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Why Triplebyte Failed

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Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#11

Post by blindriver »

Triplebyte failed because:

1) They were useless friction. As a candidate I could apply directly to the companies I was interested in, and take a phone screen and then on-site. With Triplebyte I had to take their much more time consuming process and get to the same point of either another phone screen or on-site. They added absolutely no benefit to me as a job seeker. Especially during the hiring heydays of 2019-2022 why would I need to use Triplebyte when I can get access to the recruiters myself?

If applying through Triplebyte offered some sort of benefit, like an easier on-site or straight to team match because the candidate had been vetted by Triplebyte, then that would be useful. Instead it was more interviews just to get to the same onsite that you could get to by passing a phone screen, so it was useless.

2) Triplebyte betrayed user privacy by posting their names etc on a new service that the users didn’t explicitly subscribe to. And it took a while for the CEO to acknowledge that and backtrack. That was the deathknell for Triplebyte for me as a candidate.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#12

Post by aidos »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #5
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #3

It's interesting to see how much "standardized cross-company interview for software eng" has been consistently a cursed problem in the industry. Unlike airline pilots (or I'm certain many other professions), every company in the valley insists on re-interviewing a candidate in their own custom and unique way, instead of trusting some sort of an industry-wide certificate only achievable through a standardized test. Wo…

Part of me wonders if the recruiting itself is over-engineered anyway. I mean, imagine if you just asked: Implement Bubble Sort, in 2 Languages of your choice, with multithreading or other language-provided parallelism, with the correct number of parallel threads to be most algorithmically efficient Would that really not weed out a lot of people? I think it would. I know the above algorithm is hardly production-ready…

What are you trying to achieve here? Are you looking to remove a bunch of competent developers by asking weird trick questions?

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#13

Post by peppertree »

The problem was standardized hiring is it become too easy to game the process. You end up with a pool of engineers good at studying and it doesn’t always translate to good engineering.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#14

Post by rachofsunshine »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #5
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #3

It's interesting to see how much "standardized cross-company interview for software eng" has been consistently a cursed problem in the industry. Unlike airline pilots (or I'm certain many other professions), every company in the valley insists on re-interviewing a candidate in their own custom and unique way, instead of trusting some sort of an industry-wide certificate only achievable through a standardized test. Wo…

Part of me wonders if the recruiting itself is over-engineered anyway. I mean, imagine if you just asked: Implement Bubble Sort, in 2 Languages of your choice, with multithreading or other language-provided parallelism, with the correct number of parallel threads to be most algorithmically efficient Would that really not weed out a lot of people? I think it would. I know the above algorithm is hardly production-ready…

Our coding problem is easier than that (by a fair margin, it's all completely synchronous single-threaded procedural code unless you're doing something extremely weird) and it weeds out the vast majority of applicants.

The same was true of all three of the standard coding problems Triplebyte used. They're not quite literal fizzbuzz, but they require - at best - some basic critical thinking and basic language features, and that is a filter that eliminates 90+% of applicants to dev jobs. Now, granted, this is under time pressure. I imagine, given several hours, most could finish it (although maybe even that is overestimating things). But still.

There's an old Randall Munroe article quoting a physicist:

> The physicist who mentioned this problem to me told me his rule of thumb for estimating supernova-related numbers: However big you think supernovae are, they're bigger than that.

and I feel like this applies to recruiting: however bad you think the average applicant is, they're worse than that.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#15

Post by gjsman-1000 »

aidos wrote: post #12
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me wonders if the recruiting itself is over-engineered anyway. I mean, imagine if you just asked: Implement Bubble Sort, in 2 Languages of your choice, with multithreading or other language-provided parallelism, with the correct number of parallel threads to be most algorithmically efficient Would that really not weed out a lot of people? I think it would. I know the above algorithm is hardly production-ready…

What are you trying to achieve here? Are you looking to remove a bunch of competent developers by asking weird trick questions?

1. It's the dumbest algorithm for sorting possible (bubble sort). Compare two objects, swap them if one is bigger than the other, go down the list, repeat. If a developer doesn't know that algorithm, what algorithm could they possibly know? It's the lowest bar.

2. 2 Languages of your choice is enough to show you aren't a frameworker and can think in more than one box. Doesn't matter if you do it in JavaScript and C#, Go and Rust, Python and Haskell. It's a chance to show off, while being quite obtainable for a competent developer.

3. The parallelism trick question merely shows that you actually understand what you are talking about. A leetcoder might make the trap of assuming it's log(n), or the square root of n elements, or some other overly-thought-through math that is bogus. If you think it through though, bubble sort is simple enough, that it's very easy to realize (in my opinion) why more threads than CPU cores doesn't really help.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#16

Post by racional »

blindriver wrote: post #11

Triplebyte failed because: 1) They were useless friction. As a candidate I could apply directly to the companies I was interested in, and take a phone screen and then on-site. With Triplebyte I had to take their much more time consuming process and get to the same point of either another phone screen or on-site. They added absolutely no benefit to me as a job seeker. Especially during the hiring heydays of 2019-2022…

Interesting that this post gets right to the point with at least plausible, and more to the point: user-focused reasons as to why Triplebyte filed.

While the blogpost starts off with -- its "impressive founding pedigree."

That's the first thing these people think of in their root cause analysis.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#17

Post by joshstrange »

aidos wrote: post #12
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me wonders if the recruiting itself is over-engineered anyway. I mean, imagine if you just asked: Implement Bubble Sort, in 2 Languages of your choice, with multithreading or other language-provided parallelism, with the correct number of parallel threads to be most algorithmically efficient Would that really not weed out a lot of people? I think it would. I know the above algorithm is hardly production-ready…

What are you trying to achieve here? Are you looking to remove a bunch of competent developers by asking weird trick questions?

Trick questions are a waste of every one’s time IMHO and it was something I made sure to not do when I took over the hiring process at my job.

It’s a form of hazing and rarely does it have any connection to the day-to-day work you do in the job. All of our tests or questions relate directly to the work we will ask you to do in the job, anything else is just trying to be clever and I dislike cleverness in both job interviews and code in general. Cleverness almost always means inscrutable and unmaintainable.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#18

Post by zeroCalories »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #5
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #3

It's interesting to see how much "standardized cross-company interview for software eng" has been consistently a cursed problem in the industry. Unlike airline pilots (or I'm certain many other professions), every company in the valley insists on re-interviewing a candidate in their own custom and unique way, instead of trusting some sort of an industry-wide certificate only achievable through a standardized test. Wo…

Part of me wonders if the recruiting itself is over-engineered anyway. I mean, imagine if you just asked: Implement Bubble Sort, in 2 Languages of your choice, with multithreading or other language-provided parallelism, with the correct number of parallel threads to be most algorithmically efficient Would that really not weed out a lot of people? I think it would. I know the above algorithm is hardly production-ready…

I find picking good questions is hard, and many fall into similar patterns, making them something candidates can practice for.

Even your question isn't something I'd necessarily ask on the spot. Many engineers don't use parallelism in their day-to-day work(webdevs). The part about making it efficient is interesting, but feels borderline like a trick question that a good engineer could fumble.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#19

Post by chc4 »

hnrodey wrote: post #4

I did the Triplebyte candidate process back in 2019 and overall it was a pleasant experience. Shame they didn't make it.

I applied to TripleByte in 2019. I passed the interview, they sent me some swag, and then had my profile "go live" for a week(?). I didn't get a single interested company, and then they took my profile down and said I can try again in 6 months. I don't really have much of a takeaway from this, I guess, other than they also had other failure cases that caused them to lose money.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#20

Post by sevensor »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #3

It's interesting to see how much "standardized cross-company interview for software eng" has been consistently a cursed problem in the industry. Unlike airline pilots (or I'm certain many other professions), every company in the valley insists on re-interviewing a candidate in their own custom and unique way, instead of trusting some sort of an industry-wide certificate only achievable through a standardized test. Wo…

This process is also pretty much guaranteed never to yield mid-career geniuses at the height of their powers. Those candidates don't go looking for work at all. Work comes looking for them. Why would they go on _any_ jobs platform, ever? Effective filtering of the candidates who actually engage with the platform can, at best, accurately identify the next tier down: effective engineers in mid- and late-career, and inexperienced whiz kids. Not that this is a bad thing; that first category makes the world go 'round.
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