quite a fit for ML, nor was the interviewer or job density there for the domain, but the immediate half-hour call with the promise I'd passed a technical screen was extremely efficient, even if Triplebyte lacked any basic level of market liquidity.
• gremlinsinc 5y ago
  > No quiz or interview requirement to join Triplebyte Sidebar: Take the Quiz! Maybe they should rollout the update before announcing it?