Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

news.ycombinator.com

201–210 of 605 posts

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#201
I interviewed for their generalist interviewer offer that they were advertising heavily a couple of years ago. I aced the lengthy and nontrivial generalist quiz, and then waited for a callback.

Two weeks later I sent a polite email to check in. No reply. Repeat two weeks later.

About two months later I received a reply that said the positions were filled, but that they would love to offer me as a candidate to US companies. This was useless to me as I live in Europe.

I believe the interviewer position was a sham, and they were just eating people's time in order to get detailed developer data.

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#202
post #194
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Triplebyte is only targetting Americans afaik.

I'm not an expert in the direct applicability of GDPR, but my understanding is a European, living in Europe at the time this change happens (but who was perhaps doing an online job hunt, considering a move) might still be covered. Admittedly this is an edge case, but it's not one I'd want to risk in the era of extraterritorial enforcement of various privacy laws.

A European living anywhere is covered.

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#203

Wow, what a dumpster fire. The CEO coming in here and trying to defend that this is actually a great idea is only making things worse. I'm guessing they don't operate in Europe, because this would be a massive violation of many European and national privacy regulations. Maybe they should take a hint from this - the fact that they can pull it off in the US doesn't mean it's morally acceptable.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#204
Wow. Thanks for this. I ignored the email because Triplebyte just feels a bit spammy to me now so I mentally block it out.

Have logged in to stop this from happening and currently apparently I'm "Open to discussing new opportunities", which is news to me. On trying to change it to "Not interested in any new opportunities" there's a dropdown that says "I’d be open to new opportunities in:" and most you can set it to is 2 years. These are whole new dark patterns.

UPDATE You can turn off the setting they're talking about by going to [0] and then clicking the little grey "Visibility settings" under the Profile URL section.

UPDATE There's a delete your account option on this page [1], though YMMV:

>> Government identification may be required and we may ask you for more information in order to verify your identify

[0] https://triplebyte.com/candidates/profile_builder

[1] https://triplebyte.com/privacy-center

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#205
This is utterly amazing. He just blew up his company with one horrible decision. It’s over. The people they rely on (talented software engineers) are almost all one or two degrees away from HN. They’ll never trust TripleByte again. I expect you’ll see TripleBytes partner companies start to distance themselves next week as well.

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#207
post #10

Hey everyone. Happy to answer any questions about this. Basically, we think that LinkedIn profiles don't do a good job of showing engineering skill (especially for self-taught people or people from non-traditional backgrounds). I'm excited to just build better support for showing side projects and GitHub contributions. LinkedIn profiles have become the default engineering resume (despite the fact that most engineers…

Others have addressed the obvious privacy issues, so let me address your logic on the business side of things. I apologize in advance for the tone, but your move with exposing profiles made me angry. Good thing my TB profile is fake (and performs worse than my actual, real life resume despite all the embellishments)

1) There is no lock in - I can move on and off LI whenever I want, and have. I've exported my data and used it to create my own resume site with analytics that I send out to companies. I can see who viewed my CV, when, and whether or not they actually read through it or bounced immediately.

I've also learned to track the progression of my candidacy through the organization using this trick (recruiters tend to view my CV on their Windows desktop during work hours, hiring managers tend to check out resumes in the evening on their iPhones or Macbooks, engineers/tech leads tend to use Macbooks, desktop Macs or Android phones in the morning or during lunch time. Usually when I've hit the engineering lead I tend to get invited to interview).

It's extremely easy to create your own CV website for free (github/lab pages) that's versioned by git and deployed automatically using a CI script.

2) You're attacking the tech hiring problem from the wrong angle, like everyone else. There is no issue with discovery of candidates and employers. LI and stackoverflow, etc do a great job of approximating this O(N^2) exposure process, the filtering and sifting. The ACTUAL problem is on the hiring end - companies won't take a chance on non-traditional candidates (not talking about race and gender here, more about credentials).

You have to start by chipping away at the costs of showing competence for a candidate (the traditional way to do this is to get a three- or four-year degree that's either expensive in terms of time and money, or useless, and if you get a degree with a low score, doubly so, even though you might be a better programmer than the people who scored over 90%).

This will only happen by convincing hiring orgs to hire non-traditional candidates, and this requires establishing a very strong signal/noise ratio for candidates coming from your hiring channel. Before you start PRing me about how great TB is at this - no it isn't. Not any better than leetcode etc, and those are terrible at predicting engineering competence.

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#208
post #57
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the next step from here? Public profiles themselves aren’t very useful in of themselves. Asking as someone who has been on the platform for a while but has not found any success through it. I have other thoughts but would like to hear your plans before adding.

We plan to add more engineering-specific sections to the profiles. I think there's a lot of room to just display what matters to engineers/eng hiring managers better. Then we want to use the profiles to push the industry to look beyond traditional credentials (school, work at top companies). Recruiters say that they want to do this, but we need to get them off of LinkedIn where everything is designed around the tradi…

> I think there's a lot of room to just display what matters to engineers/eng hiring managers better.

There's no doubt a lot of truth there.

What matters a lot to engineering managers are the answers to questions like "What other roles is this candidate interviewing for?" "How well did this candidate do in their Triplebyte interviews for our competitors?" "What are the salary ranges of other roles this candidate has clicked on or applied for?"

Will that also form part of every user's public profile, with the same "1 week to opt out, 30 days to enable opt out" process? Or will that data only be available to hiring managers with Triplebyte Premium accounts?

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#209
post #183

I remember doing the Triplebyte quiz a few years ago and getting the response: > "We really appreciate you taking the time to complete our quiz and coding problems. Unfortunately we couldn't accept your application this time." It didn't show a score or anything, so I had no idea what I should improve on or what I was good at. Pretty sure they hide the results so people can't cheat, but the whole experience left me fe…

They're just capitalizing on the leetcode interview fetish among certain cargo-culting startups.

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#210
I've always found TripleByte's marketing-disguised-as-help left some vague sense of distrust with me. I think it was pretending to have some deep insight about recruitment that never felt in the least bit believable. I guess the instinct was trustworthy, unlike them.
Post reply on HN