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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 especiall

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
        It's a brand of artificial lawn for sports arenas, plastic "grass", which has given rise to the idiom "astroturf campaign" = "fake grassroots campaign".
babaganoosh89 5y ago
Agreed, I recently used Hired and TripleByte. Hired gave me 2-3x more leads, and they were on avg much higher quality.
- Kalium 5y ago
  I remember my experience as a candidate on Hired. I pretty consistently got low-grade startup trash (think collectible art trading cards, but digital!) with lowballed comp. If Triplebyte was worse, then it's no wonder they placed so few people.
  - thebigspacefuck 5y ago
    I’ve had a pretty good experience using Hired the past few months. After getting a lot of small startups, I put that I was only interested in larger companies with 500+ people and I don’t see as many now. There seem to be a fair amount of large companies hiring remote after the pandemic WFH experiment, which is great for me outside of a major tech hub. Most places meet or exceed my salary expectations. I’ve gotten interviews with a few companies I’m quite interested in and would have never thought to apply at. This has required relatively little effort on my part as I usually write a cover letter and tailor my resume only to get rejected without reason, but with Hired I just set up my profile and get hits. I definitely would recommend it to anyone looking around for another job.
  - babaganoosh89 5y ago
    80% of the leads I get from hired aren't too great. But the other 20% are quality.
ammon 5y ago
Fair comment. I certainly don't think of us as a market leader. LinkedIn is the market leader. Honestly, the last year has been pretty hard for us (COVID and the problems with our model that I talk about in the post). That said, I think a hiring process that puts engineers in control (no ghosting, get data on when a recruiter looks at your application, search ranking by whether companies lie to candidates) is something that should exist. I want to try to build it!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
  As a candidate, I'm willing to put up with sometimes shoddy interview outcomes (e.g., ghosting) if my funnel is far greater and consequently leads to a more competitive offer, which is the end goal. A narrower funnel, that pre-selects for higher expectations of how companies engage in the process, may end up falling short of what I'm optimizing for.
  - flavius29663 5y ago
    Exactly, I don't understand all this moaning. You're only doing this every some years, you might as well try to optimize it rather than be picky, because it can make a big difference both career and compensation wise. Idiotic HR does not correlate in any way with a worse or better company, at least in my experience.
- f6v 5y ago
  This is an admirable aspiration. Although, if I think about, the companies spend much more time with a recruiting/sourcing product. And the candidates change jobs like once every 1.5-2 years? So optimising for a candidate experience doesn't seem right considering they're not the customer.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mike_d 5y ago
codegeek 5y ago
"spent it all on ads" Funny but whenever I think of Triplebyte, all I remember is seeing their ads everywhere. I am personally a fan of Indeed and they do a good job sending leads and applicants other than good old Linkedin.
tdeck 5y ago
I thought this was pretty telling: > We got jobs for over 1000 engineers Given how many years Triplebyte has been running, "over 1000" seems surprisingly low. I wish them luck with their pivot.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  I noticed that too, and when you combine it with "Triplebyte has hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform" it means they aren't doing great with the rate either.
  - cinquemb 5y ago
    in the comments: dev) > I forgot how to implement the zig operation in a splay tree. employee at Triplebyte) > To put some hard numbers to this: further down this thread, there's a post about how "any engineer" could answer a question the poster thinks is too easy. I looked up the question in our back end and, in fact, barely a third of people who take our quiz get it right (the correct answer isn't even the most common one!). So there 1000 job matches and at most (("hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform" / 3) - 1000) who were incentivized to answer these contrived problems, did so correctly and still couldn't be matched. So even among the large pool of engineers who have gone thru the process, met some arbitrary threshold of engineer-ness, there's still a huge mismatch between corporate/prospective employee expectations, that I'm not sure will be able to be overcome quickly even with these new initiatives, but it's interesting that they are being pursed now (not surprisingly after the shift in working environment after massive government restrictions on freedom uber alles).
    - localcrisis 5y ago
      I agree. We tried using TripleByte for hiring but what they screen for and what matters are entirely different. A founder we knew got an angry missive from one of the TripleByte founders because they’d rejected candidates during a final culture screen. Apparently the only qualification should be whether the candidate can do contrived coding tests and programming jeopardy, but whether you actually want to work with them is beside the point!
potatoman22 5y ago
Yeah, it says the company only helped with 1000 hires, too.
bradleyjg 5y ago
I was pretty happy with triplebyte from the hiring side. Slogging through candidates with good looking resumes that couldn’t actually program was expensive for my employer and unpleasant for me. TB took care of that first big cut down. I guess they didn’t hit product-market fit with candidates. Two sided markets are tough.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  How did you determine they couldn't program and what made the resumes look so appealing?
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    We had a video conferencing phone screen with a shared coding environment. I gave an easy question. It’s possible that they just couldn’t code with someone watching but the effect was the same. Note that I didn’t have control over the interview process, so I couldn’t switch to a take home or something else. The resumes seemed like they had relevant experience. That’s why I pushed them forward to the tech screen.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Aye, but now they have email addresses for hundreds of thousands of engineers along with a reasonable metric for their capability. That's worthwhile.
adfgiarguibu9i 5y ago
Based on my experience with them, I think they totally failed at their previous model. When I was fresh out of university, I had trouble finding a job. I had worked part-time at a small company through the last few semesters, but that company blew up just before I graduated. Every interviewer I ever met with was impressed because I really knew my stuff, but had trouble getting in the door due to an unimpressive CV and awkward mannerisms. I did very well at Triplebyte, scoring in their top bucket and getting top marks in several of the sub-categories. Those metrics are relative to all engineers, which would put me even higher amongst recent graduates. I also did very well on every software project I worked on and scored top marks on several other objective tests, like the Major Field Test. I was exactly the sort of candidate their system should have been able to help. I never even got an email out of it, let alone an interview. Waste of time.
distrill 5y ago
I went through triplebyte twice, once in late 2019 and then once again a few months later after the company I landed in shut down because of Covid. I was happy with the process, they promised to take a lot of the headache regarding tech screening and it worked. I think the value proposition is clear - I don't want to do the same tech screens 100 times, and lots of smaller companies may not have the resources or desire to manage high quality tech screens themselves. To be clear, I'm only addressing the comment about how people thinking highly of them are gullible. I had a great experience, twice, within a few months, and that included going through a time of huge uncertainty. That being said, I was not happy to see each of the changes they've made over the last year or so, and this does not strike me a good direction for engineers. I suppose I have to agree that they are not doing this from a position of market leadership. Perhaps they were providing asymmetric value to engineers, and at the end of the day the engineers are not the ones paying for the service.
- musicale 5y ago
  > Perhaps they were providing asymmetric value to engineers, and at the end of the day the engineers are not the ones paying for the service This is a very good insight. Unless candidates pay more than companies, the incentives are off.
naimishviradia 5y ago
I think their process of 100% not working. They branded them self through advertising that they will provide constructive feedback if you don't crack their interviews so dev can improve upon shortcomings. My experience was different I never got feedback after my last round part of the reason must be they were not able scale this process up.
hinkley 5y ago
There are two categories where people pivot while crushing it: One. The problem domain they are in is on its way out, and they've decided to defect instead of being the ones left holding the bag. Two. They hate what they do for a living. The first company to stop making buggy whips probably did not do it because they weren't selling any. The fact that they ceded market share to their top competitors probably sunk the barb in deeper for them: Yeah people are buying cars but our sales numbers are still going up so why should we change? In tech we see companies all the time end up being complicit in the destruction of their own industry by reducing its relevance in some manner or other, and by exiting early they have more options of destination. If I jump to the same industry as a competitor a year later I just look like a copycat. While some copycats copy other people, only better, they are the exception to the rule. Most churn out uninspiring derivative work, and if they can't at least do it cheaper then they end up on the scrapheap of history.
- rachofsunshine 5y ago
  In our case, it's more just an intermediate state between "crushing it" and "failing". We had a product that was working for a subset of engineers, but was running into structural and scaling problems. Simply put, it was (sort of) "crushing it" but was foreseeably not going to keep doing so. At that point, you can either keep going with what you're doing (and run into an inevitable wall later on) or you can foresee the future problems and pivot before they become unmanageable (which is what we did). Relatively few startups find their final model from minute one.
hermanradtke 5y ago
Also know as: We spent all of our money on advertising before we found product/market fit and now we are panic pivoting.
evrydayhustling 5y ago
100% this. They say individual engineers can't exercise this power, but that Triplebyte can use its weight to force their hand. As a hiring manager, I have dozens of recruiting platforms to choose from, most touting the same list of resumes. Yet another resume farm has zero power. Fortunately, most of the dirt thrown at recruiting teams is wrong in the first place. I don't know any hiring managers who make lowball offers that have a low chance of acceptance - the costs of the process, the risks of hiring someone who starts mad at you, and the value of winning someone who is actually worth hiring, are all way more important than some incremental cash saved.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  > As a hiring manager, I have dozens of recruiting platforms to choose from, most touting the same list of resumes. Yet another resume farm has zero power. Well, presumably the idea is that engineers, especially high quality ones, will be drawn to the recruiting platform that has more pro-engineer policies. And so if you avoid using it, you lose access to that subset of engineers. It's still a chicken and egg problem, though, because engineers have little incentive to join until there's enough companies.
  - evrydayhustling 5y ago
    Yeah, I think the biggest issue is with the implication that their existing user base, which was built under their old policies, is a unique asset. I'd be willing to bet that a significant majority of current TripleByte applicants also use other platforms. However, I think that even if they build an attractive, differentiated experience, the advantage is unstable. The problem is that "traditionally strong" applicants (those who already have positive ROI from existing processes) are disadvantaged by being exclusive to one platform. So, from a hiring perspective, TripleByte's differentiation in terms of unique resumes is going to be from people who are harder to assess. I'm actually fine with that as a value case - we've had great success hiring from bootcamps. "We help you reach strong nontraditional applicants" is a great value proposition. But it's not the same as a position of power to dictate the hiring process. Maybe a better pitch would be: we run a process that helps great non-traditional talent and great non-traditional companies find each other.
taude 5y ago
I'm really curious who is USING this company for their recruiting. As a IC I've been approached a lot by them, tried taking one of their tests, was turned off. And as a HM, I was never interesting in using them, and we continue to use our own internal recruiters or local recruiters who know the market. Having worked at a startup that was trying to disrupt the hiring/recruiting market back in 2010. I'm curious to how effective they were....if at all. Edit: update, maybe I'm super skeptical because of all their cheesy ads that were all over Reddit for so long?
xtracto 5y ago
I interviewed with triplebyte about 5 years ago. They rejected me saying that my editor skills were good but I didn't pass the mark because I couldn't find enough bugs in a program fast enough while being watched. This was really good for me as my subsequent decisions took me to where I'm now as a lead architect of a US startup, earning 5 figures USD while living in LatAm. On related matters. I know several companies that have pivoted out of the "hiring/recruiting" space because apparently that space is not easy to scale/automate.
graderjs 5y ago
I think the negative comments here are being a little unfair. It sounds like you've had a really terrible experience with TB. I get if that's your experience and interpretation, but TB are not superficial hawkers of products without fit or substance. They are passionate and intelligent and friendly engineers and weirdos who genuinely care about making a good startup and helping developers and companies match. My experience is different. I've been through the TB process three times, back in 2017 where they flew me to SF from Asia for Flexport, Mixpanel and two smaller startups, and then again this year where I went to the final stage with FB production engineering and TB itself. And in between as well i created yet another profile on the system after shelving prior ones for a fresh start. I have a non traditional background, (ie, an "outsider" developer, chem degree and self taught hobbyist programmer since young), i take my craft seriously, have a bunch of popular open source products and a successful low touch indie business. But i don't consider future success guaranteed so i like to keep talking to companies to find that great opportunity for me. I know my tech skills in some areas are not the best so i like to stay in the loop, stay up to date and relevant and stay in touch with what companies are looking for. By far the best hiring process experiences I've had have all been through the TB platform. And my "open rate" for applications and inbound interest on TB is way higher than any other methods I've tried (SO jobs, WWR, HN). The quality of companies, hiring process and level of interest I've received via TB has been epic and, at least in the past, even the TB support staff are super helpful going so far as to provide personalized feedback on profile improvements and resumes. I'm not an expert at getting hired but i couldn't have asked for anything more from them. They were fantastic. I only have great and wonderful memories of the time i spent in hiring processes of companies i "met" via TB. So this is my experience of it, and this is despite the fact that i have never ever received an offer from any company I have met on TB, including from TB itself. I don't blame them. I just consider my own skills are not at the right level, and the fit is not right for the companies I've met, while i work to improve myself and my skills. That's all. It's a simple and beautiful experience I've had with them. Soooo different to hiring through other platforms (where funnily enough i have recieved offers). I've met and talked to ammon and many other TB team members and they have all been cool, friendly, passionate people. From what I'm reading of this pivot, they're being vulnerable and open to learning, and using what they've learned so far to create something even better. I'm not gullible, I'm not saying they will succeed. But they're trying. And they're earnest and sincere. What more can you ask for? This has been my deep experience with them. I think the most vocal critics are talking merely theoretically without any experience of TB nor deep nor accurate understanding of who they are, what they do and what they stand for. To them i say, give it a try. Investigate before contempt! ;P ;) xx
noelherrick 5y ago
I wouldn’t be so certain. Obviously, something isn’t working well or isn’t as good as it could be, but that doesn’t mean they are on the way out. Maybe they are, but plenty of businesses say, this isn’t working like we want it to-we can do better. As a worker, I am happy that this is a product that seems to empower workers over companies. I wish them all the luck and will look at their offering to see if it could benefit my own team.

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
        It's a brand of artificial lawn for sports arenas, plastic "grass", which has given rise to the idiom "astroturf campaign" = "fake grassroots campaign".

babaganoosh89 5y ago

Agreed, I recently used Hired and TripleByte. Hired gave me 2-3x more leads, and they were on avg much higher quality.

Kalium 5y ago
I remember my experience as a candidate on Hired. I pretty consistently got low-grade startup trash (think collectible art trading cards, but digital!) with lowballed comp. If Triplebyte was worse, then it's no wonder they placed so few people.
- thebigspacefuck 5y ago
  I’ve had a pretty good experience using Hired the past few months. After getting a lot of small startups, I put that I was only interested in larger companies with 500+ people and I don’t see as many now. There seem to be a fair amount of large companies hiring remote after the pandemic WFH experiment, which is great for me outside of a major tech hub. Most places meet or exceed my salary expectations. I’ve gotten interviews with a few companies I’m quite interested in and would have never thought to apply at. This has required relatively little effort on my part as I usually write a cover letter and tailor my resume only to get rejected without reason, but with Hired I just set up my profile and get hits. I definitely would recommend it to anyone looking around for another job.
- babaganoosh89 5y ago
  80% of the leads I get from hired aren't too great. But the other 20% are quality.

ammon 5y ago

Fair comment. I certainly don't think of us as a market leader. LinkedIn is the market leader. Honestly, the last year has been pretty hard for us (COVID and the problems with our model that I talk about in the post). That said, I think a hiring process that puts engineers in control (no ghosting, get data on when a recruiter looks at your application, search ranking by whether companies lie to candidates) is something that should exist. I want to try to build it!

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
As a candidate, I'm willing to put up with sometimes shoddy interview outcomes (e.g., ghosting) if my funnel is far greater and consequently leads to a more competitive offer, which is the end goal. A narrower funnel, that pre-selects for higher expectations of how companies engage in the process, may end up falling short of what I'm optimizing for.
- flavius29663 5y ago
  Exactly, I don't understand all this moaning. You're only doing this every some years, you might as well try to optimize it rather than be picky, because it can make a big difference both career and compensation wise. Idiotic HR does not correlate in any way with a worse or better company, at least in my experience.
f6v 5y ago
This is an admirable aspiration. Although, if I think about, the companies spend much more time with a recruiting/sourcing product. And the candidates change jobs like once every 1.5-2 years? So optimising for a candidate experience doesn't seem right considering they're not the customer.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mike_d 5y ago

codegeek 5y ago

"spent it all on ads" Funny but whenever I think of Triplebyte, all I remember is seeing their ads everywhere. I am personally a fan of Indeed and they do a good job sending leads and applicants other than good old Linkedin.

tdeck 5y ago

I thought this was pretty telling: > We got jobs for over 1000 engineers Given how many years Triplebyte has been running, "over 1000" seems surprisingly low. I wish them luck with their pivot.

bigbillheck 5y ago
I noticed that too, and when you combine it with "Triplebyte has hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform" it means they aren't doing great with the rate either.
- cinquemb 5y ago
  in the comments: dev) > I forgot how to implement the zig operation in a splay tree. employee at Triplebyte) > To put some hard numbers to this: further down this thread, there's a post about how "any engineer" could answer a question the poster thinks is too easy. I looked up the question in our back end and, in fact, barely a third of people who take our quiz get it right (the correct answer isn't even the most common one!). So there 1000 job matches and at most (("hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform" / 3) - 1000) who were incentivized to answer these contrived problems, did so correctly and still couldn't be matched. So even among the large pool of engineers who have gone thru the process, met some arbitrary threshold of engineer-ness, there's still a huge mismatch between corporate/prospective employee expectations, that I'm not sure will be able to be overcome quickly even with these new initiatives, but it's interesting that they are being pursed now (not surprisingly after the shift in working environment after massive government restrictions on freedom uber alles).
  - localcrisis 5y ago
    I agree. We tried using TripleByte for hiring but what they screen for and what matters are entirely different. A founder we knew got an angry missive from one of the TripleByte founders because they’d rejected candidates during a final culture screen. Apparently the only qualification should be whether the candidate can do contrived coding tests and programming jeopardy, but whether you actually want to work with them is beside the point!

potatoman22 5y ago

Yeah, it says the company only helped with 1000 hires, too.

bradleyjg 5y ago

I was pretty happy with triplebyte from the hiring side. Slogging through candidates with good looking resumes that couldn’t actually program was expensive for my employer and unpleasant for me. TB took care of that first big cut down. I guess they didn’t hit product-market fit with candidates. Two sided markets are tough.

ipaddr 5y ago
How did you determine they couldn't program and what made the resumes look so appealing?
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  We had a video conferencing phone screen with a shared coding environment. I gave an easy question. It’s possible that they just couldn’t code with someone watching but the effect was the same. Note that I didn’t have control over the interview process, so I couldn’t switch to a take home or something else. The resumes seemed like they had relevant experience. That’s why I pushed them forward to the tech screen.
tomrod 5y ago
Aye, but now they have email addresses for hundreds of thousands of engineers along with a reasonable metric for their capability. That's worthwhile.

adfgiarguibu9i 5y ago

Based on my experience with them, I think they totally failed at their previous model. When I was fresh out of university, I had trouble finding a job. I had worked part-time at a small company through the last few semesters, but that company blew up just before I graduated. Every interviewer I ever met with was impressed because I really knew my stuff, but had trouble getting in the door due to an unimpressive CV and awkward mannerisms. I did very well at Triplebyte, scoring in their top bucket and getting top marks in several of the sub-categories. Those metrics are relative to all engineers, which would put me even higher amongst recent graduates. I also did very well on every software project I worked on and scored top marks on several other objective tests, like the Major Field Test. I was exactly the sort of candidate their system should have been able to help. I never even got an email out of it, let alone an interview. Waste of time.

distrill 5y ago

I went through triplebyte twice, once in late 2019 and then once again a few months later after the company I landed in shut down because of Covid. I was happy with the process, they promised to take a lot of the headache regarding tech screening and it worked. I think the value proposition is clear - I don't want to do the same tech screens 100 times, and lots of smaller companies may not have the resources or desire to manage high quality tech screens themselves. To be clear, I'm only addressing the comment about how people thinking highly of them are gullible. I had a great experience, twice, within a few months, and that included going through a time of huge uncertainty. That being said, I was not happy to see each of the changes they've made over the last year or so, and this does not strike me a good direction for engineers. I suppose I have to agree that they are not doing this from a position of market leadership. Perhaps they were providing asymmetric value to engineers, and at the end of the day the engineers are not the ones paying for the service.

musicale 5y ago
> Perhaps they were providing asymmetric value to engineers, and at the end of the day the engineers are not the ones paying for the service This is a very good insight. Unless candidates pay more than companies, the incentives are off.

naimishviradia 5y ago

I think their process of 100% not working. They branded them self through advertising that they will provide constructive feedback if you don't crack their interviews so dev can improve upon shortcomings. My experience was different I never got feedback after my last round part of the reason must be they were not able scale this process up.

hinkley 5y ago

There are two categories where people pivot while crushing it: One. The problem domain they are in is on its way out, and they've decided to defect instead of being the ones left holding the bag. Two. They hate what they do for a living. The first company to stop making buggy whips probably did not do it because they weren't selling any. The fact that they ceded market share to their top competitors probably sunk the barb in deeper for them: Yeah people are buying cars but our sales numbers are still going up so why should we change? In tech we see companies all the time end up being complicit in the destruction of their own industry by reducing its relevance in some manner or other, and by exiting early they have more options of destination. If I jump to the same industry as a competitor a year later I just look like a copycat. While some copycats copy other people, only better, they are the exception to the rule. Most churn out uninspiring derivative work, and if they can't at least do it cheaper then they end up on the scrapheap of history.

rachofsunshine 5y ago
In our case, it's more just an intermediate state between "crushing it" and "failing". We had a product that was working for a subset of engineers, but was running into structural and scaling problems. Simply put, it was (sort of) "crushing it" but was foreseeably not going to keep doing so. At that point, you can either keep going with what you're doing (and run into an inevitable wall later on) or you can foresee the future problems and pivot before they become unmanageable (which is what we did). Relatively few startups find their final model from minute one.

hermanradtke 5y ago

Also know as: We spent all of our money on advertising before we found product/market fit and now we are panic pivoting.

evrydayhustling 5y ago

100% this. They say individual engineers can't exercise this power, but that Triplebyte can use its weight to force their hand. As a hiring manager, I have dozens of recruiting platforms to choose from, most touting the same list of resumes. Yet another resume farm has zero power. Fortunately, most of the dirt thrown at recruiting teams is wrong in the first place. I don't know any hiring managers who make lowball offers that have a low chance of acceptance - the costs of the process, the risks of hiring someone who starts mad at you, and the value of winning someone who is actually worth hiring, are all way more important than some incremental cash saved.

TulliusCicero 5y ago
> As a hiring manager, I have dozens of recruiting platforms to choose from, most touting the same list of resumes. Yet another resume farm has zero power. Well, presumably the idea is that engineers, especially high quality ones, will be drawn to the recruiting platform that has more pro-engineer policies. And so if you avoid using it, you lose access to that subset of engineers. It's still a chicken and egg problem, though, because engineers have little incentive to join until there's enough companies.
- evrydayhustling 5y ago
  Yeah, I think the biggest issue is with the implication that their existing user base, which was built under their old policies, is a unique asset. I'd be willing to bet that a significant majority of current TripleByte applicants also use other platforms. However, I think that even if they build an attractive, differentiated experience, the advantage is unstable. The problem is that "traditionally strong" applicants (those who already have positive ROI from existing processes) are disadvantaged by being exclusive to one platform. So, from a hiring perspective, TripleByte's differentiation in terms of unique resumes is going to be from people who are harder to assess. I'm actually fine with that as a value case - we've had great success hiring from bootcamps. "We help you reach strong nontraditional applicants" is a great value proposition. But it's not the same as a position of power to dictate the hiring process. Maybe a better pitch would be: we run a process that helps great non-traditional talent and great non-traditional companies find each other.

taude 5y ago

I'm really curious who is USING this company for their recruiting. As a IC I've been approached a lot by them, tried taking one of their tests, was turned off. And as a HM, I was never interesting in using them, and we continue to use our own internal recruiters or local recruiters who know the market. Having worked at a startup that was trying to disrupt the hiring/recruiting market back in 2010. I'm curious to how effective they were....if at all. Edit: update, maybe I'm super skeptical because of all their cheesy ads that were all over Reddit for so long?

xtracto 5y ago

I interviewed with triplebyte about 5 years ago. They rejected me saying that my editor skills were good but I didn't pass the mark because I couldn't find enough bugs in a program fast enough while being watched. This was really good for me as my subsequent decisions took me to where I'm now as a lead architect of a US startup, earning 5 figures USD while living in LatAm. On related matters. I know several companies that have pivoted out of the "hiring/recruiting" space because apparently that space is not easy to scale/automate.

graderjs 5y ago

I think the negative comments here are being a little unfair. It sounds like you've had a really terrible experience with TB. I get if that's your experience and interpretation, but TB are not superficial hawkers of products without fit or substance. They are passionate and intelligent and friendly engineers and weirdos who genuinely care about making a good startup and helping developers and companies match. My experience is different. I've been through the TB process three times, back in 2017 where they flew me to SF from Asia for Flexport, Mixpanel and two smaller startups, and then again this year where I went to the final stage with FB production engineering and TB itself. And in between as well i created yet another profile on the system after shelving prior ones for a fresh start. I have a non traditional background, (ie, an "outsider" developer, chem degree and self taught hobbyist programmer since young), i take my craft seriously, have a bunch of popular open source products and a successful low touch indie business. But i don't consider future success guaranteed so i like to keep talking to companies to find that great opportunity for me. I know my tech skills in some areas are not the best so i like to stay in the loop, stay up to date and relevant and stay in touch with what companies are looking for. By far the best hiring process experiences I've had have all been through the TB platform. And my "open rate" for applications and inbound interest on TB is way higher than any other methods I've tried (SO jobs, WWR, HN). The quality of companies, hiring process and level of interest I've received via TB has been epic and, at least in the past, even the TB support staff are super helpful going so far as to provide personalized feedback on profile improvements and resumes. I'm not an expert at getting hired but i couldn't have asked for anything more from them. They were fantastic. I only have great and wonderful memories of the time i spent in hiring processes of companies i "met" via TB. So this is my experience of it, and this is despite the fact that i have never ever received an offer from any company I have met on TB, including from TB itself. I don't blame them. I just consider my own skills are not at the right level, and the fit is not right for the companies I've met, while i work to improve myself and my skills. That's all. It's a simple and beautiful experience I've had with them. Soooo different to hiring through other platforms (where funnily enough i have recieved offers). I've met and talked to ammon and many other TB team members and they have all been cool, friendly, passionate people. From what I'm reading of this pivot, they're being vulnerable and open to learning, and using what they've learned so far to create something even better. I'm not gullible, I'm not saying they will succeed. But they're trying. And they're earnest and sincere. What more can you ask for? This has been my deep experience with them. I think the most vocal critics are talking merely theoretically without any experience of TB nor deep nor accurate understanding of who they are, what they do and what they stand for. To them i say, give it a try. Investigate before contempt! ;P ;) xx

noelherrick 5y ago

I wouldn’t be so certain. Obviously, something isn’t working well or isn’t as good as it could be, but that doesn’t mean they are on the way out. Maybe they are, but plenty of businesses say, this isn’t working like we want it to-we can do better. As a worker, I am happy that this is a product that seems to empower workers over companies. I wish them all the luck and will look at their offering to see if it could benefit my own team.