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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 th

by 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
If you want to put candidates in control, build a CRM tool. When a recruiter pings me on LinkedIn or emails me, I have a URL I can send them to with an intake form. No more calls wasting my time, I can see the company/role/salary/etc. up front. The trick here is you need to figure out a business model where you don't take money from employers, because once you do its just the long slide to becoming a shittier LinkedIn.
- rachofsunshine 5y ago
  We've talked about things in this area, but this particular framing is pretty interesting. We're talking about it now. I personally like this proposal and am probably going to at least draft a hypothetical spec of it and see how it fleshes out. Thanks for the suggestion!
  - mike_d 5y ago
    Awesome! I've started a POC, but as with most things I'd rather not have to build it myself.
    - mattheww 5y ago
      It's unbelievable that nobody has done this well - I and most people I know are tracking their own job searches on a spreadsheet. Pretty obvious value-add for job searchers. Not to mention that having access to this data would enable tons of other product features. Shows that most services/sites don't care that much about the applicant experience.
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        https://www.kiter.app/ https://www.kiter.app/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27256776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27256776
    - rachofsunshine 5y ago
      If you're interested in comparing notes, I'd love to hop on a call with you. (We've got some bookable slots linked at the bottom of the blog post, but I can make time elsewhere if you'd like.)
heavyset_go 5y ago
> 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! This is a space that unions fill well compared to for-profit recruiting agencies. The organizations give engineers control and leverage in hiring, and can help them up-negotiate. They also allow employers to hire from pools of skilled talent. Whereas with recruiting agencies, the customers are employers, not the candidates. Incentives are not aligned to give candidates control.
- filoleg 5y ago
  While I still slightly prefer the direct experience for other reasons, the recruiting agency experience was pretty good for me in its own way. More specifically, when it comes to salary negotiation. Let me elaborate. People at the recruiting agency usually get paid a commission as a percentage of the first year of the hiree’s salary (not taken from your paycheck, but just in general). Which means, it is in their interest to get you as high of a comp as possible. Which also means that I dont have to bs around with the recruiter about my salary expectations or anything like that. I give them the upper range of what i want, they tell me either “sounds good” or “they are easily willing to pay more, so why not try $X instead” or “they cannot pay that much, but there is this other company that we work with that can offer you as much.” And if you work with one recruiter consistently, it gets even easier, because now that the recruiter knows my total comp expectations, she pre-filters opportunities for me and only contacts me if there is a position she is aware of that pays at least as much as I want or more. Of course there are downsides too, for example, the limited choice of companies that the recruiting agency is working with at any given time, so i still have to find some opportunities and interview with those companies on my own. But as a supplementary option, working with a good recruiting agency has been quite nice for me. P.S. The type of a recruiting agency i am talking about is the one that is focused on a specific sector (in my case, fintech/quant), so it might be a completely different story for a “generic software dev” recruiting agency.
  - hectormalot 5y ago
    > Which means, it is in their interest to get you as high of a comp as possible. Beware: this is not universally true. What you typically see is that it leads to closing as many candidates as possible. A recruiter can make more by closing 2 candidates at 80% of max comp than 1 candidate at 100% in the same time. This is a well known behavior in real estate sales, which have a similar commission structure.
tdeck 5y ago
A small bit of feedback here. I tried TripleByte a couple of years ago and the experience was really polished. I passed the interview and got great detailed feedback which I really appreciated. However, I dropped out completely because TripleByte wouldn't let me see companies without entering in a desired comp number. My recruiter at triplebyte said I could just put in "$1 or $1,000,000" to get past it, but that just feels like the same kind of corporate HR bullshit that people have complained about for years. Just Google "recruiter won't proceed without desired salary" and you'll understand how many folks dislike that question. The experience made me feel that Triplebyte wasn't interested in putting me in control of the process at all if they have such a user hostile requirement and require me to work around it by putting in fake numbers. I understand that many people will have no problem providing this info, but I prefer to see what companies offer me because it tells me how they value me and the position they're hiring for.
- rachofsunshine 5y ago
  You're totally right. If we'd been thinking in this mode when that particular requirement was built, it wouldn't have been. It isn't required today (and IIRC hasn't been for a while now).
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  I never, ever, ever give anyone a number until the salary negotiation stage of the interview (ie. after I've been given a job offer), and even then I only give the company a number as a counter to their offer. I always do this negotiation myself, and never let anyone else negotiate for me. Almost all recruiters have been fine with that, but a couple haven't. To such people I wish a good day and go my own way. There are plenty of other recruiters in the sea.
  - usaar333 5y ago
    A particular problem with doing that is discussed in the post; you risk everyone's time being wasted if the company will never be able to meet your target.
    - 5y ago
choppaface 5y ago
You want to build it, or you want to make money off it? As CEO, you: * Grossly expanded profiles without user permission. * Laid off tons of staff right before the COVID lockdowns. (What has been your personal returns since April 1, 2020 by the way?) * You have been privy to discrimination happening in client company on-sites yet did nothing to the client companies. You’re a CFO, an investor. You’re not a CEO, and you certainly do not have my trust as a developer.
- jakearmitage 5y ago
  Oof, burn.
  - choppaface 5y ago
    Well, I witnessed one of the reports of discrimination, and his response made me puke. So I’m a bit biased.
- xtracto 5y ago
  Interesting I was only aware of their constant polluting of Hackernews with bad article-vertisements
an_opabinia 5y ago
I used TripleByte to recruit people for a startup without paying, by asking people to sign up for the test and screenshot the answers and collecting the scores at the end. I already had an inbound funnel, I just liked your test when I saw it the first time. In 2015, candidates with the same schooling scored about 20 percentage points lower than 2020, the last candidates I used the test for. The number of questions doubled, and then the test got much easier, by eliminating more challenging programming questions and replacing them with questions with giveaway context. By comparison, according to my data, about N=43, until about 2018 being a senior versus a junior in college CS programs is worth about 10 percentage points on the test; going to Harvard instead of Berkeley is also worth about 10 percentage points. In 2020, the last tests had no predictive features. I stopped using the test, because it became too easy and too noisy to be informative. I recognize some of the coded language in the blog post. There are definitely more lucrative opportunities in recruiting for DEI. I don't know if it will last. If you're still jittery about the public-profile-by-default thing, which by the way, was totally irrelevant and overblown IMO, this may not be a pivot for you. One thing I see in the data is that at MIT, women and men performed the same, controlling for seniority. This wasn't true at the 3 other universities that produced enough data to measure. That said, what really is the best way to hire candidates? I'm not convinced having binders full of engineers is special, there are almost always more candidates than jobs, at least 5:1, in every non-credentialed industry vertical. Anyone who has worked at a jobs (or indeed any matching platform, like the Common App or Tinder) knows that. Then there's this long thing about asymmetries or whatever, warble garble about missing information... It has never, not once been my experience that someone seeking a subordinate role at a typical private company with preferences like "pair programming" or whatever have ever been better than someone with no preferences at all. Maybe it helps to engage in the vanity of whatever trendy workplace trend is hot for whatever vertical. But like, if you're being intellectually honest, if you thought pair programming was important, you'd pair program at TripleByte, but you don't, you know in your heart of hearts none of that shit matters, so why are you putting stuff like that into your search system? Indeed and ZipRecruiter are ad arb companies. They don't care. Private universities lead, not lag, DEI at giant companies, so it's hard to see how to compete against them in that core business. It will still come down to a real defensible opinion. Do you have more valuable inventory than ZipRecruiter for DEI candidates? Who knows. What an uninteresting question. Apple also hires people who just make shit up on their resumes, I know two - though they weren't engineers.
DylanDmitri 5y ago
I referred my friend to triplebyte and never received the promised $5000 referral bonus. My emails to support were ignored.
- rachofsunshine 5y ago
  That shouldn't have happened. Could you go ahead and email our support at support@triplebyte.com again (just so that you don't have to expose your data here) and let them know who you are? I let one of our support folks know to keep an eye out; we'll get you sorted out (and I'll check back here later this evening, so let me know if you don't hear something back quickly).
failwhaleshark 5y ago
What made me instantly distrust TB was the Publisher's Clearing House-style "you had the best score on our online assessment we've ever seen." C'mon, don't blow smoke up my ass right off-the-bat. If it's that easy, then it needs to be more difficult, broader, and deeper to pre-test candidates with proficiencies in particular areas with questions that are AI-generated: algorithms, data structures, particular languages, operating systems, networking, front-/back-end technologies and tools, software engineering, customer service, team communication common-sense, professional workplace behavior, and engineering ethics.
sturadnidge 5y ago
Do you think more of a peer based approach to recruiting would have any legs? I built something a little while back that was a kind of "keep track of the people you'd hire", and anyone on your list had the power to grant you visibility to various parts of their profile (current employer, whether they are looking or not, what kind of role they are looking for, etc). Never targeted recruiters as a potential user, but I guess that probably isn't a bad use case. I'd much rather get contacted by a recruiter (albeit a recriuter who was known to me) with "hey I see you're looking for X, let's catch up to discuss opportunities Y and Z" as opposed to the cold calls / linkedin messages that are the current status quo.
btilly 5y ago
Fair warning. There is a large pool of people who think that they are programmers, but are not. This is exactly what the infamous fizzbuzz test was intended to weed out. I personally know a top notch recruiter who credits her success due to learning early in her career how to filter most of the junk out. For example a "Perl programmer" who listed Microsoft Word as a skill was probably not worth looking at. (Note, this is an example from 20 years ago. But the principle remains.) If you create an engineer focused site and DON'T find a way to segment engineers by ability, you'll find that your negotiating power is based on the average of your candidate pool. Which means that you'll discover why traditional recruiters kowtow to companies and not the other way around.
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  Very good advice. The "gatekeeping" they alluded to is just very necessary if they want to have any differentiation from any other generic job matching service. I'm sure the triple byte team is aware of this but I think it's important to keep in mind just how much people work in tech/IT jobs, how wide the skill/qualifications range is and how spammy applications can get very, very quickly. Even positions that are "easy" to get as a competent engineer can get hundreds of applications, and since it's also pretty common for people to just outright lie on their CVs it becomes very time consuming to filter for someone who genuinely meets even just most of the job requirements. & maybe I'm wrong but I thought the entire value proposition of TB was that their pre screening and testing process made the whole process much less noisy for your hiring managers. If you still end up needing technical interviews and aren't guaranteed that all the candidates you get have gone through some technical screening, what's the point?
- twic 5y ago
  AIUI, employers will be told whether the candidate took the tests, and if so what their score was: > 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), rather than a requirement for entry. I think the idea is that an employer can still filter out the unfizzbuzzables, but has the option to ignore that for candidates whose stellar track record is a stronger signal. I'm a little bit skeptical, because i think there are lots of people with apparently strong CVs who are still weak when you actually put them to the test. But maybe not at the very top end; i am really thinking about people with experience in various investment banks, which is perhaps less of a signal than Apple then Netflix or something.
ctvo 5y ago
I can't remember the last time I was ghosted. The problems you listed aren't problems that I experience. I don't care what part of my resume recruiters look at. I don't care what they do with it. Sure, having metrics on how often a company ships code, etc. would be helpful, but frankly I have about 10 companies on my list that I'd work for, and I doubt any of them would give you this data. What I'd really like is not having to practice leet code problems for 3 months before I interview. The older I get, the less motivated I am to do this. I've worked in senior engineering roles at big tech (FANG) with 3+ years tenure. I don't think I managed to not be able to do my job and fooled people for that long. I've interviewed people I KNOW could do the job, but they didn't get the optimal solution, or were nervous, or N things in the loop, and we ended up not hiring them. There must be some incentive to create a system that lowers these false negatives.
- localcrisis 5y ago
  I have had this exact experience with Triplebyte both as an engineer and as a hiring manager. I simply do not care about things like, “what does malloc return”. I do not care what people know about bloom filters in Postgres. The 99.99% of web developers don’t have to know these things. I do not care if you can implement Tic-Tac-Toe. It’s poor interviewing, which is the entire product they’ve been offering.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  > There must be some incentive to create a system that lowers these false negatives. I’m generally quite pro immigration but when BigTech goes to DC and bellyaches about how they need higher quotas because they can’t find enough workers it really sticks in my craw. Reminds me a bit of the classic example of chutzpah—-the boy who killed his parents, then threw himself on the mercy of the courts, asking for leniency because he was an orphan.
anonymoushn 5y ago
I emailed customer support in April because your site would not allow me to change my current role to any value other than <Specific title at specific company>. Like, my profile literally has a dropdown menu where that's the only option. Nick O'Brien asked me for a screenshot of the problem then ghosted me. Today it is still impossible to change my current role on your site. I am looking forward to progress toward a hiring process that puts engineers in control, such as by allowing them to accurately record their current role in their profile.
zerr 5y ago
Would it be still "US-only"? As a suggestion - try to serve more broad audience and also put accent on REMOTE.
caffeine 5y ago
Your point in the article about gaining bargaining power for engineers by making the hiring process an iterated game instead of one-shot is a good insight. But the transparency you need to extract is mainly financial, that’s the big asymmetry. I think people care more about money than they say they do, and less about release cadence or test coverage or whatever than they say they do. So triplebyte should be called “get me a raise.com”. I tell you what I’m making, smash all your tests, and you find me somebody who wants to offer me e.g $50k more or $100k more, and that WILL be the offer I get. And if the company reneges on that offer then it’s flagged to warn others, and if they do well by their employees they are rewarded as well.
- rachofsunshine 5y ago
  This was our original theory when we started doing user research, and we were surprised at the degree to which it didn't pan out. We assumed (in line with how these things usually go) that engineer interest in filters would follow some sort of very lopsided power law, where a few filters dominated among almost all engineers. But in practice, everyone wanted something different: some people were excited by salary, some by tech stack, some by pair programming, etc. One guy went on for like fifteen minutes about how much he hated open office plans. That said, the idea of "we will offer X to anyone with Y quiz scores" as a showing a company can make is pretty cool, and is definitely in a "company makes public conditional guarantees" space that we're interested in exploring.
  - clavigne 5y ago
    > One guy went on for like fifteen minutes about how much he hated open office plans. Does this guy have a patreon?
kragen 5y ago
LinkedIn doesn't provide the vetting service Triplebyte does; they don't tell employers anything about job candidates' quality. It sounds like you want to pivot from the small market where you were the market leader into the larger market where LinkedIn is.
duderoso 5y ago
ammon, how do I reply to recruiter contacts? applied to a job, received a request for interview from company. Nowhere to reply on the platform? How do I get in contact with them? Should there not be a reply button right there with recruiter's message? p.s. I already emailed support but, my past experience tells me they won't reply.

by ammon 5y ago

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

If you want to put candidates in control, build a CRM tool. When a recruiter pings me on LinkedIn or emails me, I have a URL I can send them to with an intake form. No more calls wasting my time, I can see the company/role/salary/etc. up front. The trick here is you need to figure out a business model where you don't take money from employers, because once you do its just the long slide to becoming a shittier LinkedIn.

rachofsunshine 5y ago
We've talked about things in this area, but this particular framing is pretty interesting. We're talking about it now. I personally like this proposal and am probably going to at least draft a hypothetical spec of it and see how it fleshes out. Thanks for the suggestion!
- mike_d 5y ago
  Awesome! I've started a POC, but as with most things I'd rather not have to build it myself.
  - mattheww 5y ago
    It's unbelievable that nobody has done this well - I and most people I know are tracking their own job searches on a spreadsheet. Pretty obvious value-add for job searchers. Not to mention that having access to this data would enable tons of other product features. Shows that most services/sites don't care that much about the applicant experience.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      https://www.kiter.app/ https://www.kiter.app/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27256776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27256776
  - rachofsunshine 5y ago
    If you're interested in comparing notes, I'd love to hop on a call with you. (We've got some bookable slots linked at the bottom of the blog post, but I can make time elsewhere if you'd like.)

heavyset_go 5y ago

> 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! This is a space that unions fill well compared to for-profit recruiting agencies. The organizations give engineers control and leverage in hiring, and can help them up-negotiate. They also allow employers to hire from pools of skilled talent. Whereas with recruiting agencies, the customers are employers, not the candidates. Incentives are not aligned to give candidates control.

filoleg 5y ago
While I still slightly prefer the direct experience for other reasons, the recruiting agency experience was pretty good for me in its own way. More specifically, when it comes to salary negotiation. Let me elaborate. People at the recruiting agency usually get paid a commission as a percentage of the first year of the hiree’s salary (not taken from your paycheck, but just in general). Which means, it is in their interest to get you as high of a comp as possible. Which also means that I dont have to bs around with the recruiter about my salary expectations or anything like that. I give them the upper range of what i want, they tell me either “sounds good” or “they are easily willing to pay more, so why not try $X instead” or “they cannot pay that much, but there is this other company that we work with that can offer you as much.” And if you work with one recruiter consistently, it gets even easier, because now that the recruiter knows my total comp expectations, she pre-filters opportunities for me and only contacts me if there is a position she is aware of that pays at least as much as I want or more. Of course there are downsides too, for example, the limited choice of companies that the recruiting agency is working with at any given time, so i still have to find some opportunities and interview with those companies on my own. But as a supplementary option, working with a good recruiting agency has been quite nice for me. P.S. The type of a recruiting agency i am talking about is the one that is focused on a specific sector (in my case, fintech/quant), so it might be a completely different story for a “generic software dev” recruiting agency.
- hectormalot 5y ago
  > Which means, it is in their interest to get you as high of a comp as possible. Beware: this is not universally true. What you typically see is that it leads to closing as many candidates as possible. A recruiter can make more by closing 2 candidates at 80% of max comp than 1 candidate at 100% in the same time. This is a well known behavior in real estate sales, which have a similar commission structure.

tdeck 5y ago

A small bit of feedback here. I tried TripleByte a couple of years ago and the experience was really polished. I passed the interview and got great detailed feedback which I really appreciated. However, I dropped out completely because TripleByte wouldn't let me see companies without entering in a desired comp number. My recruiter at triplebyte said I could just put in "$1 or $1,000,000" to get past it, but that just feels like the same kind of corporate HR bullshit that people have complained about for years. Just Google "recruiter won't proceed without desired salary" and you'll understand how many folks dislike that question. The experience made me feel that Triplebyte wasn't interested in putting me in control of the process at all if they have such a user hostile requirement and require me to work around it by putting in fake numbers. I understand that many people will have no problem providing this info, but I prefer to see what companies offer me because it tells me how they value me and the position they're hiring for.

rachofsunshine 5y ago
You're totally right. If we'd been thinking in this mode when that particular requirement was built, it wouldn't have been. It isn't required today (and IIRC hasn't been for a while now).
pmoriarty 5y ago
I never, ever, ever give anyone a number until the salary negotiation stage of the interview (ie. after I've been given a job offer), and even then I only give the company a number as a counter to their offer. I always do this negotiation myself, and never let anyone else negotiate for me. Almost all recruiters have been fine with that, but a couple haven't. To such people I wish a good day and go my own way. There are plenty of other recruiters in the sea.
- usaar333 5y ago
  A particular problem with doing that is discussed in the post; you risk everyone's time being wasted if the company will never be able to meet your target.
  - 5y ago

choppaface 5y ago

You want to build it, or you want to make money off it? As CEO, you: * Grossly expanded profiles without user permission. * Laid off tons of staff right before the COVID lockdowns. (What has been your personal returns since April 1, 2020 by the way?) * You have been privy to discrimination happening in client company on-sites yet did nothing to the client companies. You’re a CFO, an investor. You’re not a CEO, and you certainly do not have my trust as a developer.

jakearmitage 5y ago
Oof, burn.
- choppaface 5y ago
  Well, I witnessed one of the reports of discrimination, and his response made me puke. So I’m a bit biased.
xtracto 5y ago
Interesting I was only aware of their constant polluting of Hackernews with bad article-vertisements

an_opabinia 5y ago

I used TripleByte to recruit people for a startup without paying, by asking people to sign up for the test and screenshot the answers and collecting the scores at the end. I already had an inbound funnel, I just liked your test when I saw it the first time. In 2015, candidates with the same schooling scored about 20 percentage points lower than 2020, the last candidates I used the test for. The number of questions doubled, and then the test got much easier, by eliminating more challenging programming questions and replacing them with questions with giveaway context. By comparison, according to my data, about N=43, until about 2018 being a senior versus a junior in college CS programs is worth about 10 percentage points on the test; going to Harvard instead of Berkeley is also worth about 10 percentage points. In 2020, the last tests had no predictive features. I stopped using the test, because it became too easy and too noisy to be informative. I recognize some of the coded language in the blog post. There are definitely more lucrative opportunities in recruiting for DEI. I don't know if it will last. If you're still jittery about the public-profile-by-default thing, which by the way, was totally irrelevant and overblown IMO, this may not be a pivot for you. One thing I see in the data is that at MIT, women and men performed the same, controlling for seniority. This wasn't true at the 3 other universities that produced enough data to measure. That said, what really is the best way to hire candidates? I'm not convinced having binders full of engineers is special, there are almost always more candidates than jobs, at least 5:1, in every non-credentialed industry vertical. Anyone who has worked at a jobs (or indeed any matching platform, like the Common App or Tinder) knows that. Then there's this long thing about asymmetries or whatever, warble garble about missing information... It has never, not once been my experience that someone seeking a subordinate role at a typical private company with preferences like "pair programming" or whatever have ever been better than someone with no preferences at all. Maybe it helps to engage in the vanity of whatever trendy workplace trend is hot for whatever vertical. But like, if you're being intellectually honest, if you thought pair programming was important, you'd pair program at TripleByte, but you don't, you know in your heart of hearts none of that shit matters, so why are you putting stuff like that into your search system? Indeed and ZipRecruiter are ad arb companies. They don't care. Private universities lead, not lag, DEI at giant companies, so it's hard to see how to compete against them in that core business. It will still come down to a real defensible opinion. Do you have more valuable inventory than ZipRecruiter for DEI candidates? Who knows. What an uninteresting question. Apple also hires people who just make shit up on their resumes, I know two - though they weren't engineers.

DylanDmitri 5y ago

I referred my friend to triplebyte and never received the promised $5000 referral bonus. My emails to support were ignored.

rachofsunshine 5y ago
That shouldn't have happened. Could you go ahead and email our support at support@triplebyte.com again (just so that you don't have to expose your data here) and let them know who you are? I let one of our support folks know to keep an eye out; we'll get you sorted out (and I'll check back here later this evening, so let me know if you don't hear something back quickly).

failwhaleshark 5y ago

What made me instantly distrust TB was the Publisher's Clearing House-style "you had the best score on our online assessment we've ever seen." C'mon, don't blow smoke up my ass right off-the-bat. If it's that easy, then it needs to be more difficult, broader, and deeper to pre-test candidates with proficiencies in particular areas with questions that are AI-generated: algorithms, data structures, particular languages, operating systems, networking, front-/back-end technologies and tools, software engineering, customer service, team communication common-sense, professional workplace behavior, and engineering ethics.

sturadnidge 5y ago

Do you think more of a peer based approach to recruiting would have any legs? I built something a little while back that was a kind of "keep track of the people you'd hire", and anyone on your list had the power to grant you visibility to various parts of their profile (current employer, whether they are looking or not, what kind of role they are looking for, etc). Never targeted recruiters as a potential user, but I guess that probably isn't a bad use case. I'd much rather get contacted by a recruiter (albeit a recriuter who was known to me) with "hey I see you're looking for X, let's catch up to discuss opportunities Y and Z" as opposed to the cold calls / linkedin messages that are the current status quo.

btilly 5y ago

Fair warning. There is a large pool of people who think that they are programmers, but are not. This is exactly what the infamous fizzbuzz test was intended to weed out. I personally know a top notch recruiter who credits her success due to learning early in her career how to filter most of the junk out. For example a "Perl programmer" who listed Microsoft Word as a skill was probably not worth looking at. (Note, this is an example from 20 years ago. But the principle remains.) If you create an engineer focused site and DON'T find a way to segment engineers by ability, you'll find that your negotiating power is based on the average of your candidate pool. Which means that you'll discover why traditional recruiters kowtow to companies and not the other way around.

mardifoufs 5y ago
Very good advice. The "gatekeeping" they alluded to is just very necessary if they want to have any differentiation from any other generic job matching service. I'm sure the triple byte team is aware of this but I think it's important to keep in mind just how much people work in tech/IT jobs, how wide the skill/qualifications range is and how spammy applications can get very, very quickly. Even positions that are "easy" to get as a competent engineer can get hundreds of applications, and since it's also pretty common for people to just outright lie on their CVs it becomes very time consuming to filter for someone who genuinely meets even just most of the job requirements. & maybe I'm wrong but I thought the entire value proposition of TB was that their pre screening and testing process made the whole process much less noisy for your hiring managers. If you still end up needing technical interviews and aren't guaranteed that all the candidates you get have gone through some technical screening, what's the point?
twic 5y ago
AIUI, employers will be told whether the candidate took the tests, and if so what their score was: > 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), rather than a requirement for entry. I think the idea is that an employer can still filter out the unfizzbuzzables, but has the option to ignore that for candidates whose stellar track record is a stronger signal. I'm a little bit skeptical, because i think there are lots of people with apparently strong CVs who are still weak when you actually put them to the test. But maybe not at the very top end; i am really thinking about people with experience in various investment banks, which is perhaps less of a signal than Apple then Netflix or something.

ctvo 5y ago

I can't remember the last time I was ghosted. The problems you listed aren't problems that I experience. I don't care what part of my resume recruiters look at. I don't care what they do with it. Sure, having metrics on how often a company ships code, etc. would be helpful, but frankly I have about 10 companies on my list that I'd work for, and I doubt any of them would give you this data. What I'd really like is not having to practice leet code problems for 3 months before I interview. The older I get, the less motivated I am to do this. I've worked in senior engineering roles at big tech (FANG) with 3+ years tenure. I don't think I managed to not be able to do my job and fooled people for that long. I've interviewed people I KNOW could do the job, but they didn't get the optimal solution, or were nervous, or N things in the loop, and we ended up not hiring them. There must be some incentive to create a system that lowers these false negatives.

localcrisis 5y ago
I have had this exact experience with Triplebyte both as an engineer and as a hiring manager. I simply do not care about things like, “what does malloc return”. I do not care what people know about bloom filters in Postgres. The 99.99% of web developers don’t have to know these things. I do not care if you can implement Tic-Tac-Toe. It’s poor interviewing, which is the entire product they’ve been offering.
bradleyjg 5y ago
> There must be some incentive to create a system that lowers these false negatives. I’m generally quite pro immigration but when BigTech goes to DC and bellyaches about how they need higher quotas because they can’t find enough workers it really sticks in my craw. Reminds me a bit of the classic example of chutzpah—-the boy who killed his parents, then threw himself on the mercy of the courts, asking for leniency because he was an orphan.

anonymoushn 5y ago

I emailed customer support in April because your site would not allow me to change my current role to any value other than <Specific title at specific company>. Like, my profile literally has a dropdown menu where that's the only option. Nick O'Brien asked me for a screenshot of the problem then ghosted me. Today it is still impossible to change my current role on your site. I am looking forward to progress toward a hiring process that puts engineers in control, such as by allowing them to accurately record their current role in their profile.

zerr 5y ago

Would it be still "US-only"? As a suggestion - try to serve more broad audience and also put accent on REMOTE.

caffeine 5y ago

Your point in the article about gaining bargaining power for engineers by making the hiring process an iterated game instead of one-shot is a good insight. But the transparency you need to extract is mainly financial, that’s the big asymmetry. I think people care more about money than they say they do, and less about release cadence or test coverage or whatever than they say they do. So triplebyte should be called “get me a raise.com”. I tell you what I’m making, smash all your tests, and you find me somebody who wants to offer me e.g $50k more or $100k more, and that WILL be the offer I get. And if the company reneges on that offer then it’s flagged to warn others, and if they do well by their employees they are rewarded as well.

rachofsunshine 5y ago
This was our original theory when we started doing user research, and we were surprised at the degree to which it didn't pan out. We assumed (in line with how these things usually go) that engineer interest in filters would follow some sort of very lopsided power law, where a few filters dominated among almost all engineers. But in practice, everyone wanted something different: some people were excited by salary, some by tech stack, some by pair programming, etc. One guy went on for like fifteen minutes about how much he hated open office plans. That said, the idea of "we will offer X to anyone with Y quiz scores" as a showing a company can make is pretty cool, and is definitely in a "company makes public conditional guarantees" space that we're interested in exploring.
- clavigne 5y ago
  > One guy went on for like fifteen minutes about how much he hated open office plans. Does this guy have a patreon?

kragen 5y ago

LinkedIn doesn't provide the vetting service Triplebyte does; they don't tell employers anything about job candidates' quality. It sounds like you want to pivot from the small market where you were the market leader into the larger market where LinkedIn is.

duderoso 5y ago

ammon, how do I reply to recruiter contacts? applied to a job, received a request for interview from company. Nowhere to reply on the platform? How do I get in contact with them? Should there not be a reply button right there with recruiter's message? p.s. I already emailed support but, my past experience tells me they won't reply.