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

Why Triplebyte Failed

otherbranch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 282 posts

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#21

Post by gjsman-1000 »

zeroCalories wrote: post #18
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…

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.

> 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.

True, it's more of a backend role question. The reason I threw it in there, is from my assumption a leetcode grinder would be very likely to immediately go, "well, the most efficient number of threads is log (n)" or "the most efficient number of threads is the square root of n" or some other plausible-sounding BS answer. But the reason I chose bubble sort, is that it's so simple to understand, that you can fairly easily (I would hope) figure out there's no benefits to more threads than CPU cores at all, as long as you stop and actually think about what it is doing.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#22

Post by kenschu »

I'm the founder of a new tech assessment co - I hear "you guys remind me of Triplebyte" at least 1x per week. Clearly they were onto something originally - there's a lot of lingering love among eng leaders.

Our thesis is that LLMs unlock a lot in this space - and that we can provide more signal to employers, while giving candidates a better experience. There's a lot of open/difficult questions to doing this well - we're trying to figure it out.

(edit: we're not building an "AI recruiter" that asks you a time you failed or automates hiring decisions - we are extensively using LLMs to do things like problem/module generation, etc.)

I'd love to better understand the Triplebyte story. If you enjoyed their product (as a hiring manager, or as a candidate) or if you feel passionately about this space, I'd love to talk to you. Email is in my bio.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#23

Post by gamepsys »

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 don't think we are over-engineering it. You want to "weed out" everyone but the best candidate for the role, or the best candidates for your open roles. It's a very hard problem to identify the "best" person from a group of people. It would be different if all programmers that are good enough are the same, but we all know the skill ceiling on programming is very high. Selecting the best devs is a critical function for any software project.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#24

Post by esafak »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #14
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…

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…

I ask candidates to implement a simple dynamic data structure, and I even describe it first, so there is nothing to memorize. It turns out many people don't know how to set up classes or data structures, even when you describe it to them first. Forget about computational complexity.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#25

Post by rachofsunshine »

henryaj wrote: post #10
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #2

TL;DR: Publicly facing profiles, with an opt-out instead of an opt-in, was a footgun moment.

Yup. Easy to destroy trust.

It absolutely is, and it's something I am very much aware of.

I considered including something about that incident (for those of you coming in with less context, they're referring to [1] this) in this article, but I didn't for two reasons.

One, I sincerely do not think that was actually fatal (it was, at worst, a symptom of the same forces that forced a pivot). And two, the best thing I could say about it in terms of going forward is "no but seriously I'm not going to do that", which _I_ know is true but you obviously don't (and if you trust me when I say that, well, I don't think you're cynical enough). Every time I tried to write about it in the early draft versions of this post, I found myself coming back to saying both "you're not cynical enough and you shouldn't trust a damn thing I say if it doesn't cost me something" and "but look how I'm actually different". And that just seemed wrong to write.

It's hard to be an honest cynic in a world of distrust. Because I want you to trust me, because I think I am worthy of that trust, but I also think the average person is nowhere near cynical enough about how easy it is to fake sincerity and want to scream that fact from the rooftop.

----

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#26

Post by SmellTheGlove »

racional wrote: post #16
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.

It’ll be interesting to see how much “founding pedigree” actually matters now that free money is gone. It’s not to say it was ever easy (and I’ve certainly never done it), but I’d bet even folks with past successful exits are going to have a hard time these days. Hell, the market has shifted so much that I wonder if having done it before matters a whole lot now, when you fundamentally today need a different attitude toward free cash flow early on versus 5 years ago.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#27

Post by llama_person »

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.

They got me a stellar job many years ago, but unfortunately for them it's hard to monetize candidates unless they return through the same pipeline. My outcome was great, but I was one and done.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#28

Post by nordsieck »

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…

> It's interesting to see how much "standardized cross-company interview for software eng" has been consistently a cursed problem in the industry.

It's not actually a mystery. The problem is that that sort of test is de facto illegal (in the US) due to the "4/5ths rule".

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#29

Post by minimaxir »

kenschu wrote: post #22

I'm the founder of a new tech assessment co - I hear "you guys remind me of Triplebyte" at least 1x per week. Clearly they were onto something originally - there's a lot of lingering love among eng leaders. Our thesis is that LLMs unlock a lot in this space - and that we can provide more signal to employers, while giving candidates a better experience. There's a lot of open/difficult questions to doing this well - we…

LLMs + hiring is a very very risky combination.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#30

Post by dmitrygr »

kenschu wrote: post #22

I'm the founder of a new tech assessment co - I hear "you guys remind me of Triplebyte" at least 1x per week. Clearly they were onto something originally - there's a lot of lingering love among eng leaders. Our thesis is that LLMs unlock a lot in this space - and that we can provide more signal to employers, while giving candidates a better experience. There's a lot of open/difficult questions to doing this well - we…

> LLMs unlock a lot in this space

I would NOPE out of any LLM-conducted or LLM-assisted interview so fast, the LLM's head would spin. I do the same for take-homes or any other kind of interview where the company is investing less of their time than I am. Either we are evaluating each other fairly and equally, or GTFO

Post reply on HN