[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Triplebyte is, yet again, making user profi...
___________________________________________________________________
Tell HN: Triplebyte is, yet again, making user profiles public
without consent
Triplebyte (YC S15) is a tech recruiting company that operates by
getting developers to take skill tests, and then using the results
to match them with employers. Back in 2020, they got in a lot of
hot water by suddenly announcing that user profiles -- which had
been collected with assurances that the data wouldn't be shared
without consent -- would be made public, unless you opted out
within a week[1]. This provoked a lot of backlash, especially since
the CEO seemed totally oblivious to the privacy concerns[2]. After
a lot of angry comments, he publicly apologized and reversed
course[3]. Then in 2021, some users started once again being
notified that their profiles were automatically being made
public[4]. This time, it was explained away as an "oversight"
related to the fact that previously, opt-outs weren't permanent but
had a hidden expiration time. Triplebyte once again apologized and
promised that it wouldn't happen again, and many people seemed
satisfied with the "transparency and candidness" of their response.
Now it's 2022, and yesterday I got a recruiting email from a
company that found me via the Triplebyte account I created back in
2019. When I logged in to check, sure enough, my profile was set to
"publicly visible" and "open to new opportunities". I was pretty
sure I had never made those changes, but just in case I was
misremembering, I contacted Triplebyte support to find out what was
going on. Today I got this response: "I was able to do some
digging on to why this must have happened, It looks like before we
did our last update to the platform you did not have the profile
visibility set to indefinitely so the profile was turned on. Since
then we have made a privacy chance once you set the profile to off
there is not reset time frame it will remain off until you turn it
on." (Unlike the user in [4], I never got any kind of notification
that this automatic change was being made.) So despite their
explicit promises, Triplebyte did not actually go back and fix the
privacy settings for users who had them silently changed by the
previous "dark pattern". This is a heads-up to anyone else who has
a Triplebyte account and might be affected by the same issue. [1]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 [2]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280120 [3]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037 [4]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27255742
Author : teraflop
Score : 509 points
Date : 2022-06-16 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Good, hopefully they'll find the image I left for them in my
| avatar the last time they did this.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I totally forgot about Triplebyte. Are they even relevant still?
| I remember back when it seemed like their ads were appearing
| everywhere and was a bit worried they were going to be the new
| way of hiring engineering talent. Seems like there's been nothing
| but crickets chirping for the last few years.
|
| Why? My experience with them was pretty bad. I took their
| assessment for web development, I think I even did an assignment,
| and got put on a video call with someone from Triplebyte. He
| never cracked a smile. Suddenly I got asked a bunch of CS
| questions that really were not very relevant to web development,
| some of which were entirely inappropriate like sorting a binary
| search tree. I even told the guy that I thought I was getting
| those questions wrong and he just scowled and said "well you just
| don't know when you're going to use this stuff." "My point
| exactly," I thought.
|
| Ultimately I got rejected.
|
| The whole idea that you can boil down a candidate to some coding
| challenges and a video quiz is bad. I do like the idea of
| streamlining the hiring process for developers, but there's more
| to it than knowing a bunch of stuff, because that can be gamed.
| And quizzing me on irrelevant material was a bad move. A firm
| like Triplebyte won't be as good at interviewing a candidate as
| the employer itself, and may even keep perfectly qualified
| candidates out of view from all employers affiliated with them.
| anoncow419 wrote:
| Pretty much how I felt with my experience. Aced the quiz,
| completed about 95% of the project, then got anxious with a
| very open-ended presentation I had to make up on the spot, and
| the interviewer was very not pleased with anything I did. Got
| rejected and was sent a long list of complaints about me and my
| work. Don't think I would have survived to meet the "founders"
| they had anyway.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Don 't think I would have survived to meet the "founders"
| they had anyway._
|
| You dodged a bullet, some of the most "interesting"
| interactions I've had with founders were from those I talked
| to through TripleByte. There was also a pair of them that
| were clearly digging around for business ideas and markets to
| enter.
| clairity wrote:
| > "The whole idea that you can boil down a candidate to some
| coding challenges and a video quiz is bad."
|
| yes, there are too many variables between the candidate, job,
| company, and work environment to determine long-term fit via a
| test, especially for "creative" jobs. the more regimented the
| job (e.g., fast food cook), the lower the variability, but it's
| still significant. plus, such tests only evaluate technical
| skills, not the more important non-technical ones (like
| punctuality, integrity, steadfastness, etc.--note that these
| are a function of the involved parties and the relationship
| between them, not just the candidate).
|
| but also, the underlying problem of hiring is not one of trying
| to get the best fit, but of trying to avoid the pain of firing.
| that's the thing that needs to be reframed/solved, but that's a
| much harder and a much less technical problem (alternatively
| put, technical tests are marginal at best).
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| It's worth noting that Triplebyte has completely pivoted since
| they did candidate pass/fail assessments.
|
| I started using them about a year ago (first passively looking,
| then actively looking)
|
| I really enjoyed the ability to be assessed on something
| besides Leetcode style questions.
|
| I didn't take a job through their platform (though I did get
| one really strong offer), but even still, found the assessments
| incredibly useful, since they give you a percentile
| distribution of your performance for each topic-specific test.
|
| After taking their assessments, when interviewers asked me how
| I am at, say, Python, I could tell them I have a hard time
| assessing my capabilities. "But hey, I took this standardized
| test that says I'm in the 85th percentile, not sure how good of
| a metric it is" (and not mentioning that I think I'm OK at
| best, at Python)
|
| It's the only way I've found to get a measure of your talents
| compared to the rest of the field (even if it might not be
| reliable/useful)
|
| A lot of the companies that interview through Triplebyte also
| skip LC mediums because they have a different signal about your
| potential suitability as a candidate.
| malfist wrote:
| I question the ability to boil down engineering talent into
| something that can be represented as a "percentile
| distribution"
|
| Way too much of engineering is non-quantifiable. Putting a
| number to someone's skills is bound to be reductive at best.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| The test is not purporting to be a percentile distribute of
| engineering talent, it's a percentile distribution on that
| specific test. Certainly it's reductive, but if it's highly
| correlated with engineering talent it's a useful signal. I
| don't really see the problem, and the alternative (every
| company come up with their own subjective assessment)
| doesn't seem much better.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Sure, I'm with you, but that doesn't change the fact that
| enough prospective employers ask you to rate your skills
| with X, Y, and Z on a scale of 1 to 10.
|
| Like honestly I might think I'm a 3 at X, but if some test
| that thousands of other people took tells me I'm in the
| 90th percentile of X users, that information is still
| useful to me.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| Seems like a great bit of information for you to have.
| And if it's in the 30th percentile, it may let you know
| to either not apply to jobs that want that skill, or work
| to improve.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| They provide tools for companies to directly request applicants
| to fill out their screens (and presumably get those applicants
| into their job pool too). I don't think they're the only player
| in the space, but their actual tests are by far the best I've
| seen, and as an employer they are fulfilling all my core needs.
| yosito wrote:
| I had a similar experience, but when they rejected me, they
| sent me links to some tutorials for "Getting started with HTML
| and CSS". I had 8 years of experience at the time.
| KerryJones wrote:
| Wow, that sounds pretty bad. When I went through they did 4
| different interviews (a little bit fuzzy; many years ago) but
| it did:
|
| 1) Create an incremental game (start simple, see how far you
| can get) 2) Live debugging (can run tests, they fail, you need
| to figure out why and fix it) 3) Flash rounds (Do you know what
| Big O is? Can you explain linked lists?) 4) ... I forget
|
| I thought it was one of the widest range of actual skills and
| their final assessment I agreed with. Stayed away from
| algorithms-y questions (which I hate)
| gcampos wrote:
| My impression is that they are still around, but they failed to
| deliver the "recruiting revolution" and I think the reasons
| are:
|
| - The screening had a lot of false negatives. "I got rejected
| by Triplebyte, but got a FAANG offer" is quite common.
|
| - Most companies used Triplebyte not as an interview
| replacement, but as an additional screening process, which
| means that as a candidate, you don't have any real incentive to
| use them.
|
| The only real use case I heard recently about Triplebyte is to
| send candidate who normally you wouldn't even screen, so if
| they pass Triplebyte process, you know that you should consider
| the candidate, but if they fail is fine because you would have
| passed them anyways
| site-packages1 wrote:
| "Most companies used Triplebyte not as an interview
| replacement, but as an additional screening process, which
| means that as a candidate, you don't have any real incentive
| to use them."
|
| I used them many years ago, this was my impression. When I
| got to company "on sites" they were just full-blown interview
| loops. I could have just applied to the companies directly.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I had a good experience with them as a new grad. A couple
| hours with TripleByte got me a free plane ticket to Silicon
| Valley, a hotel room, free Uber rides around the bay, and 5
| on site interviews back-to-back. The product was an amazing
| deal for candidates. I had to do very little work and it
| got my foot in the door. 4 years later and I now work for
| Google in Mountain View.
|
| TripleByte isn't what they used to be, though. I don't
| think they do anything close to what I experienced anymore.
| Maultasche wrote:
| I ended up getting a job through Triplebyte late last year. My
| current employer reached out to me through the platform, and
| was interested in interviewing me. I had never heard of my
| current employer prior to that.
|
| So it helped me in introducing me to companies I wasn't
| previously familiar with, but other job platforms work in
| similar manner.
|
| I get the impression that Triplebyte has changed from what it
| used to be. I never even talked with anyone at Triplebyte. I
| did well enough on some skill test that I was put on a fast
| track and quickly approved without any interviews. I also got
| opportunities to take other tests to rate my skills in
| particular areas.
|
| It seemed like a decent place for presenting possible
| candidates to employers with some pre-screening, but it wasn't
| anything particularly innovative. I imagine that as an
| employer, it helps filter out a lot of unskilled candidates
| with pretty resumes and reduces the number of interviews
| required.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| To be fair, I think a shared interview system would be great.
| Then companies don't have to devote time and effort into their
| own interview process, which turns out to be Leetcode and full
| of false positives / negatives anyways.
|
| But it needs to be:
|
| - In-depth. Not just a single exam or interview. You need to
| really know the employee's strengths and weaknesses
|
| - Detailed. You can't just give someone pass / fail or a single
| score. Not only is it mean, but you end up getting misaligned
| candidates anyways, because some people are really bad at some
| aspects of software but good at others. In fact maybe the
| process should ditch scores entirely and just show the
| recruiters the actual employee interviews, and what he/she has
| and has not accomplished.
|
| - Changing over time. Not a short period of time. But like, if
| I take the assessment, 6 months later I can take a smaller
| assessment and it will update my scores and log my progress.
|
| Triplebyte is not 1 or 2. Idk but I think it's 3 and you can
| retake the quiz. But then it's only telling employees if you're
| basically competent for some arbitrary statistic, which doesn't
| even tell if you're basically competent at the company.
|
| I think it would be nice if i could take one thorough interview
| instead of several less-thorough company-specific interviews,
| but that's not Triplebyte.
| avereveard wrote:
| Idk, as a company I would still want to run my interview, and
| candidates would probably hate the double interview. Pre
| interview would also get stale fast.
|
| Companies wouldn't trust a third party to run binding
| technical assessment for them, and quality devs would
| probably avoid places that hire without having someone from
| the destination team show up
|
| I think the opposite would be more beneficial: a light check
| to validate work claims and some high level foundational
| question about code just to make sure one has basic
| proficiency in what he claims he has
|
| Then companies would need lot less hr pre-screening and could
| focus in technology and culture matching
| wan23 wrote:
| I'm very sure that a consortium of FANG type companies
| could get together and design a shared interview for
| generic technical skills, and then run normal interviews
| for candidates that pass that step. And when I say normal
| interviews, I mean the stuff that an individual company
| should want to do, such as behavioral, talking about past
| projects, etc. Making candidates do leetcode type sessions
| at every place they apply is a waste of time for both
| candidates and companies.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I went through the process and was accepted, and I agree with
| this post. It's not just sour grapes or anything like that.
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| AFAIK their promise of "we use machine learning to..." never
| panned out even remotely. All the processes ended up being
| mostly manual, with all the tradeoffs that entails.
|
| With the money they raised, after spending so much on
| marketing, I assume they downsized, lost some talent, and
| pivoted mostly to a sales-driven recruiting business for their
| top clients.
| treis wrote:
| Yeah, the economies of scale that VCs are looking for weren't
| there.
|
| And even if they stayed to their original model it would have
| been too easy for niche competitors to erode their margins.
| Think Triplebyte for Android developers only times 20
| different programming areas.
| ammon wrote:
| That was true of our process as it existed in 2017/2018 (and
| was a part of why that business was not viable). At this
| point, what we do is develop tests (backed by psychometric
| models). These are more accurate than human phone screens
| (and especially more accurate at finding people who have
| strong skills bad "bad" resumes)
| KerryJones wrote:
| Triplebyte has given me my favorite interview to date. I love the
| concept, I had some interesting chats with Uber and Apple, but
| didn't end up going anywhere (they wanted me for positions I
| wasn't interested in -- currently at a different FAANG).
|
| The repeated fails on execution is pretty disheartening.
| muh_gradle wrote:
| Ok, I"m deleting my profile. Thank you for the heads up. Well
| done Ammon Bartram. Great company practices.
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| Just delete your account this time.
| zug_zug wrote:
| That's what I did last time :D
| z9znz wrote:
| Whether they are malicious or not, I cannot say. But anecdotally,
| are they a time-waster? Absolutely.
|
| I took their generalist test and scored perfect. It was actually
| not so hard, but it tested some language things (a couple/few
| languages), some Unix things, SQL, etc. It was right up my alley.
|
| After completing the 30? min test, I got an email saying they
| were enthusiastic about me and would like to continue the
| process.
|
| I think the process was to become an interviewer; I forget now.
|
| Time passed... weeks, and then months. I emailed them and got
| nothing back.
|
| Then I checked Glassdoor (YMMV). There were a lot of negative
| stories about internal politics, gender issues, leadership
| problems, "insane" bad manager stories, etc. I don't know how
| Glassdoor works, but perhaps it was all lies; or perhaps it was
| very true; perhaps it has been erased (pay to play).
|
| Nonetheless, I parked them in the corner of my mind behind
| Toptal.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > Then I checked Glassdoor (YMMV). There were a lot of negative
| stories about internal politics, gender issues, leadership
| problems, "insane" bad manager stories, etc. I don't know how
| Glassdoor works, but perhaps it was all lies; or perhaps it was
| very true; perhaps it has been erased (pay to play).
|
| Are we looking at the same Triplebyte? Their reviews on
| Glassdoor are pretty good
|
| edit: There are some nasty ones further back, the latest being
| Feb 2020
| scarmig wrote:
| Glassdoor isn't really trustworthy: companies can pay it to
| nuke bad reviews.
| z9znz wrote:
| Another thing we can do, especially on HN (but also for those
| of you who may be in Cali where you actually meet a lot of
| humans in this space) is to ask, "Have I ever met a happy
| Toptal consultant?"
|
| Has anyone here on HN?
| 42e6e8c8-f7b8-4 wrote:
| I had a silly interview sequence with Toptal. Aced first
| interview. Was told "that's a record for solving that".. so,
| got to do a live, not take-home test for the second interview.
| Was clearly within 3 minutes of finishing up the last bits on
| the test suite on the solution for a 2 hour long test when the
| buzzer rang. Nope, no grace -- you clearly haven't proved
| yourself. You have to do the take-home ( A 4 day window for a
| take-home test ... which means, you need put in 40 hours!) I
| told them "no thanks".
| z9znz wrote:
| For Toptal, I progressed through the initial interview, the
| two timed algorithm challenges, and faced the human-observed
| algorithm challenge. I passed the first of two tests with
| him, and on the second test I realized at 17 minutes out of
| 20 minutes that my approach was totally not going to work for
| the complete problem set. So at that point, no matter what I
| did, I was out.
|
| I didn't even get the "privilege" of doing the 40 hour take
| home project (which culminated in a formal business
| presentation that some people reportely failed despite
| turning in a polished project".
|
| Later I found complaints of Toptal members that they were
| pressured to provide low wage offers to get gigs.
|
| Overall it felt like perhaps an ernest initial effort to make
| a better system and a quality consulting firm, but it got
| perverted into a heartless profit machine. I'm glad I didn't
| progress to the 40 hour take-home stage.
| rykuno wrote:
| I wish this company succeeded with its mission, but it turned
| into a variant of Hackerrank I feel. I hate leetcode/hackerrank
| type interviews. On the hiring side of things where the company I
| work for screens candidates this way; it sucks. I would have
| loved to see a test of more practical programming experience.
|
| Candidates spend their time on stupid coding questions all day
| instead of actually coding something useful or that they can
| learn from. I have a relative doing exactly this. No idea how to
| build a simple RESTful API, yet spends all his time on Hackerrank
| posting on linkedIn how he's in the top 'X' percent.
|
| When they get hired and put on a "real world" project they are
| absolutely lost :(.
|
| I also tried Triplebyte after seeing ads on Reddit. Passed a few
| tests and nothing really ever came of it other than an email.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| To me a big part of the appeal to Triplebyte is that their
| variant is one that does reflect real world programming. Their
| general coding quiz shows you written code and asks you to find
| the bug or fill in the blank - things very similar to day to
| day activities when working on an existing application. AFAIK
| there isn't anything about tricky algorithms, either.
| MrWiffles wrote:
| Thanks op for the news.
|
| Can anyone recommend alternatives for the future? It's clear
| they're untrustworthy so I'm hesitant to even consider them again
| even though I passed years ago (2019 I think).
| clpm4j wrote:
| I've come to a personal conclusion that hiring is an unsolvable
| "problem". When the problem and the product essentially distill
| to people - many individuals - it unravels. People are unique.
| There is never a broad, one-size-fits-all solution. Companies are
| just collections of people. There are way too many variables to
| ever reach the level of consistency that a product/solution needs
| to provide in order to retain customers and grow into a large,
| sustainable business.
| egberts1 wrote:
| so glad that i used a pseudonym on Triplebyte.
|
| I knew better.
| greatjack613 wrote:
| Triplebyte had a great model in the beginning which was focused
| on getting people who had skills without formal certifications
| jobs.
|
| That did not make enough money so the founders pivoted like 5
| times to try other things and each time they made Triplebyte more
| and more anti candidate.
|
| Keep on going Ammon, we all know where these companies end.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Oh man, not again. My initial experience with triplebyte was
| quite good, when they did a high touch testing and interview
| process. It worked pretty well (at least for me) but I guess it
| was too expensive for them to keep doing. Later there was a
| glitch where they hosed me rather badly, but I could treat that
| as a one-off.
|
| What is it with this repeatedly opening up profiles though? I
| thought the saying was that it was ok to make mistakes, but....
| make new ones.
| comboy wrote:
| Free publicity. I would love to hear some ideas for fixing this
| or maybe some inside stories but in my mind this kind of behavior
| has close to zero negative consequences for the company, even if
| it gets loud.
| jb1991 wrote:
| I've come to believe that there is a Murphy's law equivalent for
| tech recruiting. "If you can be abused as a technical candidate,
| you will be." It's just going to happen eventually that
| recruiters, either individual recruiters or recruitment
| firms/companies as a whole, will abuse your rights to just about
| everything or treat you with disrespect at some point or another.
| Developers are just commodities for these guys now.
| azemetre wrote:
| IDK when it recently started but I've been getting direct
| messages from various recruiters to an email that I only make
| public on certain open source packages. As a result I remove
| all instances of email and just mark every recruiter that I
| never reached out to as spam.
|
| It's just so disrespectful, as you said.
| chirau wrote:
| What is disrespectful? Their job? I think it only becomes
| disrespectful when they keep nagging after you have told them
| off or something. Otherwise, they are just doing their job,
| seeking out good candidates. It's not like all of them are
| conniving to swamp you, they act individually and what you
| eventually hate is the sum of those individual parts.
| jb1991 wrote:
| It is disrespectful if they are webscraping email addresses
| and cold-emailing people who never signed up for their
| recruitment "service".
| azemetre wrote:
| It's disrespectful because I never consented to giving
| their company my email, nor have I consented to their
| services. This type of reasoning is why a vast majority of
| people never answer their phone, because there is a very
| large chance it'll be a phone call from a spammer/scammer.
|
| I have no issues when I purposely choose to work with a
| recruiter, but invading aspects of my life when they never
| got permission to IS disrespectful.
| dcow wrote:
| If you publicly listed your email on open source projects
| then you agreed to be contacted at that address regarding
| your work. That's the only inconsistency I see here. I
| hate recruiter spam just as much as you, but you can't
| both list an email publicly and also require consent to
| use said email. That's not how a phone book works.
| scarmig wrote:
| Someone can have a job that's inherently disrespectful. See
| e.g. generic phone spam callers. I'm sure the live humans
| there are struggling to feed their families and get by, so
| I don't really hold it against them. But I don't feel any
| qualms about blocking them and complaining about the lame
| companies that generate revenue by employing them.
| function_seven wrote:
| They're no different from any other spammer who trawls
| through repos and forums scooping up email addresses.
|
| Whether it's dick pills or job opportunities, it's spam.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Except they aren't seeking out good candidates. The vast
| majority are spamming every email they can scrape, buy, or
| steal.
| duxup wrote:
| I wish there was some common ground with me and recruitment
| companies where we both get what we need ... but that doesn't
| seem to be the case. Their motivation / goals seems to have
| nothing to do with me.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Not just technical candidates -- I saw garbage like this when I
| was a lawyer, also.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| To recruiters it's just a numbers game. No different than
| sales in any other industry.
| duxup wrote:
| I was impressed by your resume and think you'd be perfect
| for <irrelevant job>.
|
| +1
|
| Next...
| ammon wrote:
| I'm the CEO of Triplebyte. I just looked into this, and we are
| not automatically making anyone's profile public without their
| consent. OP, it looks like you had set your profile to be visible
| some time ago (I can provide details via email but won't here for
| privacy purposes), and just hadn't gotten a message until now.
| The support response you received was incorrect; you weren't
| affected by any recent changes to the site.
|
| Since there wasn't anything broken on our end, there shouldn't be
| anyone else impacted by this. But as part of making sure that OP
| wasn't visible by mistake, I had my team double-checked to make
| sure our previous fix from last year was properly retroactive. It
| was.
|
| More generally, I don't think that tricking anyone is a viable
| way for us to run a business. We're trying to create a
| marketplace that can open opportunities for engineers who
| wouldn't otherwise have them, and we need the trust of engineers
| in order to do that.
| kodah wrote:
| I have a bit broader of a question: Triblebyte is a screening
| platform, what business does it have making "public profiles"
| in the first place? Wouldn't you want to ensure that only
| vetted companies with vetted personnel are looking through the
| candidate pool? I would be worried about the litany of tech
| businesses that have straight up _awful_ recruiting practices
| would somehow impact my reputation as a platform if it 's open
| access.
| dexterdog wrote:
| So why have I gotten 5 emails from your system in the last 24
| hours when I had forgotten you existed and haven't logged into
| my account in at least 18 months?
| mettamage wrote:
| > We're trying to create a marketplace that can open
| opportunities for engineers who wouldn't otherwise have them
|
| Provided they're in the US. My experience as a European has
| been: more or less everything I apply to ignores my
| application. I haven't checked recently, is it changing?
|
| I'm not implying you're wrong since you used the word _trying
| to create_. Moreover, you didn 't specifically specify which
| group of engineers you're trying to create opportunities for. I
| don't even want to go in a right or wrong type of frame,
| because it doesn't matter, but my lack of eloquence might give
| that impression.
|
| What I am implying is that the statement is a bit broad. On a
| more emotional (perhaps even non-rational) note: I feel spoken
| to yet left out, for years now.
| ammon wrote:
| Most employers on Triplebyte (90%) are hiring in the US
| currently. However, we're working on something that us going
| to change that (announcement coming soon).
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| > My experience as a European has been: more or less
| everything I apply to ignores my application. I haven't
| checked recently, is it changing?
|
| We actually just (like, two days ago) shipped a change to be
| more restrictive about how we show jobs based on location.
| And we have a few things in the works (unfortunately I can't
| share details) that might result in significant increases in
| activity for engineers outside the US.
|
| > Moreover, you didn't specifically specify which group of
| engineers you're trying to create opportunities for.
|
| The simplest way to put this is "we want engineers who can do
| the job to be able to get hired". That is obviously a pie-in-
| the-sky goal that is more aspirational than anything else
| (you're never going to bat 1.000), but it's the guiding
| principle.
|
| In a more on-the-ground sense, we think our assessments allow
| engineers who do well on them to get company attention that
| they might not otherwise get. And we have hard data to
| suggest that we are correct. Each assessment with a score of
| 3 or higher on an application roughly doubles the chance that
| that application is accepted, for example, and the
| overwhelming majority of outbound messages on Triplebyte go
| to engineers with at least one such score on their profile.
| Hellion wrote:
| I went through their process, passed in their top cohort (or so
| they told me, probably it was to massage my ego). And then they
| dropped that public profile bomb the first time around.
|
| I'd say I cost them a lot of money when I deleted my account, but
| they actually cost it themselves.
|
| They could have asked me if I wanted a fancy jacket, because that
| ended up immediately getting recycled. The book was dece tho
|
| Anyways, I ended up getting a job that I love the old fashioned
| way - through a friend.
|
| Great concept, shit company.
|
| Edit: Triplebyte employees reading this: you massively betrayed
| my trust. Had you asked me, and let me review on my own time, I
| might have even been proud to have a verified skill set badge
| page I could link to. Instead, I will probably look directly for
| your competitors on my next job search. You had a great idea, too
| bad that you seem to be irresponsible.
| akagusu wrote:
| > old fashioned way - through a friend
|
| I wish more companies use this method.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I think Nepotism generally causes legal issues for companies.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepotism
| camjw wrote:
| Almost every tech company pays employees who refer someone
| who ends up getting hired. It's not nepotism it's just lead
| gen.
| Hellion wrote:
| Well, I had to pass an extensive interview process in which
| said friend was not involved. So I wouldn't consider it
| nepotism.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Generally, no. For companies, no.
|
| Nepotism in _government_ is restricted at the federal
| level, and most states have their own rules about it too.
| But in the private sector it is common and not illegal by
| itself. Think about it: if nepotism in businesses were
| illegal broadly, it would end the concept of family run
| businesses, and make small farms even harder to sustain.
| This comment is in reference to the U.S., where Triplebyte
| normally operates.
| m463 wrote:
| hmm... I thought nepotism generally referred to family
| members, but the definition includes friends.
|
| I always thought getting jobs through friends was a decent
| vetted matchmaking process. That said, I've never had a lot
| of direct power to get friends hired, so I never felt it was
| nepotism. And the friends were usually from previous jobs.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Great concept
|
| I'm not sure it is.
| Hellion wrote:
| Eliminating the same boring foo bar baz coding test is a
| great concept.
|
| Being able to skip an hour or two out of a full interview
| across many companies is a great concept.
|
| Having a 3rd party verified that allows you to be quickly
| matched with potential employers is a great concept.
|
| Execution may be difficult, or impossible even. But that's
| not an issue, when said company insists on shooting itself in
| the foot constantly.
| econnors wrote:
| FWIW, my profile is still set to non-visible, so it's not a
| universal change.
| teraflop wrote:
| Good to know. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I can
| believe that at some point they fixed it so that setting your
| profile to invisible took effect permanently, but they never
| went back and retroactively applied that change to people who
| had previously opted out (or never opted in). Or if they did,
| they must have somehow skipped my account.
|
| I responded to them with a link to this thread in case they
| wanted to publicly comment or correct anything, but I'm not
| holding my breath.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| We intended to make that change retroactive. I'm looking into
| it with our engineering team as we speak.
|
| EDIT: I can confirm that that fix was in fact retroactive.
| We'll have a response to OP momentarily. (EDIT2: Ammon, our
| CEO, has a top-level reply to OP.)
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I really like the idea of Triplebyte but it did not seem to be
| worth the effort. If it could get you past multiple tech screens
| at big companies it would be great. I don't really care that it
| saves me an hour of doing an easy coding challenge at some no
| name company...
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| What are some other alternatives to Triplebyte for employers? I
| mean skills-based filtration systems. I often post on different
| forums and ask people if they want jobs, but no matter how
| esoteric and nuanced the forum I post to, I always seem to get a
| couple dozen candidates that have very rudimentary skills and end
| up wasting my time on zoom interviews. I'd like to be able to
| access a pool of candidates that I know have a certain level of
| expertise ... even if they have no formal training or poor
| academic scores.
| swayvil wrote:
| Tickling the fear of the day is a great way to get media
| attention.
|
| The obvious way is wagging your fist at all those bad guys doing
| bad stuff.
|
| But doing bad stuff is actually a pretty good way too. If you can
| manage the backlash. Works great.
|
| I mean, it worked here. Right? The last time I thought about
| triplebyte was the last time they did something bad.
|
| Kids do it all the time to their parents. Very hard to ignore.
|
| Something to think about.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Good point. A lot of candidates wont care. Like all the crazy
| stuff Uber did probably didn't bother most drivers or riders.
| And each bad publicity is still publicity.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Hi everyone - I'm the head of product here at Triplebyte. We did
| not make any intentional change to how profile visibility
| functions and (to the best of my knowledge) the issue referred to
| in OP's support response (and mentioned in the second half of
| OP's post) was fixed last year. (See my comment at the top of
| OP's link [4] for more from then.)
|
| We'll have a more complete answer shortly.
|
| EDIT: This does not appear to be a widespread issue. Continuing
| to investigate.
|
| EDIT2: Full response from Ammon, our CEO, at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31771836
| teraflop wrote:
| I appreciate you taking this seriously. If it turns out that
| it's indeed not a widespread issue, I would take that as a
| positive outcome because it means fewer people had their data
| exposed.
|
| But I hope you can understand why I'm skeptical: not just
| because of Triplebyte's track record, but also because the
| customer support representative who responded to me seemed to
| be under the impression that this _hadn 't_ been fixed
| retroactively. If I'd instead gotten a response that said "hang
| on, that shouldn't have happened, give us some time to figure
| out what's going on", I would have found it a lot less
| concerning.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Yeah, totally understandable. Although I don't want to throw
| our support folks under the bus here either: it's really hard
| to be 100% accurate when you're dealing with years of
| relatively fast-paced development. If you respond to enough
| emails with your best guess, you're gonna get one wrong
| eventually, and once in a while that one happens to spook
| people!
|
| Anyway, tl;dr - see Ammon's top-level reply.
| Hellion wrote:
| At this point, if you (Triplebyte) haven't set private the
| profiles of everyone who didn't explicitly consent, then you
| are irredeemable. You've had, what, two years to work this out?
|
| I would love to understand what the goals and numbers here are,
| and what the revenue implications of public profiles are? It
| seems to me that you're trying to build a social network of
| some sort with verified-skill capability.
|
| I went to your site, and your about me page, to see what your
| business model was. What you stated, the mission and the copy,
| does not align with a public profile and social network style
| feature.
|
| If you truly are trying to make hiring better, how does public
| profiles achieve that?
|
| If you truly are trying to make hiring better, people on all
| sides of process should be benefiting. And there should be
| nothing to be afraid of in terms of mission.
|
| Your /manifesto document falls short. What, exactly, is your
| business model? You should have no shame in it. Unless you
| think it's shameful, in which case, please stop.
|
| Like your manifesto claims, transparency is good!
| ammon wrote:
| As of 2 years ago, every profile on Triplebyte is not visible
| to recruiters unless an engineer explicitly makes it visible.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| So, first off: our support response was incorrect. OP had in
| fact enabled visibility manually some time ago.
|
| But to reply to your questions:
|
| ------
|
| > I would love to understand what the goals and numbers here
| are
|
| Well, zero, since nothing was broken in this case. The issue
| last year had affected a couple hundred people (out of a
| total pool in the hundreds of thousands) before it was caught
| and reverted; the worst-affected person was erroneously
| visible (to Triplebyte companies only) for about a week and a
| half (and was hidden again within hours of us knowing about
| it).
|
| > It seems to me that you're trying to build a social network
| of some sort with verified-skill capability.
|
| More or less. Not a social network, necessarily, but a
| platform of engineers with skill data from our assessments.
|
| In brief, our goal is to make the job search process lower-
| grind, higher-signal, and more fair for candidates by
| exposing more information about companies, targeting messages
| more intelligently, and relying on skills over resumes. And
| on the company side, our goal is to provide them better and
| more reliable information than they can get when trying to
| hire elsewhere.
|
| Everyone hates the status quo of a thousand applicants or a
| thousand outbound messages per conversation started, it's
| just a hard status quo to disrupt as an individual candidate
| or recruiter.
|
| > If you truly are trying to make hiring better, how does
| public profiles achieve that?
|
| To be clear, we do *not* have public profiles in the sense of
| "visible to the internet as a whole". We have profiles that
| are or aren't visible to our (company-side) subscribers,
| according to each engineers' settings; a "visible" profile is
| visible to those subscribers and an invisible one is not. The
| only way a profile can currently be exposed to the world at
| large is if an engineer on Triplebyte explicitly enables a
| public link and posts it elsewhere. (Even then, I don't think
| they're indexable? I'm not 100% sure about that bit; this is
| an old feature I haven't touched during my tenure.)
|
| > What, exactly, is your business model?
|
| "Be a place where the best engineers want to look for jobs,
| because it's a better and fairer experience, and charge
| companies for access to those job seekers and for the tools
| we give them to surface the best matches for the role they're
| hiring for."
|
| In a literal financial sense, we charge a subscription fee to
| employers for access to our candidate database ("visible"
| profiles in the previous section's sense only).
| Hellion wrote:
| Thank you to both of you for your responses, I admit I had
| some confusion - I hadn't looked at your product since the
| last time I used it. And, I wouldn't say that it had gone
| well last time.
|
| I have amended my post to refer to yours, for clarity.
| n_jd wrote:
| Is this about public profile visibility (i.e. visible on the
| public internet) or visibility to recruiters using triplebyte
| for hiring?
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| We don't currently have any concept of public profiles open
| to the internet as a whole, so (at most) we're talking about
| visibility to recruiters on our platform. (In this case, it
| turns out that OP had in fact enabled visibility in the past
| - see the response from our CEO at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31771836)
|
| You can get a shareable link to share on e.g. your personal
| website if you want to, but you have to manually enable it.
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