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Why Triplebyte Failed

• teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  TripleByte worked amazingly well for me. I even use my TripleByte backpack every day on my way to work. Back in 2018 I was a new grad in Pennsylvania trying to move to the Bay Area. Attempting the process of interviewing, scheduling everything so I can fly out and do on-sites, booking a hotel in a new city for the first time etc. would have been overwhelming. But the whole process was taken care of for me. I got 5 interviews scheduled across Monday through Friday. The hotel was paid for. Uber rides to and from offices were paid for. My flight was paid for. I ended the week with 2 offers. I got them to fight over me and then picked the job with the clearly superior work culture. Since then I've worked at seed stage companies, Google, and moved around the bay a bit. It would have been possible without TripleByte, but the value prop as a candidate was tremendous. The employer I joined continued to use TripleByte, almost exclusively, until we got an in-house recruiter. Even then we still used it as a solid side channel. I think 3 or 4 of the engineers that joined were TripleByte candidates. They really were excellent at digging up people who wouldn't have seemed like the right pick just given a resume, but in fact were perfect fits once settled in. The only problem, now that I've got some experience under my belt, is that my professional network makes something like TripleByte unnecessary (unless I move to a new area, in which case I could use help finding a good job). But once we're hiring some full stack web devs at work I'll take a serious look at OtherBranch.
• coyotespike 2y ago
  I liked this piece - excellent high-level thinking through the available market opportunities, especially given the constraint of venture capital. And the moral framework is down-to-earth: nothing wrong with ambition and risk even when things go south, paired with a buck-stops-here attitude. I'd bet good money OtherBranch will succeed.
• hash872 2y ago
  Would be interesting to hear Rachel's take on all the contract recruiting (?) firms that claim to do the same thing, test candidates and then provide them to employers- just on remote contracts for temp work. The OG in this space is Toptal, but there seems to be a lot of VC money in a bunch of upstarts in this space. They all say 'we screen our developers through an extremely rigorous yada yada process'. They tend to have a lot of developing world talent. Not sure if that's the future of online talent platforms or what have you
  • rachofsunshine 2y ago
    I don't have special knowledge of Toptal's screening process. But when I look at their pitch (linked below), what sticks out at me is the lack of specifics. ----- (From https://www.toptal.com/top-3-percent https://www.toptal.com/top-3-percent) > We also test each applicant's technical knowledge and problem-solving ability through various assessments. "Various assessments" is about as maximally vague as you can be. Imagine if I asked you how you'd build a back end and you went "oh, you know, various technologies, um, APIs, probably some functions" - that's the level we're operating on here. Here's how you do it not vaguely: Otherbranch's assessment is, currently, a 90 minute call with an engineer. It's synchronous over video and screen-share and split into 3 subsections: coding, knowledge, and system design. Coding is a small app in the console, you can find an example problem at https://www.otherbranch.com/practice-coding-problem https://www.otherbranch.com/practice-coding-problem . Knowledge is a mix of CS/algos, full-stack web development, and "deep tech" (systems-level/security/internals). System design is really standard "build this basic business system and scale it up". If you want more depth on our grading, I can show you that, although I don't share our actual questions verbatim. I did the structure and I've led large-scale assessments before, and our interviewers have done thousands of hours of interviews and several are ex-FAANG. Now, granted, we're in one domain and they're in many, so specifics may be hard to produce here. (And they may even be bad sales practice, so there might be non-malicious reasons for not including them.) But it still catches my eye. > we typically only advance candidates with exceptional results in this phase. 26.4% of candidates pass basic English screening, according to the numbers next to the previous claim. Of those, they claim, 7.4% pass this step. Note that no screenings for actual skills have occurred prior to this step. If we assume that domain skill and English screening are weakly correlated (this is probably a bad assumption, literally any two skills anywhere have positive correlations), they're passing roughly 25% of applicants by skill. Let's generously say 15-20%. And the 80-85th percentile of applicant is horrible. So I just don't buy "exceptional results" here. > Each candidate is interviewed by Toptal screeners who are experts in their functional domain. Again, vague. Interviewed for how long? With what criteria? How are you determining that they are "experts in their functional domain"? > Each candidate is assigned a test project to evaluate whether they can "walk the walk." Test projects take 1-3 weeks are comprehensive and provide real-world scenarios for candidates to demonstrate their competence, thoroughness, professionalism, and integrity. This part looks better! Until you look at the numbers next to it, which indicate a 90+% pass rate for this phase (and still a roughly 10% pass rate from "people who cleared basic English language skills". It's easy to say you're rigorously assessing people. But when they're so evasive about the details, I get suspicious. ----- I'm not saying Toptal isn't better than nothing. I'm not an expert on international hiring, and they seem to be doing pretty well as a business. And this vagueness may very well be a feature, not a bug - my verbosity gets me into trouble sometimes when I write copy. In fact, this very post demonstrates a good reason NOT to be specific, because armchair experts will pick your exact numbers apart without the appropriate context. (I justify myself by saying that this is, in fact, my area of expertise.) But if you want my snap take, there it is. Toptal people reading this thread, feel free to drop in with details if you got em!
• chaostheory 2y ago
  > The idea was this: if higher-education and prestigious experience weren't reliable sources of quality, and if you could make an ML model that could identify it better through testing The problem is that in reality those two sources of data are really reliable. YC itself is mostly composed of people (over 90%) from prestigious schools and organizations. It’s rare to see anyone accepted to YC, who was from a mediocre or unknown institution for both education and work experience.
• JesseAldridge 2y ago
  I always find it strange that people who talk about tech interviewing inexplicably overlook what seems to me to be a core defining characteristic: they are highly traumatic. You take some poor bastard and have him struggle at coding puzzles in front of someone he very much wants to impress and then watch as he fails miserably. They are left feeling like they are biologically inadequate to their job. It's a direct assault on egalitarian sentiment - a load bearing pillar of civilization - even if it is more or less a noble lie. By definition, they only take the top 1%, and 99% of people get to eat shit. Inspiring existential resentment in the vast majority of people who interact with you is obviously not a recipe for good karma.
  • rachofsunshine 2y ago
    Stress I'll grant you. But what's your alternative to selectiveness? Is your expectation that companies, who are spending a substantial amount of money to hire someone, should not try to hire the best person they can get for their buck? Like, I'm enough of a leftie to agree with the idea that one's ability to contribute in the workplace shouldn't determine your ability to live a decent life. But that doesn't mean companies should hire someone who can't do the job, it means being unemployed shouldn't be a virtual death sentence, which isn't fundamentally a problem of hiring processes.
    • JesseAldridge 2y ago
      I do not have an alternative and agree that this type of screening is necessary. I just think the fundamental problem here is not procedural as the post seems to suggest - but rather social-psychological. Making the experience less painful to the losers is the key problem to solve. That would fix the candidate pipeline problem because people would be less terrified of failure. I don't know how to solve it. To quote Leonard Cohen: It's coming from the sorrow in the street The holy places where the races meet From the homicidal bitchin' That goes down in every kitchen To determine who will serve and who will eat I do not envy anyone in the position of making this determination!
      • 2y ago
• MisterBastahrd 2y ago
  Go look at the resumes of everyone in a leadership position at that company. Find me the person who has ever run a recruiting desk. You can't do it. Every engineer has an inner know-it-all recruiter who just instinctively knows not only how to recruit, but how to run a successful recruiting business. Which is why almost none of them have ever been successful at building a recruiting company. Because recruiting is a people problem, not a technical problem, and people problems are vastly harder to scale. If you don't believe me, go talk to third party technical recruiting firms and ask them what the backgrounds of their top contributors are. Unless they're being spoonfed with a sweetheart deal from a former employer, virtually all of these people can barely operate their own PCs, much less know anything about engineering. I used to be a recruiter. The three most successful third party technical recruiters I know (with incomes in the 300k+ range in Texas, not SV) are a high school dropout, a college dropout, and a theater major. These people know how to communicate with other people, are as nice as can be over the phone, and they will fight you over a stray nickle. Being great at recruiting is about being great at building relationships. Building relationships is built upon trust. Clients need to trust that the recruiter can find candidates and convince them to sign on when the time comes. Candidates need to trust that the recruiter is motivated to find them a position. As long as the effort is there, the better the recruiter balances that trust factor, the more money they make. Triplebyte sucked at the people game. They sprang public opt-out on people and couldn't figure out why that would be such a big deal to potential job seekers. They assumed that their process was so great that experienced devs who had jobs and lives and lifestyles and families would just jump at the chance for impersonal coding evaluations. They started a company with no idea how to recruit and hired people to build a recruiting product who had no background in recruiting. And no, founding a company does not give one recruiting expertise, even if they're doing the hiring. It is both a talent and a skill. Oh, and here's a fun one: they failed to recognize that along with being a people game, recruiting is a numbers game. Being highly selective in your pool of candidates is a genius way to run out of money as a recruiting firm, especially when you've already chosen to place numerous self-own barriers in front of you. The average third party technical recruiter with a year of experience actively maintains and prunes their own database of 3-400 candidates. More than that is too many people to manage. You can either pay a bunch of engineers to attempt to automate a small part of their process, or you can simply hire people to do the work and pay them according to what they produce.
• lackbeard 2y ago
  This is a very interesting, very well written post. The part that stands out the most is: > if you needed venture capital to produce a viable small-scale business, you didn't really have a viable small-scale business to begin with. Triplebyte's break-even status was an illusion, predicated on funding that would probably never have existed if that scale were the founders' only ambition. I wonder if there's a way to build a viable business out of a product like FastTrack that does not depend on venture capital to get going?
  • rachofsunshine 2y ago
    Your curiosity might be sated by clicking one of those buttons on the navbar <.<
• taway-20230404 2y ago
  Yet another Triplebyte placement chiming in. The FastTrack product worked incredibly well for me in 2018. At the time, I had just over a year of full-time SWE experience but was struggling to get any traction, being still relatively-junior and without a degree; my open-source work wasn't cutting it. Meanwhile, the '90s legacy tech company I had ended up with was proving to be a professional dead-end. I took Triplebyte's test, did their interview, apparently did pretty well (at that point in time, they weren't showing candidates their own scoring) and over a period of about 2 weeks chatted with 14(???) different companies. I narrowed it down to three onsites and ended up with two strong offers, one of which I took. I'm no longer in that role, but I now work as an infosec-focused SWE at a prominent Bay Area fintech. I get to lead work I care about, and get compensated in a way that I couldn't have dreamed of ten years ago. Triplebyte made that possible for me in a very concrete and permanent way. My resume in 2018 was the kind of thing a lot of hiring managers would've tossed; not any more. The loyalty I feel towards a company that's no longer around makes me wonder if Triplebyte could've worked on a longer timescale. I'm now the kind of candidate they were trying to acquire via Screen, and if they still existed, they'd have a very good shot at recruiting me on behalf of their clients.
  • rachofsunshine 2y ago
    > The loyalty I feel towards a company that's no longer around makes me wonder if Triplebyte could've worked on a longer timescale. Yeah, I started a company basically because I got tired of wondering about that.
• light_triad 2y ago
  It's too bad they didn't make it they had quite a bit of name recognition especially in SV. But basically it's a tarpit idea (TM YC) where everyone passionately agrees that hiring is broken but there's no straightforward alternatives. It's basically a services business disguised as a tech play that doesn't scale, an attempt to disrupt a high touch sales process (and there's a reason that these processes run the way they do even though they are subpar). Also specifically with hiring it's extremely fragmented and every company has their own internal method and preference - or rather voodoo magic they like to use.
• jonahss 2y ago
  In 2018 I managed a team at a marijuana startup and was evaluating Triplebyte for recruiting. One evening, after sampling our own product (post-deploy smoke tests), I went through the Triplebyte quiz to see what my candidates would experience. A couple years later I was job hunting myself, and went back to my Triplebyte profile. I sheepishly admitted that I didn't bring my A-game to the quiz, but was told I couldn't retake it, even though it had been a few years. Odd to me that there wasn't a provision to account for candidate's skills to grow over time. Got plenty of interviews anyways >.> I used Triplebyte successfully for recruiting as a manager at two companies, and was sad to watch it decay and die while working at a third :( I hired some of the best people I've ever worked with on Triplebyte.
• ketoDiets 2y ago
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• metadat 2y ago
  I'm hoping someone will humor me: At the beginning the author states the "shorter version" is at https://www.otherbranch.com/blog/rebooting-something-like-triplebyte https://www.otherbranch.com/blog/rebooting-something-like-tr... Then in this shorter article: > But maybe we can fork it. (In the Git sense, not that one!) With a wikipedia link to the Good Place TV show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Place I don't get it though, what does The Good Place have to do with any kind of 'forking'? @rachofsunshine: what the heck?!
  • philsnow 2y ago
    In the show, the characters can’t swear (non-spoiler: because they’re in the Good Place, and nobody can swear there) so they say “fork” and “shirt” and so forth.
    • metadat 2y ago
      Ah, got it. Thank you kindly, philsnow.
• wodenokoto 2y ago
  What did triplebyte do that interview.io doesn’t? (Haven’t used either, but one is still around and the other sounds like a major loss to society)
• cgearhart 2y ago
  > "But for all that I'd love to believe that that was because of the wonderful quality of our product, it realistically wasn't. It was ads." > Why were we able to buy those ads? Because investors gave us a lot of money. > And why do investors give companies a lot of money? On the expectation that they will pursue aggressive growth, not stop at small to middling scale. This exactly describes the same lessons I learned working at Udacity around 2016-2018. We built–and then walked away from–a handful of moderately successful businesses that probably could've been run almost indefinitely at little marginal cost. Instead when we crossed 50k enrollments we pivoted–because 50k enrollments doesn't justify unicorn status. (I don't think that was wrong; it's just that that's what the investors wanted.)
  • rachofsunshine 2y ago
    I wonder if there should be a less-speculative investment arm whose entire model is "pick up the nonscalable businesses venture firms find and can't commit to". Sounds really interesting, actually! You need the speculation to find the niche, but then you need the not-speculative approach to exploit it.
    • cgearhart 2y ago
      That’s an interesting idea! There’s already a lot of companies that are founded out of the graveyard of startups that failed to scale. (Sound familiar?) ;-) I think the conventional wisdom would say that it’s not worth the effort to put together those smaller companies though; those resources would be better spent finding a different business that could scale. It would probably depend on whether there are any efficiencies of operating many such businesses. Aside: good luck with Otherbranch. TripleByte was a critical part of my own career journey in 2018/2019, so I’m keen to see how it goes this time around. My complaints about TB were basically that it was too focused on SF Bay Area (I get it…), and it didn’t have an ML track until long after it was relevant for me.
      • rachofsunshine 2y ago
        I can't see why it wouldn't be worth the effort to assemble a suite of companies with millions in ARR. It might not be funding-AirBnB-level profitable, but there's plenty of money in it, and your hit rate would be far higher. Structure it as something akin to an accelerator, pitch it as the way to run a company with less risk and less of the wild existential uncertainty of being a traditional founder, take a big chunk of equity to compensate for the idea being prefab and maybe give a payout to the pivoting company as a pseudo-fire-sale acquisition (which also funds their pivot), take on some employees who liked the pre-pivot thing and set them up with your Very Talented Founders(TM), and go to town. This should exist. The more I think about it the more I think it's an excellent idea. > Aside: good luck with Otherbranch. TripleByte was a critical part of my own career journey in 2018/2019, so I’m keen to see how it goes this time around. My complaints about TB were basically that it was too focused on SF Bay Area (I get it…) Thanks! Hopefully the Bay Area thing might be less of an issue for us, because (a) we're recruiting specifically for individual roles (so we're not burning a bunch of cash if we get a good candidate where we can't place them yet) and (b) tech has definitely dispersed from the Bay over the last few years, even if not completely. I'd love to work with some of the Sun Belt startup scene.
• labaron 2y ago
  I used FastTrack in the early days and loved the product. Problem was their question bank was too small so it was easy for anyone motivated to cheat. I spent under an hour reading reviews of what questions were asked, prepared solutions for those questions, and then in the interview there were no surprises. I merely regurgitated my prepared solutions. One of them was making a tic tac toe game. If employers knew how easy it was to pass the Triplebyte exam then I wonder how many would have allowed candidates to skip to onsite.
  • rachofsunshine 2y ago
    This was an issue, but less of one than you'd probably think. I estimate that roughly 10% of people we vouched for were cheating. 10% is certainly not zero, and it was occasionally trouble with clients, but 10% also kind of disappears into the general noise of different hiring processes and steps to the point that that estimate could be off by a factor of 2 or 3 in either direction. There's also the sort of sad statement that even prepping that much puts you far ahead of the average candidate. We TOLD candidates what to expect (and we do at Otherbranch, too) and the overwhelming majority do not even read that, which requires no active searching, no moral compromise, and no pre-knowledge of our process. Triplebyte did, late in the history of FastTrack, start rotating problems a bit to address that problem.
• GLORIA90 2y ago
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• GLORIA90 2y ago
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• lilian90 2y ago
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• Mary984 2y ago
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• gjsman-1000 2y ago
  TL;DR: Publicly facing profiles, with an opt-out instead of an opt-in, was a footgun moment.
  • henryaj 2y ago
    Yup. Easy to destroy trust.
    • rachofsunshine 2y ago
      It absolutely is, and it's something I am very much aware of. I considered including something about that incident (for those of you coming in with less context, they're referring to [1] this) in this article, but I didn't for two reasons. One, I sincerely do not think that was actually fatal (it was, at worst, a symptom of the same forces that forced a pivot). And two, the best thing I could say about it in terms of going forward is "no but seriously I'm not going to do that", which _I_ know is true but you obviously don't (and if you trust me when I say that, well, I don't think you're cynical enough). Every time I tried to write about it in the early draft versions of this post, I found myself coming back to saying both "you're not cynical enough and you shouldn't trust a damn thing I say if it doesn't cost me something" and "but look how I'm actually different". And that just seemed wrong to write. It's hard to be an honest cynic in a world of distrust. Because I want you to trust me, because I think I am worthy of that trust, but I also think the average person is nowhere near cynical enough about how easy it is to fake sincerity and want to scream that fact from the rooftop. ---- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837
      • salade_pissoir 2y ago
        The fact that you chose not to address this incident is exactly everything we need to know about why Triplebyte failed.
        • itsdrewmiller 2y ago
          What does it tell us exactly?
• 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
  It's interesting to see how much "standardized cross-company interview for software eng" has been consistently a cursed problem in the industry. Unlike airline pilots (or I'm certain many other professions), every company in the valley insists on re-interviewing a candidate in their own custom and unique way, instead of trusting some sort of an industry-wide certificate only achievable through a standardized test. Wonder if this will ever be solved. I remember way back in the day where it felt like Triplebyte might finally figure that one out, but it unfortunately never happened.
  • gjsman-1000 2y ago
    Part of me wonders if the recruiting itself is over-engineered anyway. I mean, imagine if you just asked: Implement Bubble Sort, in 2 Languages of your choice, with multithreading or other language-provided parallelism, with the correct number of parallel threads to be most algorithmically efficient Would that really not weed out a lot of people? I think it would. I know the above algorithm is hardly production-ready, but the requirements are easy to understand. (It's also a bit of a trick question - there is no optimal algorithmically efficient number of threads in a bubble sort, only the number of CPU cores in the system.)
    • anonymoushn 2y ago
      What's your approach for parallelizing bubble sort in a way that profits from cores beyond the first?
      • thdc 2y ago
        It's probably alternating the comparisons. Compare [0, 1] [2, 3] [4, 5] ... in parallel and swap if necessary, compare/swap [1, 2] [3, 4] [5, 6] ... in parallel, then go back and forth until no more swaps are made - second element in pair is always greater/less than the first. That does suggest that the theoretical ideal number of threads is n / 2 ignoring cores, though you'll also want to consider things like cache line size, cache coherency, and actual problem size so it's probably less. At the end of the day, the important thing would be to actually benchmark your attempts and seeing how it scales with processors/problem size and checking the isoefficiency. I think it was a bad question.
• hnrodey 2y ago
  I did the Triplebyte candidate process back in 2019 and overall it was a pleasant experience. Shame they didn't make it.
  • zeroCalories 2y ago
    I went through the process and liked it too. The engineer made critiques about my code that I found silly though, which really makes me question if I would really trust a candidate approved by them.
    • AlotOfReading 2y ago
      In my case, they didn't support my specialty (robotics/embedded) and focused the tests of DB scaling because that's what the interviewer knew. Like, I'm sure it was a good test for somebody, but it made no sense as a validation of my skills or experience.
      • rachofsunshine 2y ago
        Yeah, we didn't have a good embedded track. We called it "generalist" (well, we didn't call it anything at first, but it became "generalist" later), but it was really back-end-leaning full-stack web dev.
  • chc4 2y ago
    I applied to TripleByte in 2019. I passed the interview, they sent me some swag, and then had my profile "go live" for a week(?). I didn't get a single interested company, and then they took my profile down and said I can try again in 6 months. I don't really have much of a takeaway from this, I guess, other than they also had other failure cases that caused them to lose money.
  • llama_person 2y ago
    They got me a stellar job many years ago, but unfortunately for them it's hard to monetize candidates unless they return through the same pipeline. My outcome was great, but I was one and done.
• blindriver 2y ago
  Triplebyte failed because: 1) They were useless friction. As a candidate I could apply directly to the companies I was interested in, and take a phone screen and then on-site. With Triplebyte I had to take their much more time consuming process and get to the same point of either another phone screen or on-site. They added absolutely no benefit to me as a job seeker. Especially during the hiring heydays of 2019-2022 why would I need to use Triplebyte when I can get access to the recruiters myself? If applying through Triplebyte offered some sort of benefit, like an easier on-site or straight to team match because the candidate had been vetted by Triplebyte, then that would be useful. Instead it was more interviews just to get to the same onsite that you could get to by passing a phone screen, so it was useless. 2) Triplebyte betrayed user privacy by posting their names etc on a new service that the users didn’t explicitly subscribe to. And it took a while for the CEO to acknowledge that and backtrack. That was the deathknell for Triplebyte for me as a candidate.
  • racional 2y ago
    Interesting that this post gets right to the point with at least plausible, and more to the point: user-focused reasons as to why Triplebyte filed. While the blogpost starts off with -- its "impressive founding pedigree." That's the first thing these people think of in their root cause analysis.
    • SmellTheGlove 2y ago
      It’ll be interesting to see how much “founding pedigree” actually matters now that free money is gone. It’s not to say it was ever easy (and I’ve certainly never done it), but I’d bet even folks with past successful exits are going to have a hard time these days. Hell, the market has shifted so much that I wonder if having done it before matters a whole lot now, when you fundamentally today need a different attitude toward free cash flow early on versus 5 years ago.
      • doctorpangloss 2y ago
        Being (or working with) the son or daughter of a celebrity or prominent rich person / business leader is more important than ever.
• peppertree 2y ago
  The problem was standardized hiring is it become too easy to game the process. You end up with a pool of engineers good at studying and it doesn’t always translate to good engineering.
• kenschu 2y ago
  I'm the founder of a new tech assessment co - I hear "you guys remind me of Triplebyte" at least 1x per week. Clearly they were onto something originally - there's a lot of lingering love among eng leaders. Our thesis is that LLMs unlock a lot in this space - and that we can provide more signal to employers, while giving candidates a better experience. There's a lot of open/difficult questions to doing this well - we're trying to figure it out. (edit: we're not building an "AI recruiter" that asks you a time you failed or automates hiring decisions - we are extensively using LLMs to do things like problem/module generation, etc.) I'd love to better understand the Triplebyte story. If you enjoyed their product (as a hiring manager, or as a candidate) or if you feel passionately about this space, I'd love to talk to you. Email is in my bio.
  • minimaxir 2y ago
    LLMs + hiring is a very very risky combination.
    • kenschu 2y ago
      One that we have to tread carefully! I should have clarified - we're not just putting an LLM on the other side of the candidate and letting it drive decisions. Instead think of things use cases like content generation (we don't have a problem library - we create custom problems/modules for each customer of ours), etc. That's where I think you can improve signal a lot, by setting up a better situation to assess the candidate.
      • altdataseller 2y ago
        By content generation, do you mean take home problems or interview questions?
        • kenschu 2y ago
          Both! Generally more of the former.
  • dmitrygr 2y ago
• lacker 2y ago
  It sounds like the core problem is that companies don't really have trouble screening large amounts of incoming low quality resumes. It's annoying and time-consuming for the software engineers, but it's a well-known process and the CEO/CTO/COO/VP who controls the budget can just make the engineering team do it. The core problem that companies are willing to pay for is "top of funnel". The obviously skilled, experienced software engineer that every company wants. How do you make them interested in your company in the first place? Triplebyte did not really have a cost-effective solution for that, although that's what people wanted most when buying their service.
  • rachofsunshine 2y ago
    They can just make the engineering team do it, but that's really expensive. A failed onsite is more expensive than if the candidate walked in the door, grabbed someone's laptop, threw it out the window, and left. That's a big deal. Even a 15-minute phone screen at typical Bay eng salaries is like a nice steak dinner (particularly if you include disruption to actually go do it).
  • itsdrewmiller 2y ago
    The article says people loved screen, and as a user myself I concur and used it for exactly what was mentioned - screening junior candidates efficiently. Theoretically if the company wasn’t venture funded they could maybe have waited for those junior candidates to turn into senior ones that people want. I wish someone would bring back that tool.
  • bhuga 2y ago
    > How do you make them interested in your company in the first place? Triplebyte did not really have a cost-effective solution for that They absolutely did! It was getting companies to agree to skipping straight to the onsite after a 15-minute recruiter call. This lets you skip the back-and-forth of screen scheduling and result chats. In turn, that saves weeks of time during a job search, and allows you to have all of your onsites within a short time period, and then and offers come in within a much narrower window of time. You can make apples-to-apples comparisons about which role you might take that way, so it's a much lower cost for a much greater payoff to spend a few hours interviewing with a company you weren't thinking of to see if it's a fit. In my mind, this was the absolute killer feature. I am still at a Triplebyte job 7 years later that impressed me via their onsite, and I would not have thought to apply if they had not been on TripleByte's skip-to-the-onsite list.
• kleton 2y ago
  It was a nice jacket they were giving out though.
• perspectivezoom 2y ago
  I was Triplebyte's first engineering placement. I still remember going to a random SoMa apartment with Harj and Ammon and Guillaume and coding up tetris in ruby, having no prior experience with game loops. That landed me a job with Flexport in 2016. I doubt that I would have gotten that placement without Triplebyte. So I am quite grateful that they existed, for jumpstarting my early career. With that said, when it came time to look for a job again a few years later, I did chat with Triplebyte but ultimately took an offer through other contacts that I had built up by then.
  • jiveturkey 2y ago
    You're not evaluating this on a proper A/B basis. I dare say, you might not have landed at Flexport but you would have landed somewhere? pedantry: surely you didn't go to a random apartment, rather it was their apartment.
    • distortedsignal 2y ago
      I'm another TripleByte placement. After my (virtual) TB interview (which I barely passed), I had onsites at 5 places. After the five on-site interviews, I had 2 job offers, one of which was a company I wanted to work for since graduating college. I took the other offer. This was preceded by a four or five month job search. I had received two offers in that time, but nothing seemed great. I think TB's process kinda worked, but I understand your skepticism.
      • jiveturkey 2y ago
        I'm actually not all that skeptical of TB's approach. They built a real business around it, way more targetted than eg Karat. Even though ultimately unsuccessful, that is surely more due to PMF and various missteps, than to lack of advantage for individual applicants vs spray and pray approach. (When taken as an average across all applicants.) I'm just highlighting that GP's specific anecdote doesn't really demonstrate that advantage. Your example seems much more clear. Somewhat OT for this specific sub-thread but I wonder how much "OA" tools that are part of coderpad etc, contributed to TB's demise. These are meant to be fizzbuzz kind of pre-screens. I know TB's approach was more than that, but from the hiring side, was the value not there since you'd always (?) have your own coding exercise after the TB screening.
• parpfish 2y ago
  there is also the user expereience of feeling like you've been rejected at scale. you're used to getting rejections from applications you send out, but getting a rejection (or even just being slow at getting an offer) makes it feel like the entire industry has turned you down
• cbanek 2y ago
  I feel like they didn't cover one of the massive losses of confidence in TripleByte, which was when they opened up their database of candidates and did not really warn people ahead of time. I'm struggling to remember all the details, but I feel this happened a few years ago and really pissed off the HN community and a lot of people scrambled to hide the fact they screened with TripleByte. I feel like as an outside user this was the nail in the coffin. The dark patterns just took over.
  • wging 2y ago
    It's not covered extensively in the article, but it was alluded to at one point via the phrase "pissed them off with anti-privacy decisions". (In context, 'them' refers to the engineering side of Triplebyte's user base.)
    • jimberlage 2y ago
      Anti-privacy can mean "we accidentally leaked that you visited facebook.com on Nov 15" or "we allowed your employer to see that you're actively job hunting." I mean technically the same term is OK to use for both, but it does feel like it's burying the lede.
  • rachofsunshine 2y ago
    See [1] for more on that (to avoid duplicating threads). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40635518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40635518
  • geoelectric 2y ago
    I felt that was an odd omission in the article. Maybe it didn’t have a huge market impact outside the local crowd, but it was a big deal then. I seem to remember the CEO posting in the threads apologizing, etc.
• debacle 2y ago
  Recruiting is brokered enterprise sales. Realty for human resources. And, like realty, recruiting is 80% shit, 15% good people, 5% crooks. And, like realty, ripe for disruption in niche markets (like IT). As a buyer, Triplebyte should have gotten me: 1. Access to a larger pool of applications through their network. 2. Better matching between needs/skills through expertise. 3. Higher trust in applicants without initial screening. As a seller, Triplebyte should have gotten me: 1. An apply once, interview anywhere system. 2. Much higher trust in the interview process. 3. A higher initial starting salary through expertise. It seems like Triplebyte was too hot for fast growth. Had they decided to grow more slowly (probably with less or limited VC), they likely could have established the expertise necessary to fulfill on some of the requirements for providing the kind of value they needed to offer to become relevant in the industry.
  • rachofsunshine 2y ago
    Well, that's essentially what I'm trying to do with Otherbranch (specifically, 2 and 3 of your "buyer" points and 2 and some of 1 and 3 of your "seller" points).
• nostrademons 2y ago
  So I founded a couple hiring-related businesses a year or so before TripleByte. I eventually decided to get out of the space for reasons that are touched on in this article, but I would sum that up even more bluntly: Hiring is a market for lemons. The really good employees are almost never on the market [1]. They'll get one job, stay for years, and then if conditions change so that that job no longer fits their needs, they have enough of a network that they'll get snapped up by some other company in a jiffy. The folks that do tend to populate the open job market often have one or more dysfunctions that make it hard for them to slot into the corporate job market, the most common of which are not wanting to slot into the corporate job market and not being able to define yourself enough to identify where you should slot into it. Software can't fix this; it's all about making internal emotional choices and then doing what you need to do to make this apparent to other people. As a result, successful hiring strategies often don't look like hiring strategies. They include things like: 1. Internships 2. Contractor conversions and contract-to-hire roles 3. Sponsored conferences and competitions 4. Employee networking 5. Open-source projects 6. Paying more 7. Being the only one left hiring in an economic downturn 8. Investing in retention 9. Ex-employee outreach This article seems to make a mistake I made early in my entrepreneurial career, of misunderstanding your competition. The competition for a hiring startup is not resumes, recruiters, and job boards; these are generally terrible ways of finding new employees. It's personal references or open-source projects, which are the actual good ways of identifying new talent that isn't already snapped up by an employer. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-developers-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...
  • Jianghong94 2y ago
    Maybe we can add: 1. going remote and support remote; 2. set up offshore offices.
  • rachofsunshine 2y ago
    > The folks that do tend to populate the open job market often have one or more dysfunctions that make it hard for them to slot into the corporate job market, the most common of which are not wanting to slot into the corporate job market and not being able to define yourself enough to identify where you should slot into it. I think this is a pretty good reason to have an org that "speaks corporate job market", but that doesn't evaluate candidates the same way the corporate job market does. A person who is skilled but doesn't want to/doesn't know how to/has moral objections to selling themselves the way employers often want benefits a lot from having an agent who can vouch for them. As for the market-for-lemons thing, yeah, absolutely! It's a good framing. And in that analogy, I'm betting on the idea that a team of mechanics that can identify the good cars is valuable.
• crmd 2y ago
  What I remember of Triplebyte was, out of nowhere, omnipresent and inauthentic advertising that made it very clear someone was spending a lot of money to target me.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• IshKebab 2y ago
  There's a funny contrast between the beginning where they want a meritocracy of candidates and the end, where they are only interested in Americans from prestigious universities.
  • pcthrowaway 2y ago
    Interesting you should say that. I'm neither American nor from a prestigious university, though I had a lot of success with Triplebyte towards the end (as a candidate)
• Jianghong94 2y ago
  I can't help but want to draw the parallel between triplebyte and dating app: both are marketplace for 2 parties, or say networks; both networks are inherently two-tier, one premium tier and one, let's say subpar tier. For the premium tier, the problem is less so the efficiency of the matching process because participants have powerful signals, I would say the problem is the efficiency of negotiating a fair term because both parties are not incentivized to go to a public auction, hence no market price. Hence the hiring process may be less so investigating potential candidates and more so "let' just wait two weeks and see who's the highest bidder". For the subpar tier, the problem is less so the efficiency of the matching process (this still is part of the problem), but more so a cost-effect analysis: is it worth throwing X amount of resources to filter a huge pool of unknown quality candidates? Obviously, one more problem is that there's no easy way to use whatever incentive to quickly bump up the supply. So intrinsically, triplebyte/dating app tried to use tech to alleviate the pain point, but it is a part of the bigger, convoluted mating dance, and improving a non-critical part of the whole pipeline doesn't yield a so-called step function gain overall. That, plus venture backing, forces triplebyte to go down the rabbit hole and try to acquire as much of the lower subpar tier network as possible, yet this dilutes their attention and human touch on the premium tier, and goes down a death spiral. Sorry I do not intend to bash the author or the founders for picking this problem/user need to solve, it just occurs to me that this heterogeneous network with no easy way to increase supply/lower demand, is really hard for a marketplace company and sometimes simply throwing technology onto the white-hot competing segment may not be the groundbreaking solution. I wish the author all the best with their next endeavor
  • rachofsunshine 2y ago
    We talked about the dating-app analogy a LOT, and I think it goes quite deep. It applies to almost all competitive markets, especially matchmaking ones. > I would say the problem is the efficiency of negotiating a fair term because both parties are not incentivized to go to a public auction, hence no market price. Are you referring specifically to salary negotiation here? I think this is one of the things that makes a trusted intermediary useful. During signup, or during an initial recruiter call with candidates, I ask about salary with the following script: > Okay, what are your salary expectations? To be clear, I will NOT share this with clients unless you tell me that I can. This is just so we know what jobs you might be interested in - the only thing we'll communicate is whether you match a client's salary range or not and vice-versa. While I doubt the incentives here align to perfect honesty, it's certainly a lot better than the background, in that each side gets information on the other only after revealing semi-honest preferences used to match them. > For the subpar tier, the problem is less so the efficiency of the matching process (this still is part of the problem), but more so a cost-effect analysis: is it worth throwing X amount of resources to filter a huge pool of unknown quality candidates? Yeah, this is where the pitch about centralization - the main pitch I want to make with Otherbranch, since I think the full background-blind pitch was overselling things - comes in. There's some threshold where the cost-benefit analysis is neutral for companies, in the sense that there is 0 expected value to the next marginal candidate. But if we're effectively interviewing for more than one company, that threshold is lower for us, because the cost is similar and the benefit is higher. I don't expect we're going to be able to get a mediocre developer with a mediocre resume an amazing job. I'm not really trying to do that. I'm trying to get an amazing developer with a mediocre resume an amazing job, or a good eveloper with a mediocre resume a good job - one better than they could have gotten on their own.
• imzadi 2y ago
  I went through the triplebyte process around 2020. I was accepted into the program and assigned a manager (or whatever they were called). He setup one interview for me, but it didn't lead to a job. Shortly after, he sent out a message that the company was changing directions and he would no longer be part of it. They changed it to basically a job board with more steps.
• camdenreslink 2y ago
  I got a great job through Triplebyte, which let me skip a technical leetcode interview I definitely would have failed. Very grateful for them.
• neilk 2y ago
  Rachofsunshine: for what it's worth, I appreciate that there are people who insist on trying to change the market, rather than doing what the market wants. I did some early interviews with TripleByte and appreciated they were trying something different. It's just a different kind of effort and it's hard to change people's minds with just money. Often, a grassroots movement arises that slowly changes consensus, over years, and only then some well-funded player can come in, see which way the trends are going, and capture the value. My current startup is so remote we had to move Friday meetings to Thursday to accommodate Japan and Oceania. In my experience the Silicon Valley practices of the 2000s and 2010s already seem antique. So maybe TripleByte they were just early? Or as the post mentions, maybe the funding environment was wrong. We are often told that a loose funding environment encourages new ideas to prosper. But whatever happened in the 2010s with ZIRP seemed to concentrate wealth for people who had already gotten through various gatekeepers. I am sort of in the Silicon Valley ecosystem and sort of not, working remotely for American companies, so this stuff just feels like a distant thunderstorm to me. I can see new graduates getting my salary or higher for doing very basic, mistake-laden work, and I can't figure it out. But this helps put it in context. Anyway, perhaps a downturn is a better time to start trying to change minds, although that's going to be a very long battle and the TAM is going to be "???" for quite a while.
• devdao 2y ago
  Because 'this dev is 3/5 on our Javascript assessment' is useless information, and it subtracted value from everyone that interacted with it
• Darkstryder 2y ago
  I am not very familiar with Triplebyte but I really appreciated this (seemingly) candid yet lucid writeup about how it was all went down from the inside. These kind of insider perspectives, even if they come with their own biases, are very interesting nevertheless. I wish I would see these types of articles more often.
• Glyptodon 2y ago
  I took their quiz without thinking once from a throwaway account because I was afraid of taking it from a real account and also because I had no context about what would be in it, which made it seem high risk. That made me realize it wasn't as scary a thing as I was afraid it might be, but also kind of summerizes what I don't love about it. Later, I think I took the quiz from a real email. I think could have scheduled an in-person or something. But I was always afraid to: just like with the quiz, it felt like another layer of high risk, where being slightly off on one thing would kind of potentially blacklist you forever. (Which sort of sounds absurd to me now, but young me was like "what if it matters?" and "it'd be humiliating to not make it through.") I work for a company that's been invested in by reputable venture firms so I don't think I'm bottom of the barrel as an engineer or anything. But the above anecdotes are to illustrate that I always found that the platform push my deeply ingrained risk aversion buttons. Which is interesting to think about. With job interviews it's extremely annoying to prove you bona fides over and over, with every interview or application. But having the opportunity to do so only once seems even worse. Edit: that said, I think doing a professional exam after college wouldn't have seemed risky in the same way as a ~12 question quiz and a couple interviews being so potentially determinitive.
  • fallingknife 2y ago
    I went through their process for frontend like 6 years ago and got to the in person interview and it was the most inane BS I have ever wasted time on. A bunch of questions like listing "best practices for X and tell me about <buzzword tech thing>.
  • throwaway81523 2y ago
    I did the online interview and then the in-person one and those worked out ok. But, I think Triplebyte was only viable because the huge engineering shortage at the time made that high-touch and expensive process worth pursuing. Its purpose was to find talented people who otherwise would fall through the cracks. Now there are unemployed engineers with impressive resumes everywhere, so there is less demand for a deep-digging recruiting operation like Triplebyte.
  • rachofsunshine 2y ago
• wonderwonder 2y ago
  I remember taking the quick for this. Passing and then I scheduled the interview. The first question was to code an app just like excel. I totally blanked. It was my first experience ever coding live with an interviewer watching me. When I say I blanked I mean I could not even remember how to code a class. Was a unique experience and I definitely learned a lot from it. The interviewer was great and very understanding. Made me appreciate how hard a tech interview could be. Interviewer was a good dude though, hope he is doing well.
• narcindin 2y ago
  > (I won’t talk about Magnet much here, because the proximate reasons for its failure are pretty simple: we ran out of money and the market fell out from under it. It might have - smart money says probably did have - other means of failure, but we didn’t last long enough to find them in any great detail.) This has the same voice as patio11. Did he start this style? Is it new? Who else talks like this?
• clpmsf 2y ago
  Not all (or most) people-problems can be solved with software. Recruiting/hiring is a pure people-problem. No two people are the same. No two groups of people (i.e., companies) are the same. It's a "problem" that everyone has felt, but it honestly seems like an unsolvable problem... and "problem" mostly likely isn't even the right word - more of an uncomfortable reality.
• ramesh31 2y ago
  They lied about the core value prop. Their qualification process was nothing more than another entry point to the standard interviewing regime.
• djaouen 2y ago
  Why does there have to be a reason? Some things just fail and there is nothing we can do about it.
• fwungy 2y ago
  I've been at this business for a few minutes and can say it's not that hard to identify good candidates. 1) a native and active interest in computing 2) good english 3) good (enough) social skills A good software team is built like a good NBA team: 1) a limited number of exceptional performance contributors, not many of these, by definition. Right tail of the normal curve. 2) Good support players with specific skills and the personality to allow your superstars to maximize their potential. Everyone seems to be looking for 1) in the interview process because that's the gold, but 2) are extremely important to get 1) in the door and working at optimal. Finally, you need to avoid 3) frictional team members, i.e. negative work. These are people who inject drama into the team process that does not contribute to outcome. A passionate team member who takes hard stances at times is a good thing, even if they're not always correct, because they can head off a bad outcome early in the process. However, someone who just causes drama and turmoil, or even simply breaks the team flow state, is also a big problem. A team can easily be spoiled by 3) even when you have the perfect superstar and supporting cast because the focus turns from the product to the emotional drama, which is a huge drain. This leads to a tangential, but important point, the current hiring mandates for modern practice are potentially catastrophic for software development teams. Inserting people onto a team who become 3) will kill a product and drive away your highest value contributors. Superstars in this field don't want drama, they tend to be introverts who are happiest quietly working on their own. It then follows that meeting modern day hiring protocols often means pushing the equity component into the soft skills side of the company, which means your hiring pool for marketing, hr, project management is reduced to fulfill various hiring mandates. This leaves a lot of experienced, valuable people, who understand good software development because they've done it, on the sidelines because they have the wrong physical characteristics, e.g. the 60 year old who is pushed out of the tech side because of an outdated skill set would probably make an excellent project manager because they understand the SDLC from a technical and personal perspective. Who better to mentor young developers? But those roles are often going to young college graduates who don't have that experience and just end up glamourized secretaries because they don't have the formative passion for the field. The NBA superstar/support model works in software development. It's the only thing that creates high quality, high impact outcomes historically. It's the desire to reconfigure the schema into a social change experiment via mandated hiring that causes the complications.
• dzonga 2y ago
  what I haven't seen mentioned in the comments is that Triplebyte had so much funding to just have a database of 250k users / engineers. Yeah, at that scale bootstrapping would've been the way to go.