[HN Gopher] Rethinking Triplebyte
___________________________________________________________________
Rethinking Triplebyte
Author : Harj
Score : 226 points
Date : 2021-06-17 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (triplebyte.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (triplebyte.com)
| minimaxir wrote:
| The overall idea seems like Glassdoor with extra steps.
| ammon wrote:
| The difference is that I think we're in a position to actually
| change behaviour (require companies to not do bad things like
| ghost candidates, lie about salary).
| epberry wrote:
| Credit to these guys for not giving up. Hiring engineers remains
| unsolved so if they're still in the game they still have a chance
| to ultimately solve it and reap the rewards.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| In 2021, you don't even have to search for engineering jobs. You
| either start out with a shortlist of companies and roles or a
| recruiter reaches out to you and kicks off the process.
|
| Maybe this would be useful for folks just starting their career,
| but on the hiring side of this, in the last year I haven't made
| an offer to a candidate who didn't already have at least one
| other offer on the table.
|
| Overall I think there are a lot of misconceptions about how
| people are hired from the recruiter side -- which is why most of
| these platforms see the recruiter as the target customer, not
| engineers. I get that y'all are trying to change that, but
| without insight into the hiring practices at any given company
| (e.g. my company gives a lot of latitude for salary negotiations
| but every hiring manager negotiated differently) it's going to be
| hard to pull a signal from the noise.
| crooked-v wrote:
| While the constant supply of recruiter contacts and even direct
| internal company contacts I get is nice, I repeatedly see the
| sort of basic issues as mentioned in the piece of concealment
| of or lying about pay (or incredibly broad pay ranges),
| entirely leaving out information about a job's location even
| when it's on the other side of the country, trying to offer
| entirely inappropriate junior positions that I'm never going to
| be interested in... all stuff that has zero cost to a hiring
| manager but wastes my time. I could see a lot of usefulness in
| something to push back against that in a structured way.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| On the recruiting side (I'm not a recruiter but a director
| making a lot of hires), we actually do the opposite all the
| time -- we post relatively senior positions then downlevel
| whoever we hire to fit their experience level. A lot of
| people think more highly of themselves than the employment
| market does.
|
| We look at the job posting as a brand marketing -- all we're
| really trying to do is get you to apply and fill the funnel.
| The whole hiring process is designed to be a calibration on
| role, cultural fit, compensation, etc.
| htrp wrote:
| Downleveling is a flaming trainwreck in almost every case.
|
| Seems almost like the bait and switch that the OP company
| is railing against in the blog post.
|
| I'm curious to see how you guys have managed it without
| disgruntled employees quitting within 18 months.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| In a narrow sense, that's the thrust of the case we're trying
| to make here: if veteran engineers didn't frequently have
| competing offers, they wouldn't hold the amount of power they
| do.
|
| That being said, the experienced engineers who can get that
| kind of attention have other desiderata in their job search
| beyond just "get an offer". "Get -an- offer" is a goal more
| typical of a new graduate or someone trying to break into the
| industry than it is a goal of experienced engineers.
|
| To people who are sure they can get _a_ job, there 's a big
| difference between a 150k offer at a company that has none of
| the workplace traits they want and a 200k offer at a company
| that they'd genuinely love to work for. And right now, they
| can't necessarily tell the difference between those jobs before
| going through a bunch of application steps. The example we
| mention in the post - of a highly credentialed and very senior
| engineer who kept having his time wasted by recruiters who
| refused to admit that they couldn't offer what he was worth -
| wasn't cherry-picked. It came up organically while we were
| doing user research, because it's a really common problem, and
| was echoed further by a number of other senior engineers we
| spoke to.
|
| (Of course, we care about the folks just starting their career,
| too, so I don't want to totally ignore the importance of
| solving problems for them. But I think we are solving an
| important problem for senior devs here, too!)
| naimishviradia wrote:
| I saw this change comming in the market. Every company which went
| IPO want to double the strength of the employees. I have a friend
| who got response from companies like Compaas/Affirm/Coinbase/Sofi
| also (Apex clearing after NSTB merger want to double it) and a
| lot more.
|
| My firend cracked interview and joined one of this and for others
| like me have no traction (6 months in) on the resume at all after
| using hired/linkedin/direct careers/cold emails. Doesn't matter
| you have github with real projects/portfolio with good responsive
| design .......
|
| If this process is broken and we also don't know what are we
| doing wrong then how all them are going to find all these talent
| they need??
| xyst wrote:
| Triplebyte was a dud for me. Way too many garbage startups
| recruiting.
|
| I have started to re-write my resume for each application and
| that has yielded much better results in terms of quality of the
| company and number of interviews.
|
| If you are submitting the same resume to multiple companies, you
| are doing it wrong.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| FWIW, this isn't really true as you get some experience under
| your belt and have a stronger resume (meaning, having worked at
| companies that people know of with a clear story of how your
| own role made a big impact there).
|
| But glad you figured out an approach that worked for you!
| nunez wrote:
| Who was the woman that wrote about how every "innovative"
| engineer recruiting platform eventually devolves into LinkedIn
| Recruiter?
|
| Because she fucking nailed it with Triplebyte.
|
| I used Triplebyte. I really liked it. The leads were not as great
| or as numerous as I was hoping, and I felt like I still had to do
| pseudo-technical interviews anyway. Fucking COVID, man.
|
| I hope this pivot works for them.
| 2arrs2ells wrote:
| Aline Lerner: https://blog.alinelerner.com/ive-been-an-
| engineer-and-a-recr...
| nunez wrote:
| Thank you!!!
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| A recruiting agency with a hundred thousand recruits in a
| database is not functionally any different than a call center
| with a list of leads they purchased and validated.
|
| Do not believe anyone who tells you they can force employers to
| change their methodology when it comes to salary and compensation
| revelation. Recruiting agencies are so far outside that
| wheelhouse that it's damned near scandalous to even pretend the
| statement has any validity.
|
| Also, I think it's important to differentiate staff recruiters
| from outside recruiters.
|
| Staff recruiters are HR people. They're on the job to shove
| square pegs into square holes.
|
| Outside recruiters are salespeople. They're on the job to explain
| why a round peg can reasonably fit in a square hole.
|
| This is your career. So act like it.
|
| If 10 different people were each going to give you a hundred
| dollars if you described yourself to them in a way that would
| obviously ingratiate yourself to them (person with cat photo,
| person with dog photo, person with photo of their kids, etc) most
| would immediately come up with reasons to make themselves1 appeal
| to their tastes.
|
| But people keep on submitting the same dumb resume over and over
| again and expect a different result. Accentuate the things in
| your resume that matter to the company you're trying to get a gig
| at. Yes, for each of them. If you would do it for a grand, you
| can do it for a career.
| jawns wrote:
| Some Hacker News context and discussion from last year around the
| "fiasco" that CEO Ammon Bartram mentions in this blog post:
|
| Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to
| become public (1543 points)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837
|
| Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology (1030 points)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037
| throwaway273575 wrote:
| Will this newfound respect for users' privacy be backed up by a
| contract or some other legally-enforceable commitment, or do we
| all have to worry about when you decide to pivot again in another
| couple years?
| ammon wrote:
| I hadn't thought about this from a legal contract perspective.
| I like the idea of making our commitment enforceable. Do you
| have ideas of what you'd want in a contract?
| htrp wrote:
| Practically, you wouldn't be able to have any type of
| contract enforceable in court.
|
| It would be a nice touch though.
| towergratis wrote:
| The problem with Triplebyte IMHO is that what the originally
| promised, while a great idea and concept, it cannot scale. Also
| after interviewing with them for a role in their company I got to
| realize they don't know how to conduct interviews themselves.
|
| I used them two times. The first one was very early on, where I
| was given a home assignment and interviewed on it by Aaron
| himself, if I am not mistaken. The dude was awesome at
| interviewing, and knew exactly how to probe to get a better
| understanding of your skills.
|
| That was when they were promising that you can interview with
| them so you don't have to do technical interviews with the
| companies. I thought it was an awesome concept and could really
| reshape hiring in the tech industry.
|
| Second time was a couple of years ago, where the model has
| already changed a bit. Passed the first round and one of the
| companies that I could interview for was triplebyte themselves.
|
| What a disappointment! The only difference in the interview
| process than the rest of the companies was that they gave you a
| laptop and asked you to do practical coding instead of whiteboard
| generic algorithm solving.
|
| Some of the interviewers themselves were junior members of the
| stuff with 0 experience in interviewing.
| naimishviradia wrote:
| Yup happened to me. The experience they wanted to provide
| couldn't not be scaled up.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > The problem with Triplebyte
|
| is that they say they have companies like Apple and TrueCar
| posting job listings and hiring but they actually never respond
| and all you get is offers for companies between 10-200 people
| in size (aka, startups)
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| I'm guessing this is your experience - was this more than a
| couple of months ago? We made some changes about ~6-8 weeks
| ago to how we order jobs to prioritize responsive companies
| much more than they were in the past. We also use
| responsiveness as an input to the "Likely To Accept" score
| shown for each job (here's a screenshot of a posting from my
| own prod-testing account: https://imgur.com/wSmGCEL).
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| This was my experience twice trying to use Triplebyte in
| the past 2 years.
|
| It's a great platform, the indicator letting me know
| companies aren't going to respond is great.
|
| It just doesn't fix the problem that... the quality of
| companies on Triplebyte aren't companies most
| senior/lead/architect/advisory level engineers are willing
| to settle for. I'm being unnecessarily harsh/biased. I'm
| sure plenty of people use the platform with great success.
| I've just come to accept "early/mid-stage startups" job
| offers from Triplebyte and not much else. Not necessarily
| "garbage" but... for sure lots of risk.
| towergratis wrote:
| Ammon not Aaron. Apologies
| _fullpint wrote:
| I had a pretty bad Triplebyte experience myself.
|
| Scheduled a practice interview and the only slot available was
| ~6AM my time. Nobody showed up and I wasn't informed that they
| wouldn't be showing up.
|
| After reaching out about it -- they tried to tell me that my
| interview scored poorly, and that I would need to retry again
| in a few months. After some back-and-forth they realized both
| that it was practice interview and that the person didn't show
| up. So they rescheduled the practice interview.
|
| When the interview did happen -- this was for ML stuff -- the
| interviewer was just no great. We spent so much time discussing
| the differences in terms we used -- mine largely coming from
| University, there's from I'm assuming their formal education --
| that much of the interview was wasted. It literally came down
| to me deriving what we were not agreeing on for them to
| understand we were talking about the exact same thing.
|
| I then had to reach out several times for my results, I'm
| assuming due to the fact that you're allotted one practice
| interview, and technically I had two(?). When I finally got my
| results I was again informed that my results were not good
| enough, and I'd need to wait to reapply. I gently informed them
| that it was practice interview, and the representative
| apologized their mistake.
|
| When I reviewed my results... the interviewer didn't rate me
| too well, largely due to our differences in terminology. They
| also didn't like my coding style -- even though no one has ever
| complained to me before -- and rated the coding exercise poorly
| even though I was able to perform what was asked of me.
|
| I just gave up.
|
| Then several months later, I got an email about being
| TripleByte certified or whatever.
|
| The whole thing was a really bizarre experience.
| halfofhalf wrote:
| I had a great experience with Triplebyte's quiz and interview. I
| suppose I'm in the category of people from "nontraditional
| backgrounds"; I majored in English in college. Getting past
| resume screeners was an enormous relief and an important boost to
| my career. That boost will have compounding effects for the rest
| of my life; I love the job I got through Triplebyte.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| I tried out Triplebyte a few years ago on my last job search and
| did well enough on the quiz to bypass the technical screen.
|
| Long story short I bear no ill-will towards the people at
| Triplebyte but will not attempt to use them again.
| jo_ wrote:
| Another voice in the fray, I also did well enough to bypass the
| technical screen. Interviewed with four companies they
| recommended. Picked one. Still with them two(-ish) years later
| and an outspoken advocate.
|
| It's a tricky situation because you have to balance being
| accepting of people with non-traditional backgrounds while also
| making sure they can do the basics. I liked that TripleByte
| could condense DAYS of interviews into a few hours.
|
| In general, long tech screens are hard on people that can't
| afford to take off a full day, so it's tricky for people
| already working in crushing jobs that need a change. The
| TripleByte quiz worked nicely for this.
|
| On the flip side, if their tech screen is filtering people for
| reasons other than ability, it's removing possibly good
| candidates who deserve a shot at something.
|
| The new approach is sounding like it's trying to satisfy the
| latter, which is good for improving inclusivity, but won't be
| to everyone's liking.
| hnxs wrote:
| The best thing I got out of Triplebyte was a great piece of
| written negotiation advice, from a recruiting specialist that
| has, presumably, since been laid off.
| acarl005 wrote:
| I got my job through TripleByte. I consider it my dream job.
| Honestly, I loved the experience with TripleByte. I got a bunch
| of interviews to happen at the same time. Having them all
| together increases our bargaining power. It's hard to get the
| processes with different companies to coincide if you're just
| waiting around for recruiters to reach out. I already felt like
| it gave me the power. I'm sad to hear it's changing, because I
| would've used it again. I've also referred tons of people out of
| genuine liking of the service. Not sure if I can recommend it
| anymore. Still, I'm very thankful for what they did for me. I
| hope their new style works out.
| ammon wrote:
| I'm really glad that the old process worked so well for you.
| When it worked, it was pretty great. We are losing something
| with this pivot. The problem is that the old process did not
| work for far more people than it did. For every wonderful
| experience with a TM there were 10+ engineers who we screened
| out. That's why we made this change.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| > For every wonderful experience with a TM there were 10+
| engineers who we screened out.
|
| maybe (and i know that this is an outre thing to say these
| days) that was the point.
| [deleted]
| Sr_developer wrote:
| Me reading this announcement:
|
| "Jesus this guy writes and writes and says nothing. Wait, there
| was a link at the top to some sort of TL; DR, let me check on
| that to find out what the announcement is"
|
| > What are we pivoting towards? To explain, let's talk about
| economics for a second.
|
| Nope, I give up.
| qchris wrote:
| By far the most exciting thing about this announcement is this
| feature: "Detailed information on what a recruiter did with your
| application."
|
| I've been wishing for something like this for _years_. Especially
| for early-career engineers or people from non-traditional
| backgrounds, this is insanely valuable because it helps you to
| know avoid wasting time on applications that will never go
| anywhere; avoid typing in your resume, line by line, into another
| form after already submitting your pdf. Avoid writing a cover
| letter to a job that 's already been filled. Avoid applying to a
| posting that's really just out there for a company to "gauge"
| interest, not for filling a real role.
|
| If an application is rejected, fine. But getting a follow-up
| request 7 months after submitting a resume into a black hole is
| ridiculous, and I think any system that decreases the information
| asymmetry between the applicant and the employer that allows
| people to intelligently approach their career search is going to
| be tapping into something truly valuable.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| So fun fact, we built this feature as a pretty low-grade
| experiment, but when we ran it by actual users we got such a
| positive response that we ended up putting it at the top of our
| new front page.
|
| Like you, we thought (correctly, as it turns out) that it would
| appeal to people early in their career. What surprised us is
| that very senior engineers _also_ told us they loved it - we
| didn 't think it was as much of a concern for them, but
| sometimes your users surprise you.
|
| It's also a great example of how obvious low-hanging fruit gets
| missed until you start thinking strictly about "what can we do
| to make job seekers' lives better?". It's not a particularly
| innovative or difficult feature, and yet major job sites with a
| dozen times our engineering resources still haven't done it.
| treis wrote:
| It's ridiculous. You can go through a couple screens, 5
| coding interviews, and the end is just a "no" due to
| liability reasons. Literally zero information about why you
| didn't get an offer or if you were even close.
| tomrod wrote:
| Seriously. People ache for feedback in low information
| environments. Good on yall for taking customer surveys
| seriously (even if the data underlying it isn't always clear)
| because enthusiasm, though noisy, is a strong signal.
|
| I wouldn't charge for the service, however, unless building
| it as a freemium model.
|
| /economist hat
| Aperocky wrote:
| When I graduated I submitted around 50 applications to open
| jobs around where I live, to almost no feedback at all.
|
| I'm in this industry and doing well because of recruiter
| reaching out to me (multiple times) and not vice versa. The
| whole idea of applying for jobs just doesn't seem to work at
| all.
| gip wrote:
| My experience is similar but at a differet level of seniorty.
| I've applied to ~15 jobs for engineering manager and got 1
| answer.
|
| On the other end a recruiter reached out to me and I'll be
| doing the final interview with their VP next week.
|
| I don't think we can draw conclusion at that stage (we are a
| dataset of 2..). But I'd love to have access to the LinkedIn
| dataset to figure out if applying for jobs is broken at
| scale.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Waiting for a recuitor to call you limits your potential
| but makes the process easier for you. Applying yourself
| takes a lot of work but you get to select who you want and
| to target a bigger group which. But it's messy, ugly ,
| stressful and filled with rejections for no reason.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Where did you graduate from?
| Aperocky wrote:
| A school that has consistently ranked top 20 and sometimes
| in top 10.
|
| My major are slightly mismatched though.
| gip wrote:
| Did you use platforms like Handshake or Jumpstart to
| apply?
| Aperocky wrote:
| No, I used Linkedin at the time.
|
| Then I stopped bothering when it's super obvious that
| isn't working. Particularly, on Linkedin you could see
| the number of people that has applied (maybe a paid
| feature, i don't remember now). And for any entry level
| software engineering and data science position it's
| always in the 100s.
|
| The one recruiter that I had contact with did more work
| than all of these. I've since switched jobs (to one of
| the FAANG) and that was through recruiter too.
| reillyse wrote:
| I see a lot of people in the comments describe triplebyte as a
| "market leader" and discuss how good they are. I can't believe
| how gullible everyone is especially on a startup forum. Let me
| spell it out to y'all, nobody pivots and changes their entire
| business model if they are crushing it. So the implication is
| that triplebyte are not crushing it. So, this probably has gone
| the same way as lots of other tech startups. They've raised a
| bunch of money spent it all on ads , distorted the market for a
| while (usually just the advertising market) and now are on the
| way out. No matter what fluff or spin they put on it, that's
| what's happening.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Yeah, it says the company only helped with 1000 hires, too.
| hermanradtke wrote:
| Also know as: We spent all of our money on advertising before
| we found product/market fit and now we are panic pivoting.
| adfgiarguibu9i wrote:
| Based on my experience with them, I think they totally failed
| at their previous model.
|
| When I was fresh out of university, I had trouble finding a
| job. I had worked part-time at a small company through the last
| few semesters, but that company blew up just before I
| graduated. Every interviewer I ever met with was impressed
| because I really knew my stuff, but had trouble getting in the
| door due to an unimpressive CV and awkward mannerisms.
|
| I did very well at Triplebyte, scoring in their top bucket and
| getting top marks in several of the sub-categories. Those
| metrics are relative to _all_ engineers, which would put me
| even higher amongst recent graduates. I also did very well on
| every software project I worked on and scored top marks on
| several other objective tests, like the Major Field Test.
|
| I was _exactly_ the sort of candidate their system should have
| been able to help. I never even got an email out of it, let
| alone an interview.
|
| Waste of time.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| I was pretty happy with triplebyte from the hiring side.
| Slogging through candidates with good looking resumes that
| couldn't actually program was expensive for my employer and
| unpleasant for me. TB took care of that first big cut down.
|
| I guess they didn't hit product-market fit with candidates. Two
| sided markets are tough.
| tomrod wrote:
| Aye, but now they have email addresses for hundreds of
| thousands of engineers along with a reasonable metric for
| their capability.
|
| That's worthwhile.
| ipaddr wrote:
| How did you determine they couldn't program and what made the
| resumes look so appealing?
| bradleyjg wrote:
| We had a video conferencing phone screen with a shared
| coding environment. I gave an easy question.
|
| It's possible that they just couldn't code with someone
| watching but the effect was the same.
|
| Note that I didn't have control over the interview process,
| so I couldn't switch to a take home or something else.
|
| The resumes seemed like they had relevant experience.
| That's why I pushed them forward to the tech screen.
| distrill wrote:
| I went through triplebyte twice, once in late 2019 and then
| once again a few months later after the company I landed in
| shut down because of Covid. I was happy with the process, they
| promised to take a lot of the headache regarding tech screening
| and it worked. I think the value proposition is clear - I don't
| want to do the same tech screens 100 times, and lots of smaller
| companies may not have the resources or desire to manage high
| quality tech screens themselves.
|
| To be clear, I'm only addressing the comment about how people
| thinking highly of them are gullible. I had a great experience,
| twice, within a few months, and that included going through a
| time of huge uncertainty.
|
| That being said, I was not happy to see each of the changes
| they've made over the last year or so, and this does not strike
| me a good direction for engineers. I suppose I have to agree
| that they are not doing this from a position of market
| leadership. Perhaps they were providing asymmetric value to
| engineers, and at the end of the day the engineers are not the
| ones paying for the service.
| musicale wrote:
| > Perhaps they were providing asymmetric value to engineers,
| and at the end of the day the engineers are not the ones
| paying for the service
|
| This is a very good insight. Unless candidates pay more than
| companies, the incentives are off.
| twphysicsphd99 wrote:
| i felt the same way, astroturf marketing
| pc86 wrote:
| That's not what astroturf means.
| twphysicsphd99 wrote:
| the word astroturf doesn't matter
|
| this post is marketing with commenters associated with the
| company
| naimishviradia wrote:
| I think their process of 100% not working. They branded them
| self through advertising that they will provide constructive
| feedback if you don't crack their interviews so dev can improve
| upon shortcomings. My experience was different I never got
| feedback after my last round part of the reason must be they
| were not able scale this process up.
| babaganoosh89 wrote:
| Agreed, I recently used Hired and TripleByte. Hired gave me
| 2-3x more leads, and they were on avg much higher quality.
| Kalium wrote:
| I remember my experience as a candidate on Hired. I pretty
| consistently got low-grade startup trash (think collectible
| art trading cards, but digital!) with lowballed comp. If
| Triplebyte was worse, then it's no wonder they placed so few
| people.
| babaganoosh89 wrote:
| 80% of the leads I get from hired aren't too great. But the
| other 20% are quality.
| thebigspacefuck wrote:
| I've had a pretty good experience using Hired the past few
| months. After getting a lot of small startups, I put that I
| was only interested in larger companies with 500+ people
| and I don't see as many now. There seem to be a fair amount
| of large companies hiring remote after the pandemic WFH
| experiment, which is great for me outside of a major tech
| hub. Most places meet or exceed my salary expectations.
| I've gotten interviews with a few companies I'm quite
| interested in and would have never thought to apply at.
| This has required relatively little effort on my part as I
| usually write a cover letter and tailor my resume only to
| get rejected without reason, but with Hired I just set up
| my profile and get hits. I definitely would recommend it to
| anyone looking around for another job.
| hinkley wrote:
| There are two categories where people pivot while crushing it:
|
| One. The problem domain they are in is on its way out, and
| they've decided to defect instead of being the ones left
| holding the bag.
|
| Two. They hate what they do for a living.
|
| The first company to stop making buggy whips probably did not
| do it because they weren't selling any. The fact that they
| ceded market share to their top competitors probably sunk the
| barb in deeper for them: Yeah people are buying cars but _our
| sales numbers are still going up so why should we change?_
|
| In tech we see companies all the time end up being complicit in
| the destruction of their own industry by reducing its relevance
| in some manner or other, and by exiting early they have more
| options of destination. If I jump to the same industry as a
| competitor a year later I just look like a copycat. While some
| copycats copy other people, only better, they are the exception
| to the rule. Most churn out uninspiring derivative work, and if
| they can't at least do it cheaper then they end up on the
| scrapheap of history.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| In our case, it's more just an intermediate state between
| "crushing it" and "failing". We had a product that was
| working for a subset of engineers, but was running into
| structural and scaling problems. Simply put, it was (sort of)
| "crushing it" but was foreseeably not going to keep doing so.
|
| At that point, you can either keep going with what you're
| doing (and run into an inevitable wall later on) or you can
| foresee the future problems and pivot before they become
| unmanageable (which is what we did). Relatively few startups
| find their final model from minute one.
| ammon wrote:
| Fair comment. I certainly don't think of us as a market leader.
| LinkedIn is the market leader. Honestly, the last year has been
| pretty hard for us (COVID and the problems with our model that
| I talk about in the post).
|
| That said, I think a hiring process that puts engineers in
| control (no ghosting, get data on when a recruiter looks at
| your application, search ranking by whether companies lie to
| candidates) is something that should exist. I want to try to
| build it!
| f6v wrote:
| This is an admirable aspiration. Although, if I think about,
| the companies spend much more time with a recruiting/sourcing
| product. And the candidates change jobs like once every 1.5-2
| years? So optimising for a candidate experience doesn't seem
| right considering they're not the customer.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| I used TripleByte to recruit people for a startup without
| paying, by asking people to sign up for the test and
| screenshot the answers and collecting the scores at the end.
| I already had an inbound funnel, I just liked your test when
| I saw it the first time.
|
| In 2015, candidates with the same schooling scored about 20
| percentage points lower than 2020, the last candidates I used
| the test for. The number of questions doubled, and then the
| test got much easier, by eliminating more challenging
| programming questions and replacing them with questions with
| giveaway context. By comparison, according to my data, about
| N=43, until about 2018 being a senior versus a junior in
| college CS programs is worth about 10 percentage points on
| the test; going to Harvard instead of Berkeley is also worth
| about 10 percentage points. In 2020, the last tests had no
| predictive features.
|
| I stopped using the test, because it became too easy and too
| noisy to be informative.
|
| I recognize some of the coded language in the blog post.
| There are definitely more lucrative opportunities in
| recruiting for DEI. I don't know if it will last. If you're
| still jittery about the public-profile-by-default thing,
| which by the way, was totally irrelevant and overblown IMO,
| this may not be a pivot for you.
|
| One thing I see in the data is that at MIT, women and men
| performed the same, controlling for seniority. This wasn't
| true at the 3 other universities that produced enough data to
| measure.
|
| That said, what really is the best way to hire candidates?
| I'm not convinced having binders full of engineers is
| special, there are almost always more candidates than jobs,
| at least 5:1, in every non-credentialed industry vertical.
| Anyone who has worked at a jobs (or indeed any matching
| platform, like the Common App or Tinder) knows that.
|
| Then there's this long thing about asymmetries or whatever,
| warble garble about missing information... It has _never, not
| once_ been my experience that someone seeking a subordinate
| role at a typical private company with preferences like
| "pair programming" or whatever have _ever_ been better than
| someone with no preferences at all.
|
| Maybe it helps to engage in the vanity of whatever trendy
| workplace trend is hot for whatever vertical. But like, if
| you're being intellectually honest, if you thought pair
| programming was important, you'd pair program at TripleByte,
| but you don't, you know in your heart of hearts none of that
| shit matters, so why are you putting stuff like that into
| your search system?
|
| Indeed and ZipRecruiter are ad arb companies. They don't
| care. Private universities _lead_ , not _lag_ , DEI at giant
| companies, so it's hard to see how to compete against them in
| that core business. It will still come down to a real
| defensible opinion.
|
| Do you have more valuable inventory than ZipRecruiter for DEI
| candidates? Who knows. What an uninteresting question. Apple
| also hires people who just make shit up on their resumes, I
| know two - though they weren't engineers.
| musicale wrote:
| > there are almost always more candidates than jobs, at
| least 5:1, in every non-credentialed industry vertical
|
| If this were true for "qualified" candidates, there
| wouldn't be a labor shortage, right? ;-)
| ryandrake wrote:
| Companies just adjust their definition of "qualified"
| upwards until it _looks_ like there are too few qualified
| candidates, then call it a shortage.
| jedberg wrote:
| > going to Harvard instead of Berkeley is also worth about
| 10 percentage points.
|
| That's interesting to me. Most reputable rankings put
| Berkeley at #2 or #3, and Harvard is usually around #7 or
| #8 (and US News puts them at #16!). I wonder what the cause
| of that discrepancy is.
| [deleted]
| DylanDmitri wrote:
| I referred my friend to triplebyte and never received the
| promised $5000 referral bonus. My emails to support were
| ignored.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| That shouldn't have happened. Could you go ahead and email
| our support at support@triplebyte.com again (just so that
| you don't have to expose your data here) and let them know
| who you are? I let one of our support folks know to keep an
| eye out; we'll get you sorted out (and I'll check back here
| later this evening, so let me know if you don't hear
| something back quickly).
| mike_d wrote:
| If you want to put candidates in control, build a CRM tool.
| When a recruiter pings me on LinkedIn or emails me, I have a
| URL I can send them to with an intake form. No more calls
| wasting my time, I can see the company/role/salary/etc. up
| front.
|
| The trick here is you need to figure out a business model
| where you don't take money from employers, because once you
| do its just the long slide to becoming a shittier LinkedIn.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| > salary
|
| Colorado now requires job postings to include something
| more or less like a "reasonable salary range". It hasn't
| been perfect, for example there are some companies who now
| just restrict their online job postings to say "except
| Colorado" instead of adding a salary.
|
| But as someone living in Colorado it's been nice to know
| the salary range up-front more often and to have confidence
| that I can ask them for a salary range without getting the
| question turned back on me: "Well, what are _you_ looking
| for? "
| dmlittle wrote:
| In California recruiters are legally obligated to
| disclose the salary range upon request.
| [deleted]
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| We've talked about things in this area, but this particular
| framing is pretty interesting. We're talking about it now.
|
| I personally like this proposal and am probably going to at
| least draft a hypothetical spec of it and see how it
| fleshes out. Thanks for the suggestion!
| mike_d wrote:
| Awesome! I've started a POC, but as with most things I'd
| rather not have to build it myself.
| mattheww wrote:
| It's unbelievable that nobody has done this well - I and
| most people I know are tracking their own job searches on
| a spreadsheet.
|
| Pretty obvious value-add for job searchers. Not to
| mention that having access to this data would enable tons
| of other product features. Shows that most services/sites
| don't care that much about the applicant experience.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.kiter.app/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27256776
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| If you're interested in comparing notes, I'd love to hop
| on a call with you. (We've got some bookable slots linked
| at the bottom of the blog post, but I can make time
| elsewhere if you'd like.)
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| As a candidate, I'm willing to put up with sometimes shoddy
| interview outcomes (e.g., ghosting) if my funnel is far
| greater and consequently leads to a more competitive offer,
| which is the end goal. A narrower funnel, that pre-selects
| for higher expectations of how companies engage in the
| process, may end up falling short of what I'm optimizing for.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| Exactly, I don't understand all this moaning. You're only
| doing this every some years, you might as well try to
| optimize it rather than be picky, because it can make a big
| difference both career and compensation wise. Idiotic HR
| does not correlate in any way with a worse or better
| company, at least in my experience.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _I think a hiring process that puts engineers in control
| (no ghosting, get data on when a recruiter looks at your
| application, search ranking by whether companies lie to
| candidates) is something that should exist. I want to try to
| build it!_
|
| This is a space that unions fill well compared to for-profit
| recruiting agencies. The organizations give engineers control
| and leverage in hiring, and can help them up-negotiate. They
| also allow employers to hire from pools of skilled talent.
|
| Whereas with recruiting agencies, the customers are
| employers, not the candidates. Incentives are not aligned to
| give candidates control.
| filoleg wrote:
| While I still slightly prefer the direct experience for
| other reasons, the recruiting agency experience was pretty
| good for me in its own way. More specifically, when it
| comes to salary negotiation. Let me elaborate.
|
| People at the recruiting agency usually get paid a
| commission as a percentage of the first year of the hiree's
| salary (not taken from your paycheck, but just in general).
| Which means, it is in their interest to get you as high of
| a comp as possible. Which also means that I dont have to bs
| around with the recruiter about my salary expectations or
| anything like that. I give them the upper range of what i
| want, they tell me either "sounds good" or "they are easily
| willing to pay more, so why not try $X instead" or "they
| cannot pay that much, but there is this other company that
| we work with that can offer you as much."
|
| And if you work with one recruiter consistently, it gets
| even easier, because now that the recruiter knows my total
| comp expectations, she pre-filters opportunities for me and
| only contacts me if there is a position she is aware of
| that pays at least as much as I want or more.
|
| Of course there are downsides too, for example, the limited
| choice of companies that the recruiting agency is working
| with at any given time, so i still have to find some
| opportunities and interview with those companies on my own.
| But as a supplementary option, working with a good
| recruiting agency has been quite nice for me.
|
| P.S. The type of a recruiting agency i am talking about is
| the one that is focused on a specific sector (in my case,
| fintech/quant), so it might be a completely different story
| for a "generic software dev" recruiting agency.
| [deleted]
| tdeck wrote:
| A small bit of feedback here. I tried TripleByte a couple of
| years ago and the experience was really polished. I passed
| the interview and got great detailed feedback which I really
| appreciated.
|
| However, I dropped out completely because TripleByte wouldn't
| let me see companies without entering in a desired comp
| number. My recruiter at triplebyte said I could just put in
| "$1 or $1,000,000" to get past it, but that just feels like
| the same kind of corporate HR bullshit that people have
| complained about for years. Just Google "recruiter won't
| proceed without desired salary" and you'll understand how
| many folks dislike that question.
|
| The experience made me feel that Triplebyte wasn't interested
| in putting me in control of the process at all if they have
| such a user hostile requirement and require me to work around
| it by putting in fake numbers. I understand that many people
| will have no problem providing this info, but I prefer to see
| what companies offer me because it tells me how they value me
| and the position they're hiring for.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I never, ever, ever give anyone a number until the salary
| negotiation stage of the interview (ie. after I've been
| given a job offer), and even then I only give the company a
| number as a counter to their offer. I always do this
| negotiation myself, and never let anyone else negotiate for
| me.
|
| Almost all recruiters have been fine with that, but a
| couple haven't. To such people I wish a good day and go my
| own way. There are plenty of other recruiters in the sea.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Semi-serious question, asking for an indeterminate person:
|
| If your desired comp number _actually_ is $1M /year, will
| that just flag you as a joke to Triplebyte companies? With
| post-pandemic stock price increases a lot of engineers at
| FAANGs are making more than that now.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| You're totally right. If we'd been thinking in this mode
| when that particular requirement was built, it wouldn't
| have been. It isn't required today (and IIRC hasn't been
| for a while now).
| choppaface wrote:
| You want to build it, or you want to make money off it?
|
| As CEO, you:
|
| * Grossly expanded profiles without user permission.
|
| * Laid off tons of staff right before the COVID lockdowns.
| (What has been your personal returns since April 1, 2020 by
| the way?)
|
| * You have been privy to discrimination happening in client
| company on-sites yet did nothing to the client companies.
|
| You're a CFO, an investor. You're not a CEO, and you
| certainly do not have my trust as a developer.
| tdeck wrote:
| I thought this was pretty telling:
|
| > We got jobs for over 1000 engineers
|
| Given how many years Triplebyte has been running, "over 1000"
| seems surprisingly low. I wish them luck with their pivot.
| ammon wrote:
| So, under the old model, order 200k engineers applied to us.
| Because we were exclusive gatekeepers, around 3% of those
| were "accepted" onto the platform. Around 2/3 of accepted
| candidates received an offer, and around 1/2 of offers were
| accepted.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| I noticed that too, and when you combine it with "Triplebyte
| has hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform" it
| means they aren't doing great with the rate either.
| cinquemb wrote:
| in the comments:
|
| dev)
|
| > I forgot how to implement the zig operation in a splay
| tree.
|
| employee at Triplebyte)
|
| > To put some hard numbers to this: further down this
| thread, there's a post about how "any engineer" could
| answer a question the poster thinks is too easy. I looked
| up the question in our back end and, in fact, barely a
| third of people who take our quiz get it right (the correct
| answer isn't even the most common one!).
|
| So there 1000 job matches and at most (("hundreds of
| thousands of engineers on our platform" / 3) - 1000) who
| were incentivized to answer these contrived problems, did
| so correctly and still couldn't be matched.
|
| So even among the large pool of engineers who have gone
| thru the process, met some arbitrary threshold of engineer-
| ness, there's still a huge mismatch between
| corporate/prospective employee expectations, that I'm not
| sure will be able to be overcome quickly even with these
| new initiatives, but it's interesting that they are being
| pursed now (not surprisingly after the shift in working
| environment after massive government restrictions on
| freedom uber alles).
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| yea, I went through their process on the employer side, and
| my guess is an average hire is 10k, that means 10m in
| revenue total
| ipsum2 wrote:
| How much is a referral worth to companies? $1,000? If so,
| their revenue is only ~$1m, but they've raised $48m.
| benhoyt wrote:
| I have no idea what Triplebyte gets or even what their
| business model is, but typical recruitment companies get a
| _lot_ more than that -- on the order of 15-20% of the first
| year 's salary, so on the order of $15-25k. I suspect
| Triplebyte is less than that, but could be an order of
| magnitude more than you've guessed.
| codegeek wrote:
| "spent it all on ads"
|
| Funny but whenever I think of Triplebyte, all I remember is
| seeing their ads everywhere. I am personally a fan of Indeed
| and they do a good job sending leads and applicants other than
| good old Linkedin.
| devwastaken wrote:
| As always with posts about employment, the idea that there's
| higher demand than supply for engineers is a lie. The demand for
| highly experienced cheap engineers is high, the demand for junior
| developers is almost non existent. New CS grads struggle to find
| employment, there are tens of thousands of very capable devs in
| open source that cannot find employment. Nobody hears about it
| because only those that succeed are actually spending time on
| forums like these talking about it.
|
| We have a big problem in the culture of employing developers that
| is closely related to how the startup market operates. The market
| is willing to shovel money at a problem rather than spend time,
| therefore the market will pay someone with specific experience in
| their problem far more than pay someone less and have more time
| to learn the domain. This results in siphoning of experienced
| developers away from new developers, which artificially reduces
| the number of experienced devs. The market is _creating_ the
| problem for short term profit, and then turning around, lying and
| saying "there's not enough devs".
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| This is true, at least of developers who lack both experience
| and impressive credentials. A new grad from, say, UC Berkeley
| might be fine, a new grad from my own alma mater (which has a
| direction in its name) will often struggle.
|
| The reason we didn't talk about it as much in the main post is
| that our approach to the problem of credentials hasn't changed
| all that much. We still have quizzes, and someone who is having
| a hard time getting their foot in the door (a) is likely to be
| willing to put in the effort to take them and (b) will benefit
| from doing so. That's not a complete solution to the problem
| (it helps people with skills get hired, but doesn't in itself
| help people _get_ skills that you only get on the job), but it
| 's better than the status quo.
|
| We haven't forgotten about people struggling as they look for
| their first job. (And I certainly never will: to get personal
| for a sec, my first job search was a miserable multi-year
| affair that nearly killed me.) We've got some experimental
| irons in the fire here (e.g. a program that basically
| highlights people who haven't gotten as much attention as they
| 'should' based on their skills) that we're not quite ready to
| talk about in great detail. If they work, you'll hear more
| about them soon. If they don't, we'll try something else.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > New CS grads struggle to find employment
|
| Sorry, but I call major bullshit on this. Sure, if you have a D
| average at a low tier school, perhaps. But if you are a
| competent coder who got good grades in school, I see many
| companies ready to hire new grads left and right (obviously
| folks who graduated during the height of the pandemic had
| different issues to deal with). I don't know if we're quite at
| the "anyone who can fog a mirror can get a job" stage like we
| were in the original dot com boom, but we're not that far away.
| devwastaken wrote:
| I know 3 of them. They only receive responses from jobs
| similiar to, but not actually software dev. Basically tech
| support jobs but you have to know the basics of a
| windows/bash command line. No dev work involved.
|
| Companies _advertise_ they 're hiring. Like they advertise
| that they're profitable, make the best products, and are
| better than their competition. That doesn't mean it's true.
| Many positions are "nice to have", so they will stay there
| until they get someone with far more experience on paper than
| they actually need - someone willing to get paid less of
| course.
|
| People lie, especially companies. That's the nature of the
| market. Even if we had 5x the devs than employers, employers
| would still say otherwise. This is because more competition
| between applicants means you can pay people less.
|
| Infact even during the dotcom boom my sister actually got a
| degree in "web development", and nobody wanted anything to do
| with her. I don't know who comes out with these lies about
| "high demand" employment but so far all I've seen is
| confirmation bias by those already employed - ignoring all
| the rest of the people who can't get anywhere, leave it
| behind, and go work at something else.
| shagie wrote:
| I believe a bit of the difficulty that new grads have with
| trying to find employment is a combination of:
|
| * Reluctance to move / restrictions on where they want to
| move (only SF, Seattle, NYC)
|
| * Extreme focus on product development (and not applying for
| the operations jobs that keep many large orgs running).
|
| * Focus on working for a high salary at a big tech company
| (and not applying to jobs at companies that aren't seen as
| big tech... say... this job - https://csx.taleo.net/careersec
| tion/basic_faceted_search/job... )
|
| I believe that there is extreme saturation in certain
| desirable sectors of the field and "where is everyone?" in
| other areas.
| ucm_edge wrote:
| The candidate me likes cutting out some of the bullshit involved.
|
| The hiring manager side of me on the other hand continues to
| remember that mishires are expensive. I've also very skeptical in
| that once a month some staffing agency comes along, tells us they
| have some fancy heuristic for matching good candidates to our
| jobs, and then unleashes a tsunami of mediocre leads into our
| recruiting database. They'll then proceed to act upset and
| surprised when we don't want to intervene sixty percent of them
| and most of those we do intervene wash out. I guess TB can
| somehow promise that a certain baseline technical competence is
| present, but even that's of moderate value. If I really need a
| candidate who is skilled at X, I might be willing to sacrifice
| some skill in Y because I already have two engineers strong in Y.
| I never found TB sufficiently granular in how you configure the
| automatic screens to allow for that. Secondly, it's totally
| useless in soft skill assessment.
|
| The cynic in me just sees a lot of this TB now trying to force
| you to expend internal resources to rank the unqualified people
| or people whose skill sets don't align with what you want
| (forcing you to respond with data on how you handled the
| application) because they can't crack the nut of doing it
| themselves. So they're going to leverage the customer's
| recruiting teams to code the data for them.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I'm an engineer who was introduced to a startup via triplebyte. I
| liked the platform because I went through a technical interview
| to even be allowed to connect with companies (one that a lot of
| my peers who are junior level weren't able to pass.) I guess my
| first thought is that doesn't this defeat the initial purpose of
| Triplebyte?
|
| If you allow everyone in, regardless of if they are qualified to
| be a senior level engineer, will this not just be another job
| hunt platform where (when I look for another job) I'd still have
| to do another technical interview at the company itself?
|
| How will companies know now who has been vetted as qualified and
| who is just lying on their resume? Maybe it's shitty to think
| this way but there is already a ton of sites out there that allow
| me to send my resume (or allow a company to view mine) before
| starting a traditional hiring process that Triplebyte prevented,
| allowing companies to connect with qualified high level engineers
| and know the person would fit their skill needs. The way it was
| companies mainly were just testing for cultural fits, etc.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| (I'm a PM at Triplebyte working on this overall direction,
| joining Ammon for this thread.)
|
| To be clear, we still have quizzes and the ability to show your
| performance on them to companies. The fact that they're not
| completely mandatory to use Triplebyte doesn't mean that
| they're not important or that we won't build further features
| around them.
|
| Right now, companies can offer an expedited process as part of
| their reach-out. We're working on ways to productize this a
| little bit better. We didn't announce the feature in this post
| because it isn't done yet, but one thing we're looking at is
| allowing companies to set individual score thresholds for
| various types of expedited process (e.g. "if you scored a 3 on
| algos and a 4 on back-end, we'll definitely get on the phone
| with you" or "if you have a 5 on python we'll skip tech screens
| for you"). We certainly recognize that FastTrack was valuable
| to a subset of engineers, and we want to recreate the value it
| offered in a way that is a little bit more sensitive to the
| specific company and specific engineer in question. We imagine,
| for example, that less-prestigious companies (who are more
| concerned about attracting applicants) will probably set lower
| thresholds than the Apples of the world. Under the old system,
| we had to set a single threshold, which would necessarily
| either be too low for prestige companies or too high for
| everybody else.
|
| And just to lean a little bit back into the pitch we're trying
| to make here: if you're concerned about interviewing process,
| wouldn't it be nice to be able to search companies by how their
| interview process works? That's not an axis on which companies
| meaningfully compete right now, but with the right incentives,
| companies will cut a lot of the annoying hassle that they
| currently have no reason to get rid of.
| prirun wrote:
| One thing I didn't like about TB is that I couldn't see my
| own score, or how I compared to others. They sent me follow-
| up emails, tried to engage me in interviews, asked if I had
| any questions, and when I asked about my score or how it
| related to others (top N% for example), they didn't even
| respond.
|
| If a company asks me if I have questions, and I ask them, and
| they ignore me, I'm done.
|
| I wasn't looking for a job, but thought the test results
| would be interesting. Who takes a test and doesn't get
| results?
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| This must have been a long time ago! We've told you what
| your scores were and how they compared for quite a long
| time now. Even the current version of that page, which is
| like the third or fourth iteration, is now many months old.
| (That said, we've got a bug breaking that display right
| now. Working on it!)
| dsr_ wrote:
| When you're coming close to market saturation, you can't
| maintain unicorn-style growth rates.
|
| TripleByte wants that growth rate more than anything else:
| therefore, this.
| jawns wrote:
| Exclusivity and rapid growth don't normally go hand-in-hand, so
| one would expect that at some point, the company would have to
| bend on one of them, and it makes sense that they decided to
| bend on exclusivity. Facebook followed a similar course early
| in its history, and what allowed it to rapidly grow was
| diversifying its value prop. When it was exclusive to Ivy
| Leaguers, the draw was the meet other people at your school.
| When it was exclusive to college students, the draw was to meet
| other people at your school. But then when it became open to
| the world, it became much more of a general-purpose social
| networking site. That's the course Triplebyte will likely need
| to navigate if it wants to be successful in the long run.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I'll broadly second this. As an experienced dev, what kept
| Triplebyte on my radar was being able to at least theoretically
| cut past the initial round of 'can you actually fizzbuzz or are
| you just lying about it' that most companies need to filter out
| the people with inexplicably good resumes but no practical
| skills.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I think my experience sounds like what the article is trying
| to say...
|
| I tried TripleByte and wanted to like it, but mostly it
| didn't seem like anything special. The whole concept of
| getting pre-screened, getting multiple offers, and jumping
| straight to final interviews just didn't pan out. The last
| company I interviewed with basically treated my application
| like any other pipeline. I had a standard recruiter call,
| hiring manager call, and several technical interviews before
| getting an offer. And the experience with other companies was
| similar. From the outside looking in, it appeared that there
| was no special track for TripleByte applicants. In the end it
| felt like the TripleByte process simply made the interview
| process longer, not shorter. Eventually I found it faster &
| more effective to pursue companies on my own.
|
| TL;DR -- companies I met through TripleByte ran me through
| the standard process I'd experience through any third party
| recruiter without the personal touch one might get from a
| good third party recruiter.
| edgyquant wrote:
| This wasn't my experience. Sure they didn't just make an
| offer but instead of the usual algorithm test and a second
| interview my onsites consisted of actually working
| alongside the founder for a day and then an offer a few
| days later. I'm totally fine with that what I don't want is
| to have to do 2-3 interviews at every company I apply to.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I'm glad it works for some people!
| bowenyang wrote:
| > Triplebyte has hundreds of thousands of engineers on our
| platform, and that means we can flip the script on companies. The
| collective power of thousands of engineers is enough to change
| their incentives in a way that individual engineers cannot.
|
| Copying this from the article. Doesn't this sound like a union?
| Unions generally lead to mediocrity though.
| bpiche wrote:
| I would probably take this down if it was me but I can also
| appreciate TB's radical transparency and putting themselves out
| there for public criticism.
|
| Ever thought of building a recruiting recommendation software
| product, instead of just selling people? You have the data.
|
| edit: I want to be more constructive with my feedback. You have
| four years of data on hundreds of thousands of candidates. I
| don't know what the legal implications are regarding using that
| stuff as training data, but.. embeddings. doc2vec. Thank me
| later.
| dvt wrote:
| I'm personally very excited to see this change by an industry
| leader! I think that there's a seismic shift waiting to happen
| w.r.t. engineer hiring. The "old guard" of hazing, quizzing, and
| gotcha-style interviews are slowly losing ground.
|
| The most friction when switching jobs is the interview process --
| and the question is _why?_ I 've been writing code for a decade+
| now, working on startups, for known tech companies, public open-
| source, and have written a freakin' _book_! But, oh, my bad, I
| couldn 't figure out a solution to your optimization question. I
| forgot how to implement the zig operation in a splay tree. I
| might simply not function well under pressure. Maybe I'm having a
| bad day.
|
| Companies are missing out on literal geniuses by using outdated
| hiring practices. And, I get it, Google doesn't care. Amazon
| doesn't care. (There's an argument that they should.) They're
| huge and get X,XXX applicants daily. But why are small startups
| using the same hiring methodologies? It quite literally makes no
| sense. They're shooting themselves in the foot. I'm very
| passionate about this, and I'm working on a book on how to hire
| engineers. Maybe I'll actually finish it one of these days :)
| hellcow wrote:
| For what it's worth on the hiring side, applicants lie (or more
| charitably, wildly overestimate their own abilities) all the
| time. Of resumes I see, 50% of them will not show up on time to
| their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz.
|
| Past companies and open source contributions are not perfect
| indicators. I've seen people with stellar resumes fail to even
| know the syntax for an 'if' statement in any language of their
| choosing. I've had people absolutely ace takehome exams, yet in
| person don't know how to write a function.
|
| False positives are also much more expensive than false
| negatives, so companies would rather accidentally weed out good
| candidates than risk hiring bad ones.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| To put some hard numbers to this: further down this thread,
| there's a post about how "any engineer" could answer a
| question the poster thinks is too easy. I looked up the
| question in our back end and, in fact, barely a third of
| people who take our quiz get it right (the correct answer
| isn't even the most common one!).
|
| That's maybe a _little_ unfair (plenty of people who aren 't
| engineers take our quiz out of curiosity), but the basic
| point here - that companies are frustrated because they keep
| getting fizzbuzz-incapable applicants - is more-or-less
| accurate. That has been (and continues to be) a big part of
| our offering on the other side of our platform: in the same
| way that we can provide data about company behavior to
| engineers, we can provide independent verification of an
| applicant's skills to companies.
| driverdan wrote:
| > Of resumes I see, 50% of them will not show up on time to
| their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass
| fizzbuzz.
|
| Wow, sounds like you either need to change your sourcing or
| improve your early screening. If that many poor candidates
| are making it to the interview stage something is wrong with
| the process.
| hellcow wrote:
| I should have clarified, the first interview is just a code
| screen. People submit resumes, and we test them with
| fizzbuzz. 90% of applicants are removed at this first
| filter.
| dvt wrote:
| > Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz.
|
| If this is actually true, which I highly doubt (I've
| interviewed people, too), your process is terrible at
| preselection. I've heard so much about this "programmer
| charlatan" that lies on his resume and ends up blowing up
| million dollar systems, but have yet to see any tangible
| proof.
|
| > Past companies and open source contributions are not
| perfect indicators.
|
| This is self-contradictory: how/why would any open source
| project let someone that doesn't know fizzbuzz contribute to
| their codebase? I run a tiny throwaway open source project
| (~600 GH stars) and even _my_ reviews are pretty stringent.
| This point of view is not consistent. It 's like saying "I
| know people that ran in marathons, but couldn't even run for
| half a mile in my interview."
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _If this is actually true, which I highly doubt (I 've
| interviewed people, too), your process is terrible at
| preselection. I've heard so much about this "programmer
| charlatan" that lies on his resume and ends up blowing up
| million dollar systems, but have yet to see any tangible
| proof._
|
| I dunno about the back half (blowing up million dollar
| system) but the front half, certainly.
|
| We used to ask "write min()" at a previous employ, and the
| pass rate was probably <50%. I still to this day structure
| my coding question around "it has to get them to write a
| for() loop". It's not trick questions (I understand why
| people don't like those, and those can die out, yes.) it's
| things like "here's a sample grammar, how would we go about
| parsing it?" which is something that I've used any number
| of times in my career.1 Other candidates fail to display
| understanding, let alone deep understanding, about things
| like HTTP or Linux. Not exactly niche topics, and during
| this example period my employer at the time was clearly
| posting for "backend software engineer". And not just one
| or the other, but _all_ of them, simultaneously. Since I
| can 't establish any proof of anything, so... what other
| choice is there, but to pass?
|
| 1while there are parsing libraries, yes, and I'll use those
| first / when I can, I would also say that 50% of the time,
| for whatever reason -- better error reporting, better
| control -- I end up going with a partially or mostly hand-
| rolled state machine or recursive descent parser. Also,
| while I wish people would just encode their data in
| something like JSON, or YAML, or whatever, it doesn't
| really matter, they. keep. making. new. grammars. Often
| _inside_ those other grammars. Just today I had to deal
| with a config -- a YAML config! -- that wanted "key
| values". Turns out, it wanted strings formatted like
| "key:value", not YAML mappings.
| curryst wrote:
| > If this is actually true, which I highly doubt (I've
| interviewed people, too), your process is terrible at
| preselection. I've heard so much about this "programmer
| charlatan" that lies on his resume and ends up blowing up
| million dollar systems, but have yet to see any tangible
| proof.
|
| I've seen similar. I wouldn't say 80%, but somewhere in the
| 20% range of people on phone screens. If I ask a similar
| modulo question that isn't obviously a rephrased FizzBuzz
| (i.e. "write a function that returns every 4th item in a
| list"), that percentage goes up dramatically. A lot of
| candidates memorize FizzBuzz without actually understanding
| what's happening and how to use it.
|
| > This is self-contradictory: how/why would any open source
| project let someone that doesn't know fizzbuzz contribute
| to their codebase? I run a tiny throwaway open source
| project (~600 GH stars) and even my reviews are pretty
| stringent. This point of view is not consistent. It's like
| saying "I know people that ran in marathons, but couldn't
| even run for half a mile in my interview."
|
| There are no time constraints, and no way to tell how much
| of their contribution is from their own knowledge and how
| much is copied from StackOverflow/other open source
| projects/etc. The point of view is consistent; I can't run
| a marathon, but I can walk 26 miles. That's fine for the
| local charity marathon, but it's not going to cut it if I
| want to do competitive marathons. The constraints and
| expectations are wildly different.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Programming verbally over the phone is a skill that
| requires learning.
|
| I can run a marathon but I can't run 100. Your interview
| is one of many that I am making time over lunch. I'm
| tired and getting a perfect mark on a take home isn't as
| important as getting it done quickly so I can find time
| to apply to other positions before I go back to work.
|
| If you are not paying someone to do the interview you are
| not going to get anyone's best. Even if you pay people
| are trying to juggle things to get the interview to work.
|
| And to the parent post. 50% of people being late means
| they took the time out to talk to you and come to your
| offices and didn't gage the time or didn't think it
| mattered. That doesn't make them bad programmers and
| shouldn't even matter to the interviewer. Was the car
| service the employer used late picking the employee or
| did they have to come on their own?
| dvt wrote:
| > There are no time constraints
|
| Even ignoring the fact that you keep moving the goalposts
| and are taking my "marathon" analogy way too literally,
| the argument that any kind of real-world coding involves
| "time constraints" akin to a 30-minute stress-ridden
| whiteboard interview is just bonkers.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| There are a surprising number of people who have _done_
| marathons that couldn 't run half a mile -
| https://www.verywellfit.com/finding-walker-friendly-
| marathon...
| naimishviradia wrote:
| I agree, To me discovery process is broken. FANG sends email
| every year once you have already reached onsite. But I am
| trying to get into this tech companies new IPO's not FANG. I
| have applied to many good ones.
|
| I have Github repo. I have my own portfolio. I have wrote
| flutter app deployed to play store to demonstrate I can
| function individually and still can write production ready
| code. And All the above just on my own spare time.
|
| But every company I have applied told me my skill set doesn't
| aligned with them. I get response from them that there is no
| traction on my resume. While some friends get interview after
| interview and others don't.
|
| I am not saying that I am the best but we need different
| process where entry is given and now show me what you can do.
| wittycardio wrote:
| You think literal geniuses can't solve sligtly challenging
| algorithm questions ?
| dvt wrote:
| > You think literal geniuses can't solve sligtly challenging
| algorithm questions ?
|
| (N.B. I was being a bit hyperbolic, but, yes, for example, I
| highly doubt Steve Jobs could.) The spirit of my point is
| that most smart people don't care about the kind of idiotic
| minutia typical hiring panels ask. They care about
| interesting/creative problems.
| wittycardio wrote:
| I mean Steve Jobs may not be a great software developer. I
| don't think companies are hiring for a Steve Jobs. You
| could be really good at other things and not be great at
| programming
| woeirua wrote:
| They usually can, but not necessarily under strict time
| constraints and the pressure associated with a whiteboard
| coding exercise.
| cinquemb wrote:
| > And, I get it, Google doesn't care. Amazon doesn't care.
| (There's an argument that they should.)
|
| And yet they will still email you, year after year... as a dev
| that's worked in finance/academic research labs and for low
| funded/bootstraped startups all over the world for the past 10
| years... I'll never get into these big companies because I
| simply try to find companies that need work done yesterday, see
| my experience (maybe reach out to past corps i've done work
| for), and give me an offer for at least a short term contract
| (and these big companies will never do this).
|
| The worst is when I've think I found an interesting company
| (that on more than one occasion, publicly likes to complain
| about not having enough devs... lol), start talking a bit and
| they send me a triplebyte link... maybe it will be different
| this time, but I doubt it because these behaviors are too
| ingrained in a lot of corporate processes (even if its mostly
| "big co does this, me small co must copy"-NPC type thinking)...
| crazypython wrote:
| Triplebyte quizzes are a much more realistic representation of
| job skills than leetcode quizzes.
| cornellouis wrote:
| If you're not vetting the candidates, it seems like that's bad
| both of candidates and companies.
| TuringTest wrote:
| _> We want to stop being a placement agency, and instead become a
| job search platform that leverages that unique power to create a
| better hiring process for engineers_
|
| _> Triplebyte has hundreds of thousands of engineers on our
| platform, and that means we can flip the script on companies. The
| collective power of thousands of engineers is enough to change
| their incentives in a way that individual engineers cannot._
|
| > _We can change their incentives directly by rewarding or
| punishing certain behavior. For example, companies aren't
| normally incentivized to provide salary and culture data. But we
| can force their hand by promoting transparent companies in our
| search rankings. When a company's access to thousands of
| engineers is on the line, their incentives are very different.
| The same goes for honesty: a company often has no reason to be
| honest with any one engineer, but we can disincentivize lying by
| making their behavior with one engineer affect their access to
| the next._
|
| So... a union? In digital, online format?
|
| I'm glad that someone there is now realising the advantages of
| joining forces to negotiate workers' conditions. It was about
| time high-tech engineers noticed this.
| findjashua wrote:
| tldr: they're pivoting from placement agency to job board
|
| i'm not sure about the viability of their "search criteria"
| though - things like test coverage, release cadence etc are team
| specific, so it's hard to define it at a company-level, other
| than maybe small startups
| EDEdDNEdDYFaN wrote:
| Interesting that they are effectively pivoting to do what Vettery
| (I guess now part of Hired) was already doing years ago.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > We got jobs for over 1000 engineers
|
| Triplebyte has existed for, what, 4 years? That actually doesn't
| sound like very many.
|
| > Triplebyte has hundreds of thousands of engineers on our
| platform
|
| Hmm.
| foota wrote:
| I've always thought triplebyte was interesting, I did a first
| online interview with them while finishing school but basically
| had an offer from a large company in hand by that time and
| haven't looked for a new job since. I think they should try and
| pull people who indicate they are interested into attractive job
| searches, I mostly care about compensation as long as a company
| is decent.
| Leoeer wrote:
| So, I'm personally pretty unhappy with this change, because part
| of what made triplebyte valuable (and gave y'all the hundreds-of-
| thousands-engineer userbase) was the _path to competence-
| signalling_ which avoided credentials that your platform gave,
| given the quiz -- companies knew that someone being on triplebyte
| was a strong signal, and engineers had a path to signalling
| competence that was one-to-many. Eliminating that signal for
| goals that...seemingly don't require it (why does this new job
| platform require eliminating the assessment?) seems unwise, IMO
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > part of what made triplebyte valuable (and gave y'all the
| hundreds-of-thousands-engineer userbase) was the _path to
| competence-signalling_ which avoided credentials that your
| platform gave, given the quiz -- companies knew that someone
| being on triplebyte was a strong signal, and engineers had a
| path to signalling competence that was one-to-many.
|
| On the other hand, when I applied to TripleByte, their feedback
| to me was "we think your skills are fine, but we want somebody
| who can perform well in an interview". Which is exactly the
| opposite of the value you're attributing to them here.
|
| Quoting them, for reference:
|
| > We really appreciate you taking the time to work on the take
| home project. We're aware this requires a substantial time
| commitment and we are really grateful that you invested the
| time in completing it. We thought you wrote a great, very full
| featured regular expression matcher. It was especially
| impressive how much you dug into the academics behind regular
| languages.
|
| > However we made the decision because we felt that while going
| through the project together during the interview, we didn't
| see the fluency of programming when adding to it that we had
| hoped for. While we specifically designed the take home project
| track to help overcome the difficulties of coding under time
| pressure with someone watching, we do still need to see a
| certain level of programming during the interview.
| ammon wrote:
| This is a perfect example of why we're making these changes
| (and the problem that came from us being a gatekeeper). There
| are lots of different ways to show skill. We don't want to be
| in the position of deciding who "deserves" a job.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Isn't that what the core value of TripleByte was though?
| "This person deserves a job." Then some company says
| "Okay".
| ammon wrote:
| I'd say that main value was that we opened doors for
| people (got them opportunities they would not have been
| considered for without us). I don't think what we need to
| be gatekeepers to do this. Yes, not everyone can succeed
| (get a job at at top company). But we can help everyone
| show their skills in the way that's best for them. We can
| fight ghosting and lying and create a less hostile
| process. We're keeping our quiz (so that people who do
| well on tests can get opportunities that way), and also
| creating a job search process for people who do not want
| to do a quiz (the majority of engineers). The idea is
| that they will show their skills other ways (past
| experience, side projects, open source work). By us not
| being a gatekeeper we open these other paths.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| In the case of people who needed us to vouch that they
| deserved a job, yeah. But:
|
| - In borderline cases, we didn't want to risk our
| credibility and companies didn't want to skip tech
| screens. So competent-but-not-amazing engineers got shut
| out.
|
| - Our quiz is not perfect, so engineers who didn't fit
| what we were quizzing got shut out.
|
| - Not everyone needs us to vouch for them. Companies
| (reasonably) trust that someone with a degree from a top
| school and years of prestigious experiences can probably
| do fizzbuzz, and demanding that they prove it was a
| barrier to them using Triplebyte.
|
| We think it's better to have more granular ability for
| companies and engineers to decide what mattes to them. A
| prestigious company can say "we'll only talk to people
| who took the quiz and got a top score" (and that score
| _is_ us saying "this person deserves a job"). One that
| desperately needs the headcount can talk to the
| borderline cases or decide they don't want to put the
| extra barrier of a quiz in the way.
|
| Like most markets, we think the hiring market on our
| platform works best when it's able to respond to local
| conditions.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > (and that score is us saying "this person deserves a
| job")
|
| If you're not willing to refer people to companies based
| on their score, how can you interpret the score as you
| saying "this person deserves a job"?
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| The difference is in the bar for forcing companies to set
| aside parts of their screening process. To get them to do
| that - as we needed to under our old model, because we
| didn't have a notion of "recommended but without the
| requirement to skip tech screens" - we needed to be
| making very strong recommendations.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I'm a little bemused at the notion of evaluating someone
| "strong tech skills, but can't pass an interview" and
| determining that the appropriate recommendation is "talk
| to this guy, but -- unlike with most of our candidates --
| don't skip the tech screens". The recommendation seems
| like the opposite of the diagnosis.
|
| How does the new ability to make that recommendation
| address the original problem?
| ammon wrote:
| So, we ARE keeping the quiz (and companies still trust it as
| much as they did in the past). It's just not mandatory.
| Leoeer wrote:
| this seems like it's just diluting the signaling value of
| being on the platform? (and seems like it'll quickly create
| an upper and underclass of quiztakers vs nonquiztakers)
| ammon wrote:
| There's some risk of that. But I _think_ that we can make
| it work. Basically, the model I have is that there are many
| different ways that an engineer can signal competency to a
| company and get a job. One way is doing well on our
| quizzes. But another way is having impressive experience at
| a good company, or a lot of open source contributions. Any
| one engineer might be really good, but look bad on one of
| these metrics (someone who gets stressed and does poorly on
| tests, or someone who has mostly worked for the government
| and does not have side projects). This happens a lot. When
| we ONLY ranked engineers by our assessments, we just missed
| people. The goal now is to let people show skill in any of
| these ways.
| Leoeer wrote:
| Well, I hope you're right and will keep an eye out (and
| will regardless be Fasttrack-ing in 6 months when I'm
| looking for FTE work, so I'll see firsthand :p)
| maverick2007 wrote:
| I feel the exact same way. I went through the interview process
| with a handful of good startups through Triplebyte (and got
| offers from almost all of them) and even though I ended up
| taking a job with a company outside of TB, I still walked away
| extremely impressed and confident that I'd use the platform
| again in my next search. I loved that I was pre-qualified and
| didn't have to intensely prove my technical chops at every on
| site. With this change, I don't see the benefits for me to use
| TB over a competing job board or just applying to companies
| directly. With these changes, I don't plan on using TB for my
| next job search.
|
| Edit: just saw the comment that TB is keeping the quiz. Would
| consider using the platform in the future as long as that pre-
| qualification track is available and that this new direction is
| just a superset on the existing TB features.
| Leoeer wrote:
| Tentative agree here, if quiz-taking is prominently displayed
| i'm still probably going to use the platform
| ninetax wrote:
| I'd love to work with Triplebyte (as someone who's running a
| hiring process), but a while back they removed their option to
| work on contingency, and it's a difficult sell to fork over
| $X,000k for another source of engineers when it would just be one
| of 10 sources we already work with.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong here, but it gives me the impression that
| Triplebyte doesn't believe in it's ability to get candidates into
| jobs. If companies pay (a not small sum) when candidates actually
| get hired, then I feel that incentives are aligned. If it's an
| annual fee (with no option for contingency) then I wonder what
| incentive the company has to make sure what I care about (making
| a hire) is the thing they care about.
|
| 90% of the other major players (AngelList, Hired, etc) in the
| market offer this... so why not Triplebyte? Perhaps I'm missing
| something.
| ammon wrote:
| The main problem we had with the contingency model is that it
| resulted in companies using us for a few of their "hardest"
| hires, rather than as a bread-and-butter part of their
| recruiting. For example, almost no one wants to pay a
| contingency fee on junior or remote hires (because they are
| perceived as 'easier'). This made our platform kind of suck for
| junior and remote engineers. The subscription model is more of
| a commitment from a company (I understand why some companies
| don't choose to use us.) But it means that once a company signs
| up, they want to make as many hires as possible through us.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Why not a combo where the subscription isn't paid until a
| hire is actually made through the platform?
| ammon wrote:
| We experimented with this, as well as with trial periods
| (which are sort of the same thing, but with a time limit).
| Trial periods ended up being easier to think about and
| optimize (each account either converts or not at the end of
| the period). But we may revisit this in the future.
| treis wrote:
| Sounds like you hit a niche and solved hard problems for
| companies. Unfortunately not a niche big enough for a company
| that's taken 10+ million in VC money.
| ghiculescu wrote:
| That business model is optimising for large customers that
| are probably better equipped to replace you with something in
| house. And leaving the long tail of smaller customers on the
| table.
|
| I wanted to use triplebyte - but I only want to make 3 hires
| per year.
| ammon wrote:
| We do have discounts for smaller startups (under $10m in
| funding). Happy to talk about that if you're interested.
| ammon@triplebyte.com
| ninetax wrote:
| Interesting... you've probably considered this but, sounds
| like to solve that problem you could just have an option for
| companies to subscribe, or be on contingency? Then the
| companies hiring for juniors can subscribe and the folks
| looking for harder hires can be on contingency?
|
| "But it means that once a company signs up, they want to make
| as many hires as possible through us.", right, but as a
| hiring manager that doesn't make sense to me... I don't care
| that we're making hires to justify where we spend our
| sourcing money. I care that we're making great hires, so I
| want to cast as wide a net as possible. I'm not going to shut
| my eyes to other sources because I've paid for triplebyte.
| But maybe in bigger companies I wouldn't be the one making
| purchasing decisions? And the folks making those decisions
| would be pushing HMs to use Triplebyte?
|
| It is interesting, how the incentives align and don't align
| sometimes. Hard to say if I'm even in the target market
| (raised $15m, hiring a few folks this year in the "hardest"
| category, #1 problem is qualified folks at top-o-funnel).
|
| Maybe I also have a personal penchant for seeing companies
| who bet on themselves and clearly align incentives :shrug:
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| For junior talent I found it's much better to simply fork the
| $X,000k to a serious school with a good engineering program and
| run hiring events or sponsor things. Or establish a
| relationship with a research lab in the school that's close to
| your area of expertise.
| bambax wrote:
| One of the problem with recruiting is not just power imbalance
| but information asymmetry (or even plain lack of information).
|
| What Triplebyte is trying to do is give more information back to
| job seekers. But it will be limited to the companies they
| actually work with (and punishing your own clients sounds like a
| peculiar business model...)
|
| Why not build a Glassdoor for hiring, that would cover the entire
| industry? Anyone can go and describe the hiring process they went
| through, if they heard back or not, etc.
|
| Does such a thing already exist? If not, why not?
| sickygnar wrote:
| I'm salty towards the platform because they rejected me a few
| years ago, and my ego has barred me from using them again despite
| their outreach. I was also very unhappy when I heard about the
| public profiles. I don't want people to see that I interviewed
| poorly, or to have any kind of public record of that. I'm a
| decent engineer, I swear!
|
| I had some bad luck. My nodejs build broke after a recent update
| on my machine, which I didn't realize until right before the
| interview. During a test with a different language, I tried to
| define a constant with the same name as a built-in function and
| ran into a vague compiler error (something about missing
| parentheses, ugh). This language has case-insensitive function
| names to compound the confusion. I unfortunately looked up how to
| define a constant in the docs. Their conclusion was that "I was
| uncomfortable in the language," despite having used it for 10
| years. There was some other feedback which I felt was inaccurate,
| I think I just had a bad day, and obviously didn't convey my
| knowledge and experience well. I could see why a recruiter would
| hard pass on me for some of the stumbles, since their main goal
| is to forward candidates who interview well. It hurt to get
| rejected.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| >..My nodejs build broke after a recent update on my machine,
| which I didn't realize until right before the interview
|
| I mean, you went into a combat scenario, and chose a weapon
| absolutely notorious for jamming.
| kumarjsingh6 wrote:
| Your preferred language was nodejs after all
| sickygnar wrote:
| hah, fair enough.
| Terretta wrote:
| A benefit of Triplebyte to big enterprises _not_ mentioned in
| Triplebyte's discussion here: acting as engineering assessment
| proxy for engineering hiring managers stuck with pathologically
| risk averse enterprise HR departments.
|
| Often enterprise HR is paranoid of honestly evaluating anyone for
| anything, to the point that many HR teams tell one another and
| engineering hiring managers that it's "illegal" to assess
| candidate abilities on the way in the door, at all.
|
| If you think about joining a dev team where no one checked if any
| candidate could FizzBuzz, you can imagine the workplace
| environment that can end up with.
|
| Triplebyte is able to provide engineering managers with a stack
| of pre-vetted resumes so an enterprise can interview by its
| lowest common denominator HR policies, while still having a
| prayer a team will at least be made of candidates who can code.
|
| The value of this to an enterprise stuck in this position is hard
| to overstate.
|
| Hopefully along with expanding the talent pool per this post,
| Triplebyte can figure out a way to get well paid for this ability
| to help land _actual_ coders on _actual_ dev teams _despite_
| enterprise HR.
|
| The need for this is huge.
|
| // I see a comment below from a Triplebyte PM about score
| matching: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27542621 ... That
| would be slick: land candidates that genuinely raise the bar, but
| aren't _so_ far ahead as to be speaking a foreign language to the
| team. Of course, this would require also assessing the target
| team, and oops, we're right back up against that HR policy...
| akarma wrote:
| Good point!
|
| There's an old quote: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
|
| Large companies tend to be more risk-averse, so if there are
| two companies you can use for a service -- $PromisingStartup
| and IBM -- large companies will generally make a decision
| that's optimal to the specific decision-maker, not optimal to
| the company.
|
| There are two options if you, as the buyer, choose either
| $PromisingStartup or IBM: success or failure.
|
| If IBM or the $PromisingStartup succeed, then you've done your
| job.
|
| If IBM fails, you can tell your manager "Who could've guessed!
| It's IBM!"
|
| If $PromisingStartup fails, you'll have a harder time
| explaining your decision, and the fault will be with you.
|
| The "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" idea is useful to
| look at every decision large companies make, whether it's
| pivoting, choosing a SaaS product, or hiring.
|
| TripleByte, in its current form, has been beneficial to
| candidates as well by giving enterprise employees a justifiable
| signal towards hiring them regardless of pedigree.
| driverdan wrote:
| > many HR teams tell one another and engineering hiring
| managers that it's "illegal" to assess candidate abilities on
| the way in the door, at all
|
| From the position of a candidate this sounds like a poorly run
| company I'd have no interest in working for. I wouldn't want to
| interview with them.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| But they'll pay you 4x more than the smaller, better run
| companies. That's why people still want to interview with
| them.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > If you think about joining a dev team where no one checked if
| any candidate could FizzBuzz, you can imagine the workplace
| environment that can end up with.
|
| That sounds hilarious How could a dev team not be able to write
| 5 lines?
| pc86 wrote:
| You would be surprised how many people legitimately can't
| wrap their heads around a fizz buzz style problem, but also
| how many people who can yet _completely_ freeze in an
| interview setting.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| It is hilarious but man, you would be really surprised how
| people choke on this. It's weird. People with 10+ years
| writing software can't do this sometimes.
| Igelau wrote:
| I'd believe it.
|
| I got shitlisted at one place for being the only dev with the
| mathematical insight to know that multiplying pesos by a
| dollars:yen ratio doesn't yield a correct conversion of pesos
| to yen. They let that one slide without fixing it, but the
| final straw that got me frogmarched was refactoring an if-
| else to a switch.
| verall wrote:
| Refactor to switch?? All of those break statements are
| evil!!
| digikata wrote:
| I've seen this claimed for multiple job pre-vetting sites and
| am not convinced it does anything than add an extra layer of
| test interviews.
| ninetax wrote:
| I feel that part ofthe thing they want to do is already done well
| by keyvalues.com
|
| Not that there's not room for another player in the space, but
| it's just a good example of how to do it well.
| toomuchredbull wrote:
| I have not signed up to triplebyte because I don't want to do
| their screening, but this doesn't make it better. It defeats the
| purpose.
| asidiali wrote:
| As someone who has been critical of TripleByte here on HN in the
| past, I appreciate the identification and acknowledgment of where
| things went wrong and why people were unhappy. This seems like a
| sincere pivot where the community was heard. Wishing TripleByte
| luck and success.
|
| I can also report I haven't received a single TripleByte email
| since the issue was last brought up :) Thank you for standing by
| that.
| jchiu1106 wrote:
| Without passing the minimum bar, how does Triplebyte distinguish
| itself from other 1000 platforms where people post resumes?
|
| Also, dissing those who have passed the bar as "engineers who
| like tests" is disrespectful. When they first launched, passing
| the bar makes you (in their words) a highly qualified engineer,
| and now passing the bar means nothing except that you only "like
| tests"...lol
|
| Fundamentally, I think this invalidates Triplebyte's business
| model. Companies don't really care if someone passes your tests.
| They still put you through LC type interviews onsite. They simply
| save a phone screen.
| DanielDe wrote:
| I worked at Triplebyte several years ago (but way before any of
| these changes were being discussed - this blog post is the
| first I'm hearing of them). I'm an engineer, but I spent a lot
| of time with the account management team talking to companies.
| And the biggest thing I remember is how much those companies
| pushed back on our "rules". They were all eager to talk to the
| top .1% of candidates, but otherwise just seemed to want an
| unfiltered firehose of resumes.
|
| So while in theory I like the idea of this meritocratic minimum
| bar granting special privileges (I liked it enough to join
| Triplebyte!), in practice we seemed to be fighting an uphill
| battle with all but a few candidates each month.
|
| On the other hand, I have wasted a lot of time in conversations
| with recruiters only to be let down at the end by mismatched
| expectations. I'm interested to see if this new approach can
| make a meaningful difference in that problem.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| > Without passing the minimum bar, how does Triplebyte
| distinguish itself from other 1000 platforms where people post
| resumes?
|
| We still have the quiz, and we still show performance on it
| prominently on your profile (provided you've chosen to share
| those scores). In fact, we've put a lot of energy into
| improving the trust companies place in our quizzes over the
| past year precisely because we think that skills data is
| important.
|
| > Also, dissing those who have passed the bar as "engineers who
| like tests" is disrespectful. When they first launched, passing
| the bar makes you (in their words) a highly qualified engineer,
| and now passing the bar means nothing except that you only
| "like tests"...lol
|
| Heh, yeah, that's fair, at least to a point.
|
| Our quizzes are predictive. We know this from a lot of
| objective data, it's what you'd expect subjectively, and
| companies do tell us that they trust and value that data. That
| does not mean that our tests have no bias towards certain
| personality types. Different people respond differently to
| testing, and that _does_ have a differential effect, not
| because our tests are bad but because testing is inherently
| somewhat artificial.
|
| I actually taught test prep before joining Triplebyte years
| ago, so I've been this first-hand: it was not uncommon for a
| student who'd been doing well in practice sessions to crumple
| under the pressure of the real thing. That doesn't mean the
| test is bad, it just means that some people fare better on
| tests than others for reasons other than _just_ their raw
| ability. When we say "likes tests", that's more what we mean:
| not that that's the only reason someone does well on a test,
| but that people who perform well in isolated, pressured
| environments do better relative to their skills than others.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| > crumple under the pressure of the real thing
|
| I think that goes to another ability. If we need a candidate
| to gracefully handle a 3 AM production outage, we should
| expect them to handle an interview.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| An alternate explanation is that you want more users and the
| quiz is one of the top things excluding people from the top
| of your funnel.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Well, yeah - weren't we pretty upfront about the fact that
| we were only serving a relatively small number of people?
| That's not the same thing as "we were only taking good
| engineers and now we take a new cohort of just bad
| engineers", though.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| I love standardized tests and I got a little bit of that
| dopamine hit from the triplebyte test, too.
| tdeck wrote:
| I did a job search at the end of 2020.
|
| The biggest problem with engineering job searches is that they're
| a huge time sink. I'm a senior engineer with Google on my resume,
| so I don't have much trouble getting in the door or passing
| interviews, but the process is such a slog. If I were to take PTO
| for a week and cram my schedule full of job search, I could
| probably get 3-4 interview processes done per week. That's not a
| lot, considering that it's good to line up offers and that many
| people have limited PTO. Even if your PTO is "unlimited", it
| looks suspicious to be taking random days off for on-sites.
|
| What this means is that I try to keep doing my job and schedule
| phone screens and recruiter calls in the gaps when I know I won't
| get meetings. I try not to have to block time on my work calendar
| for these in case someone wonders "why does Troy suddenly have so
| many random meetings all of the sudden". The scheduling process
| with companies is a pain, they ask for 2-3 time windows for the
| phone screen, then often take a couple days to pick one. So I
| have huge time blocks reserved for them that I can't give to
| other companies I am interviewing with. It's stressful to try to
| slot all this in. Add to that the fact that recruiters want to do
| everything over the phone (which is very unnatural for me), so I
| have to also schedule little interruptions for 15 minute "chats"
| to "check in" and prepare me for the next round. I appreciate
| these things but at the same time, I'd appreciate fewer of them.
|
| When it comes to the actual interviews, some companies seem to be
| fine with one phone screen, some need 2-3. Sometimes they are an
| hour, sometimes 45 minutes. Some companies see that I work at
| Google and deduce that I might be competent enough to skip the
| phone screens entirely. I appreciate that.
|
| It's the same with on-sites. Some are a half day, and some are
| more of a full day. It's not a big difference in practice because
| I couldn't really take a half day off from 11-3. Many companies
| have a "no interview day" which is great for their employees but
| hard to work around, particularly if it falls on "non-suspicious"
| PTO days like Monday or Friday. Sometimes I wish we could just do
| several phone screens instead to make scheduling easier.
|
| I'm not sure how to solve this, but it's the biggest pain point
| by far and if someone could solve it I would absolutely use their
| platform. I want fewer phone calls, fewer hours of interviewing,
| and a clear understanding of the time commitment ahead of time.
|
| I also wish companies would be up front about WLB so I don't
| waste time interviewing, only to learn they work "maybe 50-55
| hours a week". That's not a "little more" than 40 guys, that's
| more than 6 full work days every week. You can't just ask at the
| outset because some people perceive that as a red flag.
| eliblock wrote:
| > We got jobs for over 1000 engineers
|
| That's a lot less than I expected.
| akomtu wrote:
| Here's an advice. The software engineering market, at least the
| upper end of it, doesn't need a email forwarding proxy middleman.
| What it needs is a club-like organisation that acts as a
| negotiator that leverages insider knowledge to get unreasonable
| parties on both ends to sign a contract. Good devs don't really
| search for jobs and don't really talk to random recruiters. They
| get a steady stream of sales pitches from friends of friends or
| former co-workers and leverage their fairly wide network to get
| insider info about companies they're considering to join to get a
| good contract. The "club" would be like a golf club address book
| with staff working to connect matching parties. It's surely not a
| dating site for programmers with ahem.. "AI" selling resumes to
| data brokers.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Companies that are serious about finding software talent
| already sort of understand that and hire based on
| recommendation from high performers.
| nunez wrote:
| Hence the good ol' "We'll give you $5,000 for every engineer
| you refer to us...and there's no cap!"
|
| At least good companies do this anyway.
|
| Also, executive search recruiters kind-of do what you're
| describing. Exec leadership is a small-ish world, and the
| recruiting cycle for, say, a CTO can take months. However,
| there's a lot of commission on the other end of that. So
| recruiters basically act as brokers.
| stove wrote:
| I very informally do this right now. I think of my role as a
| sports agent for top engineers. The engineers I work with pay
| nothing and the companies who want access to them give us no
| bullshit, all access interviews where we're not working with HR
| or recruiters. It works so well for both parties that I'm
| scaling it at the moment.
| nightsd01 wrote:
| I am a self taught engineer without a CS degree, and I went
| through Triplebyte at the end of 2017. It was an absolutely
| incredible experience, and really helped me break into the
| industry, and I'll always be grateful to them.
|
| I found an awesome startup to work at. And now, years later, I
| work at a FAANG company, working on tons of interesting problems.
| Thank you triplebyte, and good luck with the pivot!
| guessmyname wrote:
| TripleByte is awful.
|
| Take a look at the question they just asked me when I was doing
| their General Coding Assessment: What is the
| output of the following function? (1m 12s) function
| foo(a, b) { a += 1 b.push(1) }
| const a = 0 const b = [] foo(a, b)
| console.log(a, b)
| dang wrote:
| What's bad about that? It's obviously testing understanding of
| scoping and side effects. It's not hard if you understand those
| things and probably confusing if you don't, which seems
| like...the kind of question you'd want on a "general coding
| assessment"?
|
| The only thing that bugs me about that question is that "the
| output of the following function" is confusingly worded. It's
| the sort of question that a competent candidate might get
| nervous about and start to overthink: wait, that isn't a
| function, it's a code snippet. The _function_ here is foo - so
| maybe they mean "what's the output of foo"? But then what does
| "the output of a function" mean? I suppose they mean return
| value? Is this a trick question to see if I remember what
| _push_ returns? Damn it, does it return the entire array or
| just the pushed element?
|
| That's what my mind usually does with questions like that and
| I'm far from the only one. Since the goal of the test is to
| screen for basic competence, it ought not to filter out people
| who could answer the question perfectly fine if it were being
| asked clearly, but who also perceive corner cases and
| ambiguities. Such a skill should make you more likely to pass
| such a test, not less. Therefore the question ought to say
| something like "What does the following code snippet write to
| the console?"
| guessmyname wrote:
| > _What 's bad about that?_
|
| The timer is what is bad about this.
|
| I do not care about the question.
|
| As you say, any competent programmer could solve this in a
| few seconds, if they are proficient, or minutes if they are
| not.
|
| In my opinion, they should not put a count down because they
| are interrupting the programmer's flow. If they really want
| to measure time, they do it without interrupting the
| programmer, hide the timer, let them take as much time as
| they want/need to solve these problems. Then, at the end of
| the quiz, show them how long it took them to give a proper
| solution, and take in consideration that time to score them.
|
| If Alice solved 10 problems in 10 minutes, and Bob solved the
| same problems in 15 minutes, maybe there is something there
| that is worth highlighting in their profiles. Maybe Alice is
| able to analyze this type of questions much faster than Bob,
| and if that matters to the recruiters or potential employers,
| then allow the candidate to use that in their favor.
|
| However, if Bob actually knew the answer, but they ran out of
| time to select an option, that seems unfair.
| [deleted]
| google234123 wrote:
| > any competent programmer could solve this in a few
| seconds, if they are proficient, or minutes if they are
| not.
|
| You've found exactly what they are looking for.
|
| Also, it's pretty bad manners to leak test questions imo.
| You probably agreed not to in the TOS that you accepted.
| manv1 wrote:
| Depending on the language and how it passes in values, you'll
| have different answers. Assuming it's javascript the answer is
| 0,1. In other languages it might be 1, 1.
|
| That's a tricky question, and if you're not good enough to
| understand why they're asking that then you fail!
| hughpoint wrote:
| This particular example is 0, [1], which is easily seen by
| pasting it in the console.
|
| There may be some edge cases I'm not covering here, but
| JavaScript passes primitives by value (strings, numbers, etc)
| and non-primitives (objects, arrays, etc) by passing a copy
| of the reference.
|
| What this means is if you reassign the reference inside of
| the method, it will only affect that scope, because the
| reference itself is a copy. If you modify the properties of
| the non-primitive, it will be modified, because the copy of
| the reference points to the same non-primitive.
|
| Since primitives are passed by value then any modifications
| are not reflected outside of the method.
|
| To the other poster below, in JavaScript, const with an array
| (object, etc) simply prevents reassignment of the variable,
| the array can still be modified.
| ornornor wrote:
| I think it would be 0, []
|
| a and b are shadowed in the foo function so the function only
| acts on the shadowed (and copied) variables. Once you return
| from foo, the const a and b are unchanged.
|
| Not a great question as a pass or fail test imho because if
| you use shadowed names often enough to be able to parse this
| code in your head, you're writing bad code. There is a reason
| why shadowing names is a bad practice: it's hard to figure
| out what the end result is and account for side effects! But
| as a discussion on all the points above then it would teach
| the recruiter something about what the candidate knows rather
| than using this as a trivia question.
| dang wrote:
| The const on b only applies to the object reference to b,
| and doesn't prevent foo from changing the contents of b. No
| doubt that's why the test question includes an array in the
| first place.
|
| At least I assume that's how const works; I've not used
| const in JS.
| ornornor wrote:
| That's possible. In reality, if I ever came across that
| piece of code and had a bug to fix in it, the first thing
| I'd do is rename a and b in one scope or the other
| because it's just asking for trouble otherwise and it's
| not easy to understand what happens to a and b. That's
| why I think using this question as a trivia question is
| bad. But the discussion we're having about it clearly
| shows we both know what to look out for, that we're
| competent, and is way more interesting than running JS
| code in our heads. Even if either of us gets the answer
| wrong, it doesn't really matter as much as how we got
| there in my opinion.
| bboylen wrote:
| 0,[1] right? :)
| google234123 wrote:
| I think it's pretty necessary to know how your chosen
| language passes values.
| [deleted]
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| (For the record, the question does show the language the
| snippet is written in.)
| f6v wrote:
| Right, so the companies are still your client. But you somehow
| think you can strong-arm them because you have some CVs in your
| database. In the end, the job platforms end up serving the
| client's needs. And company stay the client.
| titanomachy wrote:
| The original TripleByte worked well for me. Even though I didn't
| have a stellar resume, I got the chance to talk to some really
| interesting companies. My TripleByte recruiter was helpful in
| deciding which interviews to take, and there was mutual fit at
| all the companies I went on-site with.
|
| I recommended TripleByte to several friends whom I considered
| reasonably skilled and currently undervalued. None of them passed
| the test, however, so they got little value out of service
| (except for the interview feedback, which at the time was
| unusually excellent). And I ultimately needed TripleByte less
| than they did, since someone who could pass the old TripleByte
| test also has a high chance of eventually passing on-sites at
| Google, Facebook, etc.
|
| So I understand the pivot, although it will certainly be harder
| to differentiate yourselves in this new space. Good luck.
| wantsanagent wrote:
| I like this new direction but the stated power dynamics don't
| align with their history. The most popular kids in the room
| (FAANG) define the hiring process and some of them outright
| refuse to skip steps, which hurt Triplebyte's reach. If those
| co's get hidden on TB don't you think a ton of engineers will
| ignore the platform?
|
| In addition, as my username suggests, I really like the idea of a
| representative for Engineers during the job search process, but I
| also want to make sure I'm the _customer_ of this representative.
| If I 'm paying TB then I think the incentives are aligned. If
| they're just a job board then their new stance is opposed to the
| interests of their true customers (hiring companies) and that
| won't work out too well for them.
| dawnho wrote:
| Interesting idea. But it seems like there's room for abuse -
| won't engineers, who are unhappy that they didn't get an offer,
| just report companies? Don't you just become Yelp in that case,
| full of reviews from salty customers? How are you going to get
| useful data when you're worried about that?
| ammon wrote:
| This is certainly an issue. As you say, it's a problem on yelp
| and glassdoor. It's why most nightclubs have low yelp ratings
| (people they exclude give them low scores). There are a few
| things I think we think we can do:
|
| 1) Look at relative data, not raw ratings. Written reviews or
| raw numerical scores are what show the nightclub effect the
| most. What we care about is a ranking of companies (showing the
| better companies first in search results). This may not be as
| impacted by the problem. If sour grapes from people who failed
| interviews overwhelm other signals, we can only look at the
| scores from people who pass (or normalize the two groups
| separately).
|
| 2) Ask very specific questions (and maybe provide dummy options
| to attract sour grapes). I suspect that questions like "did
| this company say they could meet at $250 salary and then offer
| you less?" will get more accurate answers than "does this
| company have a toxic culture?". (We do actually want to get
| culture data, but I want to be really specific about the
| culture questions we are asking).
|
| 3) Use objective facts, not subject opinions. For example, we
| can tell when a company ghosts a candidate (because they reply
| through a proxy email that we control). So we're listing the
| 'ghost rate' for each company.
| dharmaturtle wrote:
| IIRC I wrote about 30 custom cover letters to Triplebyte
| companies... about 2-3 responded. My response rate to cold
| emailing/applying to ~10 F# companies is literally 100%. To
| be fair though, the TB applications occurred right at the
| start of Covid, and my F# job applications well into Covid.
|
| Anyway, a ghost rate would be greatly appreciated.
| marcinzm wrote:
| In my experience toxic companies will essentially force
| employees to give good feedback through either social
| pressure, incentives or threat of repercussions. You can see
| this quite clearly on Glassdoor where a bad review is
| followed by five very similar good reviews within a week for
| some companies.
| kangnkodos wrote:
| Addressing ghosting is great! You should add something to
| Rethinking Triplebyte to indicate you are doing this.
| yangez wrote:
| > We want to be the job search platform that puts engineers in
| control.
|
| I love this, but I'm curious about the incentives here.
| Triplebyte only makes money from companies, not engineers. In the
| long run, can engineer-centric intentions override a business
| model based around companies and recruiters staying happy? I hope
| so!
| teachrdan wrote:
| This exactly. Their messaging is over the top "we help
| engineers get leverage over companies!" I have to wonder what
| Triplebyte is telling the companies who actually pay them all
| their money.
|
| Triplebyte has always seemed scummy and this obvious--and
| unacknowledged--contradiction makes me trust them even less.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| They could just simply be telling companies that they have
| the engineers, and other job boards do not.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| That's part of it.
|
| We do also have differentiating features on the company
| side. It's not like we're abandoning the idea of building
| features for companies or anything.
|
| The job search, like other matching problems, is often not
| zero sum. So building (say) a better search interface for
| companies benefits engineers as well, because both sides of
| the market have an interest in a good match. What we're
| saying here is that _in the cases where things -are- zero
| sum_ , the power - and therefore the incentives - lie with
| engineers and not with employers.
| ammon wrote:
| Companies do pay us. But I _think_ that our real long-term
| incentives still pull toward building what engineers want, not
| what companies want. I think that platforms like LinkedIn and
| Indeed have just gotten this wrong, because they focus on all
| jobs (not just engineers), and because demand for engineers is
| stronger than it has ever been. Take a look at this thread from
| last week:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27501675
|
| Our bet is that LinkedIn is going to fragment. They are just
| not creating a hiring process that most engineers like. People
| tend to either get ghosted, or overwhelmed with low-relevance
| inbound (almost no one gets the "right" amount of attention).
| Companies need to go where the best engineers are, not the
| other way around. So I think our long-term incentive is to fix
| these problems.
|
| In any case, I'm committed to giving this a try. There is
| danger that we get pulled toward building for companies. I want
| top guard against this by being public about what we're doing,
| and "showing our work" as we go.
| cj wrote:
| > our real long-term incentives still pull toward building
| what engineers want, not what companies want.
|
| > There is danger that we get pulled toward building for
| companies.
|
| A common phrase thrown around with free services is "if
| you're not paying for it, you are the product".
|
| > For example, companies aren't normally incentivized to
| provide salary and culture data. But we can force their hand
| by promoting transparent companies in our search rankings.
|
| Maybe I didn't read the article carefully enough, but are you
| planning to continue charging companies $15k - $30k for the
| ability to access candidates on your platform?
|
| If so, companies are still your customers. And if you're
| building and optimizing your product for people who aren't
| your customers, your real customers (companies) may not be
| happy with you which will hurt retention, etc.
|
| Maybe I skimmed the article too quickly, but it seems strange
| to charge companies $20k+ to post a job on your platform, and
| then actively do things that "force their hand". It might be
| a net benefit to the engineers on the platform, but I wonder
| how it will work from a business model perspective since
| you're potentially creating adversarial relationships with
| your "real" customers (companies paying you to access your
| candidates).
|
| Edit: But maybe it's by design, if you actively remove
| employers who aren't abiding by your philosophy. Although
| again, that means turning away customers, which means turning
| away revenue, which in my mind raises questions about the
| overall business model. A lot of conflicting interests.
| ammon wrote:
| I generally agree with the phrase "if you're not paying for
| a product, you're the product". But the market for
| engineers is just so lopsided that I think it's less true
| here. There are a _lot_ of recruiting companies. The only
| real thing that sets one apart from others is whether they
| have candidates. So one way to look at it is that yes, we
| are incentivized to build what companies want, but the main
| thing they want is for us to have engineers. And the only
| way we get engineers is by building what engineers want.
|
| That does not fully express my motivations. I am an
| engineer and find the idea of making the process better for
| engineers more exciting than making it better for
| companies. But it explains how I think the incentives work.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I haven't actually gone through the TripleByte process, but my
| impression of the value of the platform to engineers was that
| only the at least minimally capable ones could be on there.
|
| Does this not mean that even if you apply from TripleByte that
| you now still need to go through FizzBuzz and all that?
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| > Going forward, our assessments are a purely optional means by
| which engineers can show their skills to employers (who
| overwhelmingly tell us that they trust our scoring)
|
| So it sounds like the hiring manager can choose to skip a
| fizzbuzz call when they know you already passed.
| samatman wrote:
| My random Triplebyte anecdote is that I did good on the quizzes
| and gave a solid interview, but they declined to represent me.
| They were transparent about their reasoning: they saw me as
| somewhat of a specialist in parsing, and they didn't know how to
| place someone with that peculiar skillset.
|
| Which turned out fine. I found a job where my pre-computer
| programming work experience was relevant, and here a couple jobs
| later I'm working heavily with and on parsers.
|
| So. Count me as one engineer they rejected who doesn't hold that
| against them.
|
| I'm pessimistic about this pivot though, for a couple reasons.
| One, it smells desperate. Recruiting is sales, and in sales,
| desperation is the kiss of death. I can't read that blog post
| without coming away with the strong sense that if this doesn't
| work, it's over for them. If I can see it, anyone can see it.
|
| Two, companies aren't going to want to work with a firm that's
| allowing engineers to collect detailed information on douchey
| behaviour that the company might engage in. Does Triplebyte have
| the leverage and moxie to make them engage anyway? Probably not,
| see point one.
|
| I wish them well, because recruiting is awful, interviewing is
| broken, and engineers deserve to have a better time of it given
| how demand-driven the market is, and likely will remain for quite
| some time.
|
| Can't help thinking they'll be writing about their incredible
| journey within a year or two.
| andyxor wrote:
| Another one bites the dust.
|
| my advice for triplebyte is to partner with leetcode and
| establish an industry-wide coding certificate, kind of like those
| SAT or GRE tests that you pass once and apply everywhere.
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