Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by prepend » Sat, May 23, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #263

TripleByte has taken on $50 million in funding and covid is deeply slowing down hiring. I'm guessing this is the desperate phase of company growth as they try to pivot to increase growth metrics. I'm curious if they would have done it had covid not happened.

I was surprised by the level of funding for a recruiting company. Their model is really costly too because they have at least one two-hour Skype screening interview for potential candidates and I imagine they need lots of those to present a few candidates for interview.

Even though headhunter fees can be high (10-30% back when I used to use them), this seems tough to scale unless their thought was they would capture all the headhunters in the world (eg, google eating classifieds).

I don’t think that’s possible with a process that requires so much manual effort. I read about their aim for using AI, but just the cost of developing a usable training model to reduce the need for in person screens requires, what, hundreds of thousands of successful placements.

I remember needing 100 phone screens for 20 phone interviews for 5 in person interviews for 2 offers.

Assuming anyone I trust to do Skype phone screens is at least $100/hour, that’s $200 x 2 hours x 20 just = $40k for screening. Even if they break even with placement fees, that’s not an amazing margin to warrant such investment.

Seemed like AI buzz overfunding.

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

#292

Post by wbronitsky » Sat, May 23, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

ammon wrote: post #12

haram_masala wrote: post #5

This is awful. And announcing this late on a Friday is what news organizations call “taking out the trash,” publicizing something when people aren’t paying attention.

Really sorry that you think this is awful. Certainly do opt-out. I think that taking on LinkedIn and creating a better engineering resume is a good thing to do. I can assure you that the Friday announcement is a result of our team grinding to hit a planned release week, not anything other than that (I would have loved to get this out earlier in the week)

Does it matter what you think here though? Your customers gave you their data under one pretense, why do you think you can ethically change that pretense without discussing it with your customers? Said another way, you entered into a business deal with your customers and unilaterally changed the terms. I feel like if someone did that to you, you would be upset as well.

People in this thread have carefully laid out the dark patterns you are using to trick your customers into allowing you to try and make more money. This is wildly unethical, and coming to defend it on here shows us clearly that you have not thought about this from any perspective but your own.

Good luck with your company, you’re going to need it.

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

#293

Post by chrismonsanto » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #266

ammon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really sorry that you think this is awful. Certainly do opt-out. I think that taking on LinkedIn and creating a better engineering resume is a good thing to do. I can assure you that the Friday announcement is a result of our team grinding to hit a planned release week, not anything other than that (I would have loved to get this out earlier in the week)

Sera HN: Please don’t downvoted these kinds of replies from relevant people. They are super interesting given the link, so why try and hide them?

I think few people are interested in responses other than "we will stop doing that"

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

#294

Post by empath75 » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

ammon wrote: 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…

I have a triplebyte account and would love for you to take on LinkedIn, but it absolutely needs to be opt-in. Sorry if that makes things inconvenient for you, but I’m going to delete my account if you go through with this.

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

#295

Post by crabasa » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:07 PM UTC

I'm not optimistic in Triplebyte's ability to execute here because I think they fundamentally think of developers as "content" and recruiters as the primary customer.

Shameless plug:

If anyone would like to create a developer profile that you have full control over and that doesn't expose you to recruiter spam, please check out what I'm building at https://fizbuz.com.

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

#296

Post by danielmarkbruce » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:08 PM UTC

I'd guess there is a class action lawsuit coming.

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

#297

Post by bmdavi3 » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:08 PM UTC

The audacity of the plan itself. The dark patterns. The doubling-down-admit-no-wrong-non-apology defense of it all by the person in charge.

It all feels like quite the specimen - something that should be preserved for study by future generations. For what not to do, but also because sometimes its nice to have a prototypical example of unethical, tone deaf, short sighted trickery and how it can destroy a company. All in one self-contained package.

So maybe that's the gift Triplebyte leaves us with.

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

#298

Post by blunte » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

NightlyDev wrote: post #246

blunte wrote: post #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 comp…

"I aced the lengthy and nontrivial generalist quiz" I actually think everyone aced it and ends up in the 80-100 percentile group. "This site says I know more than 80-100% of users" is good for word of mouth marketing.

As I recall, the test had some medium depth questions on SQL, unix shell commands, programming, architecture, and more, and the entire test was timed at 20 minutes iirc.

In hindsight, it was actually a pretty good quiz for judging if a candidate knew a good bit about many different areas of development, architecture, and sysadmin.

I know I aced the test not because they told me I did, but because I knew the answers to the questions.

Perhaps my enjoyment of the quiz and the possibility of having an interviewer role set me up for greater disappointment that the whole thing turned out to be (or seem to be) a sham.

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

#299

Post by Dayshine » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

ammon wrote: post #66

interactivecode wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Ammon, the idea is good, it's solid. Nothing bad there. I think everyone knows LinkedIn has it's issues. But like come on. Why make everyone's private job search public? by default no less!? How can we trust triplebite with our career, finance information and personal information when you pull these kinds of moves. Make a good product. If it's actually good people will sign up.

We're not making anyone's job search details pubic. All that the profile will show is that an engineer created a Triplebyte profile at some point in the past, and any badges they earned.

Hi, I've had the same job for ten years. You were founded later than that, so my current employer knows I used it while working for them.

Is that OK with you?

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

#300

Post by aasasd » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:11 PM UTC

hitekker wrote: post #118

iovrthoughtthis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Welcome to your first PR disaster. I would suggest you step away from any scripts and turn on the company ears. Simply explaining what is going on more “clear” and repeating it more often probably won’t get you anywhere good. Why does this make your users uncomfortable? How can you work with them to achieve your product goals without undermining your relationship with them? Good luck!

> Simply explaining what is going on more “clear” and repeating it more often probably won’t get you anywhere good. I've learned this lesson personally. Trying to be "clear" about my own perspective while ignoring what the other person feels. "You don't like what you see? Impossible, you just can't see it. Let me make you see!"

I have such a great comic in my stash about this (author unknown): https://i.imgur.com/lcVU0rP.jpg