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I totally forgot about Triplebyte. Are they even relevant still? I remember back when it seemed like their ads were appearing everywhere and was a bit worried

I totally forgot about Triplebyte. Are they even relevant still? I remember back when it seemed like their ads were appearing everywhere and was a bit worried they were going to be the new way of hiring engineering talent. Seems like there's been nothing but crickets chirping for the last few years. Why? My experience with them was pretty bad. I took their assessment for web development, I think I even did an assignment, and got put on a video call with someone from Triplebyte. He never cracked a smile. Suddenly I got asked a bunch of CS questions that really were not very relevant to web development, some of which were entirely inappropriate like sorting a binary search tree. I even told the guy that I thought I was getting those questions wrong and he just scowled and said "well you just don't know when you're going to use this stuff." "My point exactly," I thought. Ultimately I got rejected. The whole idea that you can boil down a candidate to some coding challenges and a video quiz is bad. I do like the idea of streamlining the hiring process for developers, but there's more to it than knowing a bunch of stuff, because that can be gamed. And quizzing me on irrelevant material was a bad move. A firm like Triplebyte won't be as good at interviewing a candidate as the employer itself, and may even keep perfectly qualified candidates out of view from all employers affiliated with them.

KerryJones 4y ago
Wow, that sounds pretty bad. When I went through they did 4 different interviews (a little bit fuzzy; many years ago) but it did: 1) Create an incremental game (start simple, see how far you can get) 2) Live debugging (can run tests, they fail, you need to figure out why and fix it) 3) Flash rounds (Do you know what Big O is? Can you explain linked lists?) 4) ... I forget I thought it was one of the widest range of actual skills and their final assessment I agreed with. Stayed away from algorithms-y questions (which I hate)
gcampos 4y ago
My impression is that they are still around, but they failed to deliver the "recruiting revolution" and I think the reasons are: - The screening had a lot of false negatives. "I got rejected by Triplebyte, but got a FAANG offer" is quite common. - Most companies used Triplebyte not as an interview replacement, but as an additional screening process, which means that as a candidate, you don't have any real incentive to use them. The only real use case I heard recently about Triplebyte is to send candidate who normally you wouldn't even screen, so if they pass Triplebyte process, you know that you should consider the candidate, but if they fail is fine because you would have passed them anyways
- site-packages1 4y ago
  "Most companies used Triplebyte not as an interview replacement, but as an additional screening process, which means that as a candidate, you don't have any real incentive to use them." I used them many years ago, this was my impression. When I got to company "on sites" they were just full-blown interview loops. I could have just applied to the companies directly.
  - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
    I had a good experience with them as a new grad. A couple hours with TripleByte got me a free plane ticket to Silicon Valley, a hotel room, free Uber rides around the bay, and 5 on site interviews back-to-back. The product was an amazing deal for candidates. I had to do very little work and it got my foot in the door. 4 years later and I now work for Google in Mountain View. TripleByte isn’t what they used to be, though. I don’t think they do anything close to what I experienced anymore.
    - cmckn 4y ago
      What you described is just how Google (and others, in the before times) conducted onsite interviews. TripleByte got you a recruiter’s attention, maybe; but the rest was standard fare.
      - throwaway81523 4y ago
        No that sounds like something Triplebyte might have set up. I got something similar but no plane tickets and Uber since I was already in the bay area. But I got the stack of interviews and several free meals / coffee courtesy of Triplebyte. Plus I still have the jacket and coffee mug. I know the current Triplebyte experience isn't anything like the early one, but this thread does start to sound like a false alarm.
      - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
        I didn’t get a job at Google through TripleByte. I spent 2.5 years at point.com, and a year at copy.ai before heading to big G.
clairity 4y ago
> "The whole idea that you can boil down a candidate to some coding challenges and a video quiz is bad." yes, there are too many variables between the candidate, job, company, and work environment to determine long-term fit via a test, especially for "creative" jobs. the more regimented the job (e.g., fast food cook), the lower the variability, but it's still significant. plus, such tests only evaluate technical skills, not the more important non-technical ones (like punctuality, integrity, steadfastness, etc.--note that these are a function of the involved parties and the relationship between them, not just the candidate). but also, the underlying problem of hiring is not one of trying to get the best fit, but of trying to avoid the pain of firing. that's the thing that needs to be reframed/solved, but that's a much harder and a much less technical problem (alternatively put, technical tests are marginal at best).
- datavirtue 4y ago
  Can a quiz or trivia determine how good a person is at the most crucial aspect of the job: discovering what needs done? I spend weeks drumming up two or three days worth of coding work. The coding aspect is basically manual labor and pedantic arguments with other devs.
  - throwaway81523 4y ago
    I felt that the live interview was fairly ok at that. A staff engineer watched you code and debug stuff, asked you how you would do XYZ, etc. This took a few hours so must have cost the company $100s in engineering time. I can see why they don't do it any more. There's not much more they can do in a compressed time frame. Lately a bunch of companies want you to do unpaid multi-day take-home assignments before they even talk to you, but that is nuts. An alternative could be a paid brief engagement, like an NBA 10-day contract. I've done some things like that, which worked ok.
    - clairity 4y ago
      interviews are good for weeding out the absolute no's and that's about as good as you can get with those. a live coding session gives you marginally more information in that regard, but won't give you definitively more. a 10-day contract is better, since it's real work, for pay, but the relatively short duration doesn't tell you much about the candidate's intrinsic motivation or how relationships develop past the honeymoon stage. so really, it'd be best and easiest if we all explicitly assumed that jobs had 6-12 month trial periods, for both parties, and that after that time, either can walk away without hard feelings (or negative judgment), other than in the most egregious cases (i've seen a couple cases that'd fall in this category). again, this is primarily about jobs that have the most variability. less variable jobs don't need as long of an evaluation period (but do need more than a few weeks).
pcthrowaway 4y ago
It's worth noting that Triplebyte has completely pivoted since they did candidate pass/fail assessments. I started using them about a year ago (first passively looking, then actively looking) I really enjoyed the ability to be assessed on something besides Leetcode style questions. I didn't take a job through their platform (though I did get one really strong offer), but even still, found the assessments incredibly useful, since they give you a percentile distribution of your performance for each topic-specific test. After taking their assessments, when interviewers asked me how I am at, say, Python, I could tell them I have a hard time assessing my capabilities. "But hey, I took this standardized test that says I'm in the 85th percentile, not sure how good of a metric it is" (and not mentioning that I think I'm OK at best, at Python) It's the only way I've found to get a measure of your talents compared to the rest of the field (even if it might not be reliable/useful) A lot of the companies that interview through Triplebyte also skip LC mediums because they have a different signal about your potential suitability as a candidate.
- malfist 4y ago
  I question the ability to boil down engineering talent into something that can be represented as a "percentile distribution" Way too much of engineering is non-quantifiable. Putting a number to someone's skills is bound to be reductive at best.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Sure, I'm with you, but that doesn't change the fact that enough prospective employers ask you to rate your skills with X, Y, and Z on a scale of 1 to 10. Like honestly I might think I'm a 3 at X, but if some test that thousands of other people took tells me I'm in the 90th percentile of X users, that information is still useful to me.
    - kareemsabri 4y ago
      Seems like a great bit of information for you to have. And if it's in the 30th percentile, it may let you know to either not apply to jobs that want that skill, or work to improve.
tmp_anon_22 4y ago
AFAIK their promise of "we use machine learning to..." never panned out even remotely. All the processes ended up being mostly manual, with all the tradeoffs that entails. With the money they raised, after spending so much on marketing, I assume they downsized, lost some talent, and pivoted mostly to a sales-driven recruiting business for their top clients.
- treis 4y ago
  Yeah, the economies of scale that VCs are looking for weren't there. And even if they stayed to their original model it would have been too easy for niche competitors to erode their margins. Think Triplebyte for Android developers only times 20 different programming areas.
- ammon 4y ago
  That was true of our process as it existed in 2017/2018 (and was a part of why that business was not viable). At this point, what we do is develop tests (backed by psychometric models). These are more accurate than human phone screens (and especially more accurate at finding people who have strong skills bad "bad" resumes)
  - tmp_anon_22 4y ago
    > These are more accurate I can't imagine the difficulty to accurately measure the success or failure of long-tail HR hiring processes like phone screens. The success or failure of a candidate post-hire has so many variables it must be very hard to attribute them to signals present in a screen. I imagine most of the data points are derived from signals found in successful candidates, and then trying to find them in an assessment or screen. Its really hard, and I hope the negative tone of my comment does not suggest I don't respect the problemset and the people willing to throw themselves at it.
anoncow419 4y ago
Pretty much how I felt with my experience. Aced the quiz, completed about 95% of the project, then got anxious with a very open-ended presentation I had to make up on the spot, and the interviewer was very not pleased with anything I did. Got rejected and was sent a long list of complaints about me and my work. Don't think I would have survived to meet the "founders" they had anyway.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  > Don't think I would have survived to meet the "founders" they had anyway. You dodged a bullet, some of the most "interesting" interactions I've had with founders were from those I talked to through TripleByte. There was also a pair of them that were clearly digging around for business ideas and markets to enter.
armchairhacker 4y ago
To be fair, I think a shared interview system would be great. Then companies don’t have to devote time and effort into their own interview process, which turns out to be Leetcode and full of false positives / negatives anyways. But it needs to be: - In-depth. Not just a single exam or interview. You need to really know the employee’s strengths and weaknesses - Detailed. You can’t just give someone pass / fail or a single score. Not only is it mean, but you end up getting misaligned candidates anyways, because some people are really bad at some aspects of software but good at others. In fact maybe the process should ditch scores entirely and just show the recruiters the actual employee interviews, and what he/she has and has not accomplished. - Changing over time. Not a short period of time. But like, if I take the assessment, 6 months later I can take a smaller assessment and it will update my scores and log my progress. Triplebyte is not 1 or 2. Idk but I think it’s 3 and you can retake the quiz. But then it’s only telling employees if you’re basically competent for some arbitrary statistic, which doesn’t even tell if you’re basically competent at the company. I think it would be nice if i could take one thorough interview instead of several less-thorough company-specific interviews, but that’s not Triplebyte.
- avereveard 4y ago
  Idk, as a company I would still want to run my interview, and candidates would probably hate the double interview. Pre interview would also get stale fast. Companies wouldn't trust a third party to run binding technical assessment for them, and quality devs would probably avoid places that hire without having someone from the destination team show up I think the opposite would be more beneficial: a light check to validate work claims and some high level foundational question about code just to make sure one has basic proficiency in what he claims he has Then companies would need lot less hr pre-screening and could focus in technology and culture matching
  - wan23 4y ago
    I'm very sure that a consortium of FANG type companies could get together and design a shared interview for generic technical skills, and then run normal interviews for candidates that pass that step. And when I say normal interviews, I mean the stuff that an individual company should want to do, such as behavioral, talking about past projects, etc. Making candidates do leetcode type sessions at every place they apply is a waste of time for both candidates and companies.
yosito 4y ago
I had a similar experience, but when they rejected me, they sent me links to some tutorials for "Getting started with HTML and CSS". I had 8 years of experience at the time.
heavyset_go 4y ago
I went through the process and was accepted, and I agree with this post. It's not just sour grapes or anything like that.
itsdrewmiller 4y ago
They provide tools for companies to directly request applicants to fill out their screens (and presumably get those applicants into their job pool too). I don't think they're the only player in the space, but their actual tests are by far the best I've seen, and as an employer they are fulfilling all my core needs.
Maultasche 4y ago
I ended up getting a job through Triplebyte late last year. My current employer reached out to me through the platform, and was interested in interviewing me. I had never heard of my current employer prior to that. So it helped me in introducing me to companies I wasn't previously familiar with, but other job platforms work in similar manner. I get the impression that Triplebyte has changed from what it used to be. I never even talked with anyone at Triplebyte. I did well enough on some skill test that I was put on a fast track and quickly approved without any interviews. I also got opportunities to take other tests to rate my skills in particular areas. It seemed like a decent place for presenting possible candidates to employers with some pre-screening, but it wasn't anything particularly innovative. I imagine that as an employer, it helps filter out a lot of unskilled candidates with pretty resumes and reduces the number of interviews required.
bb010g 4y ago
I started at my current job at Cisco back in November through Triplebyte. The process was pretty pleasant throughout. I was reached out to through the platform; everyone I reached out to through the platform either denied me or didn't respond.

KerryJones 4y ago

Wow, that sounds pretty bad. When I went through they did 4 different interviews (a little bit fuzzy; many years ago) but it did: 1) Create an incremental game (start simple, see how far you can get) 2) Live debugging (can run tests, they fail, you need to figure out why and fix it) 3) Flash rounds (Do you know what Big O is? Can you explain linked lists?) 4) ... I forget I thought it was one of the widest range of actual skills and their final assessment I agreed with. Stayed away from algorithms-y questions (which I hate)

gcampos 4y ago

My impression is that they are still around, but they failed to deliver the "recruiting revolution" and I think the reasons are: - The screening had a lot of false negatives. "I got rejected by Triplebyte, but got a FAANG offer" is quite common. - Most companies used Triplebyte not as an interview replacement, but as an additional screening process, which means that as a candidate, you don't have any real incentive to use them. The only real use case I heard recently about Triplebyte is to send candidate who normally you wouldn't even screen, so if they pass Triplebyte process, you know that you should consider the candidate, but if they fail is fine because you would have passed them anyways

site-packages1 4y ago
"Most companies used Triplebyte not as an interview replacement, but as an additional screening process, which means that as a candidate, you don't have any real incentive to use them." I used them many years ago, this was my impression. When I got to company "on sites" they were just full-blown interview loops. I could have just applied to the companies directly.
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  I had a good experience with them as a new grad. A couple hours with TripleByte got me a free plane ticket to Silicon Valley, a hotel room, free Uber rides around the bay, and 5 on site interviews back-to-back. The product was an amazing deal for candidates. I had to do very little work and it got my foot in the door. 4 years later and I now work for Google in Mountain View. TripleByte isn’t what they used to be, though. I don’t think they do anything close to what I experienced anymore.
  - cmckn 4y ago
    What you described is just how Google (and others, in the before times) conducted onsite interviews. TripleByte got you a recruiter’s attention, maybe; but the rest was standard fare.
    - throwaway81523 4y ago
      No that sounds like something Triplebyte might have set up. I got something similar but no plane tickets and Uber since I was already in the bay area. But I got the stack of interviews and several free meals / coffee courtesy of Triplebyte. Plus I still have the jacket and coffee mug. I know the current Triplebyte experience isn't anything like the early one, but this thread does start to sound like a false alarm.
    - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
      I didn’t get a job at Google through TripleByte. I spent 2.5 years at point.com, and a year at copy.ai before heading to big G.

clairity 4y ago

> "The whole idea that you can boil down a candidate to some coding challenges and a video quiz is bad." yes, there are too many variables between the candidate, job, company, and work environment to determine long-term fit via a test, especially for "creative" jobs. the more regimented the job (e.g., fast food cook), the lower the variability, but it's still significant. plus, such tests only evaluate technical skills, not the more important non-technical ones (like punctuality, integrity, steadfastness, etc.--note that these are a function of the involved parties and the relationship between them, not just the candidate). but also, the underlying problem of hiring is not one of trying to get the best fit, but of trying to avoid the pain of firing. that's the thing that needs to be reframed/solved, but that's a much harder and a much less technical problem (alternatively put, technical tests are marginal at best).

datavirtue 4y ago
Can a quiz or trivia determine how good a person is at the most crucial aspect of the job: discovering what needs done? I spend weeks drumming up two or three days worth of coding work. The coding aspect is basically manual labor and pedantic arguments with other devs.
- throwaway81523 4y ago
  I felt that the live interview was fairly ok at that. A staff engineer watched you code and debug stuff, asked you how you would do XYZ, etc. This took a few hours so must have cost the company $100s in engineering time. I can see why they don't do it any more. There's not much more they can do in a compressed time frame. Lately a bunch of companies want you to do unpaid multi-day take-home assignments before they even talk to you, but that is nuts. An alternative could be a paid brief engagement, like an NBA 10-day contract. I've done some things like that, which worked ok.
  - clairity 4y ago
    interviews are good for weeding out the absolute no's and that's about as good as you can get with those. a live coding session gives you marginally more information in that regard, but won't give you definitively more. a 10-day contract is better, since it's real work, for pay, but the relatively short duration doesn't tell you much about the candidate's intrinsic motivation or how relationships develop past the honeymoon stage. so really, it'd be best and easiest if we all explicitly assumed that jobs had 6-12 month trial periods, for both parties, and that after that time, either can walk away without hard feelings (or negative judgment), other than in the most egregious cases (i've seen a couple cases that'd fall in this category). again, this is primarily about jobs that have the most variability. less variable jobs don't need as long of an evaluation period (but do need more than a few weeks).

pcthrowaway 4y ago

It's worth noting that Triplebyte has completely pivoted since they did candidate pass/fail assessments. I started using them about a year ago (first passively looking, then actively looking) I really enjoyed the ability to be assessed on something besides Leetcode style questions. I didn't take a job through their platform (though I did get one really strong offer), but even still, found the assessments incredibly useful, since they give you a percentile distribution of your performance for each topic-specific test. After taking their assessments, when interviewers asked me how I am at, say, Python, I could tell them I have a hard time assessing my capabilities. "But hey, I took this standardized test that says I'm in the 85th percentile, not sure how good of a metric it is" (and not mentioning that I think I'm OK at best, at Python) It's the only way I've found to get a measure of your talents compared to the rest of the field (even if it might not be reliable/useful) A lot of the companies that interview through Triplebyte also skip LC mediums because they have a different signal about your potential suitability as a candidate.

malfist 4y ago
I question the ability to boil down engineering talent into something that can be represented as a "percentile distribution" Way too much of engineering is non-quantifiable. Putting a number to someone's skills is bound to be reductive at best.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Sure, I'm with you, but that doesn't change the fact that enough prospective employers ask you to rate your skills with X, Y, and Z on a scale of 1 to 10. Like honestly I might think I'm a 3 at X, but if some test that thousands of other people took tells me I'm in the 90th percentile of X users, that information is still useful to me.
  - kareemsabri 4y ago
    Seems like a great bit of information for you to have. And if it's in the 30th percentile, it may let you know to either not apply to jobs that want that skill, or work to improve.

tmp_anon_22 4y ago

AFAIK their promise of "we use machine learning to..." never panned out even remotely. All the processes ended up being mostly manual, with all the tradeoffs that entails. With the money they raised, after spending so much on marketing, I assume they downsized, lost some talent, and pivoted mostly to a sales-driven recruiting business for their top clients.

treis 4y ago
Yeah, the economies of scale that VCs are looking for weren't there. And even if they stayed to their original model it would have been too easy for niche competitors to erode their margins. Think Triplebyte for Android developers only times 20 different programming areas.
ammon 4y ago
That was true of our process as it existed in 2017/2018 (and was a part of why that business was not viable). At this point, what we do is develop tests (backed by psychometric models). These are more accurate than human phone screens (and especially more accurate at finding people who have strong skills bad "bad" resumes)
- tmp_anon_22 4y ago
  > These are more accurate I can't imagine the difficulty to accurately measure the success or failure of long-tail HR hiring processes like phone screens. The success or failure of a candidate post-hire has so many variables it must be very hard to attribute them to signals present in a screen. I imagine most of the data points are derived from signals found in successful candidates, and then trying to find them in an assessment or screen. Its really hard, and I hope the negative tone of my comment does not suggest I don't respect the problemset and the people willing to throw themselves at it.

anoncow419 4y ago

Pretty much how I felt with my experience. Aced the quiz, completed about 95% of the project, then got anxious with a very open-ended presentation I had to make up on the spot, and the interviewer was very not pleased with anything I did. Got rejected and was sent a long list of complaints about me and my work. Don't think I would have survived to meet the "founders" they had anyway.

heavyset_go 4y ago
> Don't think I would have survived to meet the "founders" they had anyway. You dodged a bullet, some of the most "interesting" interactions I've had with founders were from those I talked to through TripleByte. There was also a pair of them that were clearly digging around for business ideas and markets to enter.

armchairhacker 4y ago

To be fair, I think a shared interview system would be great. Then companies don’t have to devote time and effort into their own interview process, which turns out to be Leetcode and full of false positives / negatives anyways. But it needs to be: - In-depth. Not just a single exam or interview. You need to really know the employee’s strengths and weaknesses - Detailed. You can’t just give someone pass / fail or a single score. Not only is it mean, but you end up getting misaligned candidates anyways, because some people are really bad at some aspects of software but good at others. In fact maybe the process should ditch scores entirely and just show the recruiters the actual employee interviews, and what he/she has and has not accomplished. - Changing over time. Not a short period of time. But like, if I take the assessment, 6 months later I can take a smaller assessment and it will update my scores and log my progress. Triplebyte is not 1 or 2. Idk but I think it’s 3 and you can retake the quiz. But then it’s only telling employees if you’re basically competent for some arbitrary statistic, which doesn’t even tell if you’re basically competent at the company. I think it would be nice if i could take one thorough interview instead of several less-thorough company-specific interviews, but that’s not Triplebyte.

avereveard 4y ago
Idk, as a company I would still want to run my interview, and candidates would probably hate the double interview. Pre interview would also get stale fast. Companies wouldn't trust a third party to run binding technical assessment for them, and quality devs would probably avoid places that hire without having someone from the destination team show up I think the opposite would be more beneficial: a light check to validate work claims and some high level foundational question about code just to make sure one has basic proficiency in what he claims he has Then companies would need lot less hr pre-screening and could focus in technology and culture matching
- wan23 4y ago
  I'm very sure that a consortium of FANG type companies could get together and design a shared interview for generic technical skills, and then run normal interviews for candidates that pass that step. And when I say normal interviews, I mean the stuff that an individual company should want to do, such as behavioral, talking about past projects, etc. Making candidates do leetcode type sessions at every place they apply is a waste of time for both candidates and companies.

yosito 4y ago

I had a similar experience, but when they rejected me, they sent me links to some tutorials for "Getting started with HTML and CSS". I had 8 years of experience at the time.

heavyset_go 4y ago

I went through the process and was accepted, and I agree with this post. It's not just sour grapes or anything like that.

itsdrewmiller 4y ago

They provide tools for companies to directly request applicants to fill out their screens (and presumably get those applicants into their job pool too). I don't think they're the only player in the space, but their actual tests are by far the best I've seen, and as an employer they are fulfilling all my core needs.

Maultasche 4y ago

I ended up getting a job through Triplebyte late last year. My current employer reached out to me through the platform, and was interested in interviewing me. I had never heard of my current employer prior to that. So it helped me in introducing me to companies I wasn't previously familiar with, but other job platforms work in similar manner. I get the impression that Triplebyte has changed from what it used to be. I never even talked with anyone at Triplebyte. I did well enough on some skill test that I was put on a fast track and quickly approved without any interviews. I also got opportunities to take other tests to rate my skills in particular areas. It seemed like a decent place for presenting possible candidates to employers with some pre-screening, but it wasn't anything particularly innovative. I imagine that as an employer, it helps filter out a lot of unskilled candidates with pretty resumes and reduces the number of interviews required.

bb010g 4y ago

I started at my current job at Cisco back in November through Triplebyte. The process was pretty pleasant throughout. I was reached out to through the platform; everyone I reached out to through the platform either denied me or didn't respond.