Rethinking Triplebyte

I wonder what 'fad-diet' solution this company I've never heard of is pitching for either (A) getting me an engineer or (B) getting me a job as an engineer. Oh, let me guess, you're going to find those magical engineers who come from non-traditional backgrounds or magically making it possible to both "identify the top 5% of Ruby on Rails developers with no fewer than 2 years of React Devops Cloud Experience"[0].

Going from that, if you RTA -- I was pretty horrified to hear what they thought would be effective in this space. I realize you'll have to take my word for it that there were literal sentences in there spoken as "good ideas" that would have literally had me thinking "oh, so this company's some form of scam" had I happened upon them before they chose to reverse these ideas. I gotta say, public profiles, entrance exams in an attempt to "hack hiring"[2] don't know what this company is. I have to take everyone's word for it that they're somehow big in this space as I haven't looked for a job, nor been responsible for finding viable job candidates[1], so that's probably me.

I was kind-of torn about his apology. It was really un?-professional (I mean that as a compliment but I can't find a way to say 'not corporate-fake' either in 'sorry-not-sorry', 'deflection' or with what appeared to be much concern for what the lawyers have to say on the subject. I don't know that the lawyers would have to say much on the subject but I'm told that this is often the reason why companies manage always manage to communicate "Sorry,... (assholes...)" every time they apologize. There's always that miserable thing, they're going along "We apologize to our customers ..." it's looking good "... for the inconvenience this outage has caused." Seems simple enough, except you've taken no responsibility -- the outage was to your software, or your hardware, running on wires that you pay for which you are supposed to have redundancy for, and all of this stuff is outside of your core competency but there are many companies who can help if you're willing to spend. And I'm sure when the issue happened, there was a key choice that had you spending a large amount of money and me getting a flight home; which you also chose to inconvenience me over.

But Triplebyte wasn't Southwest. I think the author went a little over the top on the apology, almost crossing into the "trying too hard", except that the things he was apologizing for -- basically, being blind to some pretty obvious problems -- were kind of spot on. Please don't think I'm trying to throw some sort of slant compliment; I realize I sort-of sounded like a dick.

There's no malice in that statement; I've been more blind to things I should have know that were right in front of me than a silly business model decision made too quickly. I am certain I have not apologized this clearly/bluntly.

And the thing of it is, if it hadn't been done so well, I probably would have read the first two paragraphs, closed the tab and made a mental note to never touch them -- basically, having them go from "I don't know who they are" to "probably a scam". It's the risk a company takes when their apology gets attention beyond "people who (currently) care". I am not currently hunting, but I'm all around it on the "need to hire someone" side and I have no guarantee I'll keep my current job, forever.

Thinking about it -- I've now read a very long post and written a very long comment about a company that I had never heard of and upon hearing about them, couldn't care less about their services (the space, yes, deeply). They'll probably be the first address I put into the bar if my needs change in the next year or so because I can't name a single other place I'd actually look. This guy might be an evil genius; if I suddenly have a strong desire to change employment in the next three months, I call witchcraft and there'll be pitch forks and hay, or...something. :)

[0] I must have been in a really bad mood because HN has never been a place that promotes that crap to the level of this post, so that should have been my signal that there was something of value here, and I'm glad I stuck it out.

[1] Mostly only interviewing; we have a pretty spectacular individual who has extensive knowledge about hiring for the rather broadly scoped kinds of work that just my tiny team in the 100-or-so company that employs me. I have a process that, though I am always tweaking, the major points are about as perfect a process. I've commented like this on that subject many times in the past if you want to be super bored. :)

[2] I'm confident in my abilities as a software engineer; push comes to shove, there's many, many ways to make enough money to live reasonably in most parts of the US. I've never had problems making money writing software, either directly for an employer or on contract, independently. Neither my wife nor myself have completed a 4-year degree (though I was one semester away; long story), she did a job that does not require a degree -- became a Realtor -- before we met, six-figures in 2003? I think. The most Senior guys on infrastructure pulled that where I worked (they paid a little under average for the role/area but like 1-2%).

Sure, having metrics on how often a company ships code, etc. would be helpful, but frankly I have about 10 companies on my list that I'd work for, and I doubt any of them would give you this data.

What I'd really like is not having to practice leet code problems for 3 months before I interview. The older I get, the less motivated I am to do this. I've worked in senior engineering roles at big tech (FANG) with 3+ years tenure. I don't think I managed to not be able to do my job and fooled people for that long.

I've interviewed people I KNOW could do the job, but they didn't get the optimal solution, or were nervous, or N things in the loop, and we ended up not hiring them. There must be some incentive to create a system that lowers these false negatives.