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Triplebyte acquired by Karat

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Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#91

Post by thaumaturgy »

I went through Triplebyte's process as a candidate ca. 2019. I got a lot of positive feedback from it, and while they didn't have a company in their portfolio at the time that was a perfect match for my skills, the process (and its results) gave me the confidence to pursue roles that I would not have otherwise. I just recently got a role with a really wonderful organization and Triplebyte deserves some of the credit for that, just for building a process that made talented shlubs feel hireable.

When they made some missteps and got (deservedly) bad press for it, and then struggled after, I felt bad for them in the way I'd feel about a friend that screwed up.

The honest comments in this thread from Triplebyte folks is refreshing too and I really hope for the best for them.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#92

Post by EricDeb »

mustacheemperor wrote: post #41
warent wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In summary, the beginning of a brand new business relationship, you demoed a single, first version of your custom purchase, you understood that it needed tuning, and then proceeded to immediately cut them without providing further direction. (EDIT: Note that I previously contracted with Karat and feel loyalty to them, but have no formal association or stake in them, nor do I represent them.)

Well, witnessing this behavior has certainly turned me off from considering Karat in the future. I often appreciate how on Hackernews, you can voice a criticism for an online service and someone from that service will show up, take accountability, and help out and/or take feedback - happened to me with the CEO of DuckDuckGo a while ago, a product I really like but had an issue with. What a contrast this is.

Hello I work at Karat in engineering (have had a great experience so far). I will make sure someone hears about this. I know there is some degree of customization in the format/content of interviews but sounds like it wasn't to the degree it was advertised which is unfortunate.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#93

Post by EricDeb »

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…

I commented below. I work at Karat in engineering and have had a good experience so far. I'll make sure someone hears about this. I'm not aware of exactly how customizable our interviews are but it should be consistent with what is advertised or that needs to change.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#94

Post by camdenreslink »

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…

I got my current job through TripleByte, so thanks for that! I feel like the niche exists for how Triplebyte was set up, but maybe it is not a VC-scale “unicorn” type of business.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#95

Post by hitekker »

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…

TripleByte once told me it was aiming to becoming “the hiring division for Google, Apple and all of big tech”

As a mere jobseeker in the pipeline, I wasn’t sure if the representative understood the reality of recruiting. To me, the ambition sounded ignorant; companies do not want to outsource and centralize their hiring in a third-party that is also hiring for their competitors.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#96

Post by thaumasiotes »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #61
nrb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly same journey for me. I can’t thank them enough for organizing everything (including the flights, hotel, and scheduling) and putting me in front of several great companies as someone who at the time did not live anywhere near the bay or have easy access to the SF startup scene. It felt like a really premium experience, and one that I’ll forever be grateful for.

These kinds of stories were really motivating for all of us who worked here at the time, and they definitely soften the blow of the final result, at least for me (and I think for Ammon as well).

To give a different perspective, I applied to Triplebyte when they announced their project track for people who don't do well in interviews. They told me I had done a great job on the project, but that they couldn't move me forward because they needed candidates who could do well in interviews.

(What was the project track for??)

They recommended practicing on interviewing.io, a site with closed membership that kept me waitlisted for over a year (and only then let me in because I complained about the situation on HN, not because I'd actually waited long enough to get off the waitlist).

So as far as I could see, Triplebyte advertised one thing, delivered the opposite at every opportunity (I'm also still bitter that the site with the tagline "No resumes, just show us you can code" opened its interviews with "So, where have you worked in the past, and what did you do there?"), and didn't even pretend to be interested enough to give you advice that was, theoretically, possible to follow.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#97

Post by jamiepenney »

Nextgrid wrote: post #45
coward123 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience was the same as tedvim above - it was utterly dehumanizing and there's no way I want that either for myself or for the people I hire. The interviewers were smug little shits who didn't take feedback to ask questions relevant to the position. Further - you guys lurk all over HN commenting like this every time there's an interview thread. It's submarining and it's gross.

The rules at Karat may be that giving any kind of help pretty much automatically disqualifies the candidate, so technically they're better off giving you no help at all in the hopes you make as much progress on your own rather than ruining your interview by giving you help prematurely.

Yep pretty much this. I was a contract interviewer with Karat for a few years and taught people how to conduct interviews. There's a graded scale of assistance, anything more than gentle prompting to re-read your code or the error output starts counting against you. If I have to point out a block of code or even a line, then that's getting to the point that most clients will pass you over when they review your interview, so the rules are we don't give that stuff proactively.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#98

Post by bmcahren »

I've had incredible success in gauging candidates skill-level using TripleByte Screen. Everyone I've hired has taken the test. It's not a pass/fail response but it is fairly indicative of someone who has worked full-time in their tested language/skill.

If the tests go away, I don't know what I will do to help gauge candidate skill without traditional and wasteful live / take-home / repo-based tests.

As an evaluation tool, TripleByte was great. As a user of Magnet (the recruitment marketplace), it was not so great. We signed up during the hiring frenzy of 2020 and the good candidates we tried to get were all getting offers from much more established brands. We didn't see any success there, but TripleByte Screen is an excellent product I hope remains available.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#99

Post by nullfield »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #63
subarctic wrote: post #7

I'm guessing the pivot [0] to being more engineer-focused rather than employer-focused didn't end up working out, and they decided to sell the company and move on? [0]: https://triplebyte.com/blog/rethinking-triplebyte , discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27541676

You're essentially correct that that effort didn't work. That pivot was motivated, more or less, by the fact that we'd never found a good way to attract candidates that wasn't "dump tons of money into ads". (Even in the early days, when our branding was good, most of our candidate acquisition was from ads; only maybe 25% was word-of-mouth.) It just didn't work: senior engineers simply didn't find the things we could…

If I want to burn all my data there before Karat “anonymizes it for analytics purposes” on 2023-03-31, so they don’t get it, is there a method for doing so?

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#100

Post by x_juisnka »

Using Karat services tells a lot more about the company than the candidate.

I guess it could be generalized that these companies are more likely to value philosophies that are similar to a few of these abhorrent practices-

1. Flawed concepts of "Meritocracy" based hiring/promotions

2. Stack ranking

3. RIF's based on some extremely shortsighted metrics like quarterly revenue numbers

4. PIP style performance improvements

5. More MBA types managing engineering teams

...

The only place I see Karat style services fit is to eliminate 'noise' candidates from DDOS'ing the entry level hire pipeline.

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