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Rethinking Triplebyte

triplebyte.com

371–380 of 463 posts

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sal…

In California recruiters are legally obligated to disclose the salary range upon request.

Source?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#372
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In California recruiters are legally obligated to disclose the salary range upon request.

Source?

AB No.168[1], specifically 432.3(c)

(c) An employer, upon reasonable request, shall provide the pay scale for a position to an applicant applying for employment.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#373
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. For any reasonable definition of "a lot", no they absolutely are not. A lot of people with 2+ years of experience who've either been promoted once and received a strong annual review, or switched jobs as a mi…

Stock price for most of the FAANGs has gone up by about 2.5x in the last year. If you had $200K base, $50K bonus, and $300K stock compensation in 2019, you're now making $1M today. That's roughly L6/E6/ICT6 (staff) level.

Which FAANG has had their stock go up 150%?

They’re all doing well, but even Amazon hasn’t doubled their stock since prepandemic.

There are definitely more people making 1m/yr at FAANGs than their were last year, but I agree with others that it’s not “a lot.”

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#374
The concept sounds interesting but the execution seems lacking. I couldn't complete my profile because of spurious "check your inputs for errors" messages when I tried to click save on the very first section. Reloading the page several times didn't help though eventually a hard reload did. The project section silently lost an entry when I clicked save, presumably because I entered a year without a month. In the Java quiz, a question about generics failed to properly escape the angle brackets, making three of the four choices indistinguishable without reading the DOM. Question quality was quite variable.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

A particular problem with doing that is discussed in the post; you risk everyone's time being wasted if the company will never be able to meet your target.

That’s why the company should say their range and the candidate can say if that’s satisfactory.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#376

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 l…

The mere fact that the post reeks of desperation might be their death knell :(

I would think big tech companies wouldn't touch companies who might fold in the next 6 months with a 6 foot pole.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#377

I applied through Triplebyte in 2015 & again in 2018, and got to know Harj & Ammon a bit. They, along with Gilluame, all struck me as remarkably smart and incredibly dedicated to their vision. So if after 6 years that lot haven't "cracked the code," that's reason enough to abandon hope for there ever being a sane recruiting process, anywhere. My takeaway from my experience finding a SW engr job was that actual techni…

> if after 6 years that lot haven't "cracked the code," that's reason enough to abandon hope for there ever being a sane recruiting process, anywhere.

That capable people failed to make one solution work, doesn't mean no solution can work. Now they're going to try another.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#378
post #29

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,…

Decades of poor technical interview practices started by a blog post (the one about fizzbuzz). It's amazing how a single blog post changed the entire industry by causing such fear about "false positives". Looking at that blog post now, it's obvious how it lacks real analysis of the situation:

* The blog post complains that even experienced engineers they interviewed couldn't write some simple code on paper. Did anyone stop and think that maybe it's writing code on paper in an interview setting that's the problem? Stop and think about this. Imagine writing code like you usually do in a text editor. And then writing code with pen and paper. Backspace? Can't do that. Copy/paste some line to move code? Can't do that. Add some newlines? Can't do that. Run the code using the compiler? Can't do that. Of course most developers, even experienced ones, will do poorly under these conditions, this is not how code is normally written. On top of the already stressful situation of an interview, there's this suddenly completely foreign and limited way to write code.

* Even the blog post only mentioned fizzbuzz as a quick, easy question to filter out zero coding ability. Another way to say this, it was meant to filter out coding skill <= 0. Not skill <= 50 or skill <= 90. Zero. After that, the interview was supposed to move on to things that actually matter for software engineering. The present day interview has strayed extremely far from this. These days, you get asked two leetcode questions during an interview and even if you perfectly answer the first one, if you don't get the second one then you're an automatic fail. That was certainly not the intent of the original fizzbuzz, since answering any leetcode clearly shows coding ability. And the interview never has a chance to move on to the part that actually discusses software engineering skills. Or even if it does and they do very well on those interviews, the failure of only getting 1/2 leetcode questions correct overrules everything else since they must avoid "false positives".

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#379
post #291
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somethi…

Fair warning. There is a large pool of people who think that they are programmers, but are not. This is exactly what the infamous fizzbuzz test was intended to weed out. I personally know a top notch recruiter who credits her success due to learning early in her career how to filter most of the junk out. For example a "Perl programmer" who listed Microsoft Word as a skill was probably not worth looking at. (Note, thi…

Very good advice. The "gatekeeping" they alluded to is just very necessary if they want to have any differentiation from any other generic job matching service. I'm sure the triple byte team is aware of this but I think it's important to keep in mind just how much people work in tech/IT jobs, how wide the skill/qualifications range is and how spammy applications can get very, very quickly. Even positions that are "easy" to get as a competent engineer can get hundreds of applications, and since it's also pretty common for people to just outright lie on their CVs it becomes very time consuming to filter for someone who genuinely meets even just most of the job requirements.

& maybe I'm wrong but I thought the entire value proposition of TB was that their pre screening and testing process made the whole process much less noisy for your hiring managers. If you still end up needing technical interviews and aren't guaranteed that all the candidates you get have gone through some technical screening, what's the point?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#380
post #56

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…

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 somethi…

I emailed customer support in April because your site would not allow me to change my current role to any value other than . Like, my profile literally has a dropdown menu where that's the only option. Nick O'Brien asked me for a screenshot of the problem then ghosted me. Today it is still impossible to change my current role on your site.

I am looking forward to progress toward a hiring process that puts engineers in control, such as by allowing them to accurately record their current role in their profile.

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