4 ms·

Might be a little elitist but it always seems like these sites go for the broadest applicable market rather than sticking to their lanes of catering to at the v

Might be a little elitist but it always seems like these sites go for the broadest applicable market rather than sticking to their lanes of catering to at the very least experienced engineers. TripleByte felt like a premium product that cared about both sides of the transaction but when I came back to it years later, maybe I had changed but the site just felt... bad, like that it was just a job mill. It didn't feel premium, it felt like a hokey recruiter site with a Silicon Valley skin. It doesn't help that companies also treat(ed) it like a job mill. I would have companies reach out, tell me my resume looked great and fit all the criteria then would turn me down for lack of experience when I responded.

zitterbewegung 4y ago
I had a weird experience with Triplebyte. First I take their intake test and then I’m ghosted for a year or two. I email them and I got unghosted somehow. They said it was some kind of glitch but it didn’t really appeal to me…
titanomachy 4y ago
I had the same experience. In 2017 it was amazing and I felt like I'd discovered an incredible career-boosting hack. I told all my friends about it. By 2020 it felt exactly the same as every other low-grade career mill. To be fair, none of my friends that I referred to TripleByte actually passed their (2017) screening process. So it was a site that was very useful to a very small subset of engineers. I'm sure there's a viable business in that premium market, but probably not a unicorn scalable tech company.
Xt-6 4y ago
They start elitist, people love them for it but that's a niche market as the top "1%" is, well, only 1%. So to justify valuation/please VC/increase revenue, they have to increase the pool of candidates which basically destroy the value-prop of their service.
- rachofsunshine 4y ago
  (TB's head of product for the last ~year and a half here - I wasn't involved in the decision to pivot away from the old model, but I'm retroactively aware of its reasoning.) This is essentially correct. Our original model worked, more or less, for a small pool of candidates. But acquiring those candidates was extremely expensive in ways that scaled poorly as Triplebyte grew. Basically, we were dependent on ads for growth (anyone who used Reddit at the time probably saw a lot of our ads, shout out to /r/againsttriplebytemike), and the marginal cost of ad conversions grows as you try to scale how many people you're bringing in. Slightly less cynically: if your business can't exist without VC funding, but can't justify the expectations of that funding, you never really had a business to begin with. You borrowed one temporarily. This is normal for startups, and VCs know that they won't always (or even usually) succeed, but you can't sit on your break-even-ish business when that's not what VCs were funding you to do. For what it's worth, early TB's efforts (and for that matter, late TB's efforts, both before my tenure and during it) were sincere, it's just that that sincerity is predicated on actually being able to make a working business out of it.
  - compumike 4y ago
    (The engineer formerly known as "Triplebyte Mike" here. Hi Chel!) Harj recently described Triplebyte's user acquisition trajectory publicly in a video from Y Combinator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s from timestamps 7:53 to 9:33. But yes, ads worked for a while, until they didn't.
  - camdenreslink 4y ago
    I got my current job through TripleByte, so thanks for that! I feel like the niche exists for how Triplebyte was set up, but maybe it is not a VC-scale “unicorn” type of business.

zitterbewegung 4y ago

I had a weird experience with Triplebyte. First I take their intake test and then I’m ghosted for a year or two. I email them and I got unghosted somehow. They said it was some kind of glitch but it didn’t really appeal to me…

titanomachy 4y ago

I had the same experience. In 2017 it was amazing and I felt like I'd discovered an incredible career-boosting hack. I told all my friends about it. By 2020 it felt exactly the same as every other low-grade career mill. To be fair, none of my friends that I referred to TripleByte actually passed their (2017) screening process. So it was a site that was very useful to a very small subset of engineers. I'm sure there's a viable business in that premium market, but probably not a unicorn scalable tech company.

Xt-6 4y ago

They start elitist, people love them for it but that's a niche market as the top "1%" is, well, only 1%. So to justify valuation/please VC/increase revenue, they have to increase the pool of candidates which basically destroy the value-prop of their service.

rachofsunshine 4y ago
(TB's head of product for the last ~year and a half here - I wasn't involved in the decision to pivot away from the old model, but I'm retroactively aware of its reasoning.) This is essentially correct. Our original model worked, more or less, for a small pool of candidates. But acquiring those candidates was extremely expensive in ways that scaled poorly as Triplebyte grew. Basically, we were dependent on ads for growth (anyone who used Reddit at the time probably saw a lot of our ads, shout out to /r/againsttriplebytemike), and the marginal cost of ad conversions grows as you try to scale how many people you're bringing in. Slightly less cynically: if your business can't exist without VC funding, but can't justify the expectations of that funding, you never really had a business to begin with. You borrowed one temporarily. This is normal for startups, and VCs know that they won't always (or even usually) succeed, but you can't sit on your break-even-ish business when that's not what VCs were funding you to do. For what it's worth, early TB's efforts (and for that matter, late TB's efforts, both before my tenure and during it) were sincere, it's just that that sincerity is predicated on actually being able to make a working business out of it.
- compumike 4y ago
  (The engineer formerly known as "Triplebyte Mike" here. Hi Chel!) Harj recently described Triplebyte's user acquisition trajectory publicly in a video from Y Combinator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s from timestamps 7:53 to 9:33. But yes, ads worked for a while, until they didn't.
- camdenreslink 4y ago
  I got my current job through TripleByte, so thanks for that! I feel like the niche exists for how Triplebyte was set up, but maybe it is not a VC-scale “unicorn” type of business.