Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Triplebyte acquired by Karat

karat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 126 posts

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#71

Post by edgyquant »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #59
minimaxir wrote: post #2

I remember when Triplebyte had a blog post and/or job ad every other day on Hacker News, and a bazillion physical ads in San Francisco. It's surprising how quickly after the public-profile-incident ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037 ) they fell off the radar.

That incident was obviously pretty damaging to us from a PR perspective, but it isn't really what killed us. It's not like no one ever used TB after that, even though it did reasonable damage to our brand (and for what it's worth, that kind of blowup really is damaging - we got asked about it during basically every one of the acquisition conversations we did at the end, so please don't think that PR backlash never ma…

I got my big break through triplebyte but once you switched from the “personal” site that connected me to companies I was actually a good match for and moved towards being just a jobs site I’ve had zero luck so I got my last job via workatastartup (which is also going downhill.)

It’s a shame because I know there’s people like me stuck in a dead end job somewhere despite being a senior level engineer (I was working construction!) and these people will have nowhere like triplebyte to help show the industry their skills.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#72

Post by elijaht »

tedivm wrote: post #12

I demoed Karat as a customer and I think they're just awful. They pretended that the interview process was customizable, so we sent them what we wanted. Then to demo it I signed myself up as a candidate. Literally all of our feedback was completely ignored. They didn't touch on any of the topics they said they would, and even though we explicitly told them it wasn't an algorithms heavy position that was their entire…

+1, we had a similar experience using it to hire engineers. It felt like our feedback went into a black hole and they did not change their process.

We had a few months of really painful full interview loops with candidates not appropriate for the positions.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#73

Post by rachofsunshine »

edgyquant wrote: post #71
rachofsunshine wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That incident was obviously pretty damaging to us from a PR perspective, but it isn't really what killed us. It's not like no one ever used TB after that, even though it did reasonable damage to our brand (and for what it's worth, that kind of blowup really is damaging - we got asked about it during basically every one of the acquisition conversations we did at the end, so please don't think that PR backlash never ma…

I got my big break through triplebyte but once you switched from the “personal” site that connected me to companies I was actually a good match for and moved towards being just a jobs site I’ve had zero luck so I got my last job via workatastartup (which is also going downhill.) It’s a shame because I know there’s people like me stuck in a dead end job somewhere despite being a senior level engineer (I was working co…

Yeah. You weren't alone. My favorite was some guy who'd been packing boxes for Amazon for like ten years and couldn't get anyone to give him the time of day, who ended up getting a like 200k a year job at one of the bigger SV companies. That kind of story was something I couldn't shut up about during my first couple years at TB, and it was definitely something lost when we changed models. (We made that change for a reason - discussed elsewhere in this thread - but it was still sad to see that model go.)

The issue of "talent but no experience" is a glaring inefficiency, but it's the kind of inefficiency that (so far, at least) it's been very hard to make a business out of. (And to be clear, this isn't just employers being evil, a lot of their behavior is rational and it's not like candidates never lie or cheat either.)

I have some thoughts on this that I'll probably be batting around with my new bosses a bit once we're settled in with Karat's teams. Since Karat focuses more on screening than on trying to be a marketplace, it's a more natural fit for their (our, I guess I should say now) existing business anyway. Hopefully we can make it work.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#74

Post by flyandscan88 »

elijaht wrote: post #72
tedivm wrote: post #12

I demoed Karat as a customer and I think they're just awful. They pretended that the interview process was customizable, so we sent them what we wanted. Then to demo it I signed myself up as a candidate. Literally all of our feedback was completely ignored. They didn't touch on any of the topics they said they would, and even though we explicitly told them it wasn't an algorithms heavy position that was their entire…

+1, we had a similar experience using it to hire engineers. It felt like our feedback went into a black hole and they did not change their process. We had a few months of really painful full interview loops with candidates not appropriate for the positions.

From your comments it seems you're at Google. Isn't Google mostly algorithm/leetcode problems? I thought Karat was mostly that as well. Wouldn't Karat be a good screen for that sort of thing so as not to waste Google Engineer time?

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#75

Post by flyandscan88 »

coward123 wrote: post #39

Karat embodies everything wrong with the tech industry, and Triplebyte wasn't much better. I've interviewed - and hired - hundreds of people in my career. This robotic approach with a focus on either standardized test type material and/or the leetcode interviews where how we interview doesn't match the work itself - it's just all so broken. I don't know the fix, but I know this isn't it.

I agree but I feel Karat is good/helpful IF we're all still stuck in the leetcode/algorithm world because at least it's friendly/consistent.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#76

Post by devstein »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #59
minimaxir wrote: post #2

I remember when Triplebyte had a blog post and/or job ad every other day on Hacker News, and a bazillion physical ads in San Francisco. It's surprising how quickly after the public-profile-incident ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037 ) they fell off the radar.

That incident was obviously pretty damaging to us from a PR perspective, but it isn't really what killed us. It's not like no one ever used TB after that, even though it did reasonable damage to our brand (and for what it's worth, that kind of blowup really is damaging - we got asked about it during basically every one of the acquisition conversations we did at the end, so please don't think that PR backlash never ma…

> We tried some new tactics near the end that seemed to be bearing fruit, and I think in a world where tech hadn't crashed in mid to late 2022 we would have had a reasonable shot.

Is this referring to Magnet? I thought that was neat product idea.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#77

Post by compumike »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #56
Xt-6 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They start elitist, people love them for it but that's a niche market as the top "1%" is, well, only 1%. So to justify valuation/please VC/increase revenue, they have to increase the pool of candidates which basically destroy the value-prop of their service.

(TB's head of product for the last ~year and a half here - I wasn't involved in the decision to pivot away from the old model, but I'm retroactively aware of its reasoning.) This is essentially correct. Our original model worked, more or less, for a small pool of candidates. But acquiring those candidates was extremely expensive in ways that scaled poorly as Triplebyte grew. Basically, we were dependent on ads for gr…

(The engineer formerly known as "Triplebyte Mike" here. Hi Chel!)

Harj recently described Triplebyte's user acquisition trajectory publicly in a video from Y Combinator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s from timestamps 7:53 to 9:33. But yes, ads worked for a while, until they didn't.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#78

Post by compumike »

jonahss wrote: post #62

I used Triplebyte from both sides, as a candidate as well as a hiring manager. I hired some great people from them, but over the past couple years watched as their standards slid, pricing models changed, and sales practices went from friendly to cutthroat :/

Curious, what would have been a better model?

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#79

Post by bigbillheck »

I went thru Triplebyte in 2019, did well enough on the initial quiz to skip the technical screen, but then they matched me with a bunch of little tiny startups -- including one on in a different hemisphere! -- doing uninspiring work. I talked with two, one of which ended up ghosting, and ended up declining a flyout to the other.

Three weeks later I got an email from Triplebyte saying they were "pausing your process".

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#80

Post by naet »

hayst4ck wrote: post #68

I had a friend get a job through triplebyte and generally had a positive opinion of them. I also had a generally positive opinion since I had wasted time phone screening candidates. Every phone screen a company does is at least $100 of wasted time. The value proposition of outsourcing phone screening for fizzbuzz is clear. The value proposition of doing one phone screen for N companies is also clear. Then they starte…

I got my foot in the door in tech through triplebyte after a couple months of job applications. I had a very small number of triplebyte company "matches", but I got a good review on my triplebyte front end interview and ended up landing a good job at a growing startup... only for the company to lay off the entire office 3 months later after the initial Covid outbreak (but the production experience taught me a lot and helped me get my next role).

I had less success when I came back 2-3 years later and tried to get another role through them, but I'll always be thankful for the initial foot in. At at time when many places didn't want to consider me at all for having no professional experience, triplebyte was willing to give me the chance to interview and judge me on my answers instead. Even just the interview process was a good learning experience and I could research any topics I didn't know afterwards.

I like to riff off one of the questions from my triplebyte interview when I now interview candidates- the "used car" architecture question. Makes for a great open ended technical discussion.

Post reply on HN