I feel like they didn't cover one of the massive losses of confidence in TripleByte, which was when they opened up their database of candidates and did not really warn people ahead of time. I'm struggling to remember all the details, but I feel this happened a few years ago and really pissed off the HN community and a lot of people scrambled to hide the fact they screened with TripleByte. I feel like as an outside user this was the nail in the coffin. The dark patterns just took over.
Why Triplebyte Failed
51–60 of 282 posts
Re: Why Triplebyte Failed
#52Triplebyte 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.
I remember Triplebyte for saturation advertising and paying off bloggers to write spammy articles with titles like “hiring is broken”. Nothing destroys a brand more effectively than ineffective and annoying advertising.
(I think of the otherwise great milvlogger who does his own product placements for his own caffeinated gum which I get disgusted just thinking about)
Re: Why Triplebyte Failed
#53Recruiting is brokered enterprise sales. Realty for human resources. And, like realty, recruiting is 80% shit, 15% good people, 5% crooks.
And, like realty, ripe for disruption in niche markets (like IT). As a buyer, Triplebyte should have gotten me:
1. Access to a larger pool of applications through their network. 2. Better matching between needs/skills through expertise. 3. Higher trust in applicants without initial screening.
As a seller, Triplebyte should have gotten me:
1. An apply once, interview anywhere system. 2. Much higher trust in the interview process. 3. A higher initial starting salary through expertise.
It seems like Triplebyte was too hot for fast growth. Had they decided to grow more slowly (probably with less or limited VC), they likely could have established the expertise necessary to fulfill on some of the requirements for providing the kind of value they needed to offer to become relevant in the industry.
Re: Why Triplebyte Failed
#54It'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…
If you create a standardized test it will be gamed. Even with the small modicum of standardization around interview questions that we currently see, people have published books like Cracking The Code Interview, making it easier for people who don’t have the skills for a particular job to pass interviews at any place that uses standard-ish questions. Furthermore, as an avowed enemy of “Clean Code”, I don’t want to see…
The current system is already gamed and virtually standardized. The only difference that official standardization would present is that applicants would no longer have to go through the Leetcode gauntlet each time they want to switch jobs, which would save a breathtaking amount of time and effort currently occupied by wasteful redundancy in the interview process.
Corporations can use that standard exam/license as a baseline and then focus their interviews on domain-specific questions and the like. The existence of standardization does not negate custom processes.
Re: Why Triplebyte Failed
#55It'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…
It's also a mostly useless problem for determining engineer quality, in many cases.
It tests for pure coding ability, when most organizations should be optimizing for engineers that are going to be productive-if-not-spectacular, that can design and build maintainable systems.
Could I have written the above problem back in my engineering days? Probably not, since I went years not working with threads. But I also wasn't working on problems that would ever have benefited from knowing that. Most software engineering roles are essentially building CRUD or ETL systems, maybe with a user interface. Any coding problems given should be optimized for weeding out bozos (which are still plentiful), not for weeding out the most people.
Re: Why Triplebyte Failed
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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#,…
What does parallelism have to do with Big O and I do wonder how would parallel bubble sort be written to your standards in for example Python.
Re: Why Triplebyte Failed
#57It'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 do a tree-search-ish thing when interviewing people. I’ll start with a super basic question about something beginner-ish on their resume. If they can’t answer that, the interview is politely wrapped up. I’ve eliminated a surprising number of people who had jQuery on their resume by asking them to write code that will make a div with the ID “mydiv” disappear if the user clicks a button with the id “mybutton”.
After that I ask a super difficult or niche trivia question like “in CSS, what two overflow properties cannot be used together?” If I’m hiring a mid-level frontend developer and they nail that one, I go “fantastic, great answer, do you have any questions for us?” And the interview can end early.
But if they miss that, no sweat, I’ll start asking more mid-level technical questions to figure out where they’re at.
Re: Why Triplebyte Failed
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you create a standardized test it will be gamed. Even with the small modicum of standardization around interview questions that we currently see, people have published books like Cracking The Code Interview, making it easier for people who don’t have the skills for a particular job to pass interviews at any place that uses standard-ish questions. Furthermore, as an avowed enemy of “Clean Code”, I don’t want to see…
How do we let someone fly hundreds of people through the upper atmosphere with a certificate, but you can't make a login page with javascript without a unique multi-day interview for each distinct company?
Every airplane flies pretty much the same way, and pilots all get paid pretty much the same*
Every website stack, and the level of complexity under it, is unique, and there's also a huge pay differential.
*could be false assumption on my part
Re: Why Triplebyte Failed
#59Triplebyte 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…
I always understood the promise of Triplebyte was ”do the first steps of a hiring process with us and skip them for your next dozens of job applications (that are through Triplebyte, obviously)” Did they never deliver on that promise?
Triplebyte didn't have a relationship with every company out there looking to hire. When the job market is great and you can filter yourself to specific companies, that's great. When those large companies are laying people off and you need to broaden your search, it's impossible on Triplebyte.
Re: Why Triplebyte Failed
#60It'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…
This sounds like what a lot of companies do - except the scaled problem with this approach (and the certification approach of the grandparent) is that most companies want to avoid candidates who've memorized a specific solution, as then they don't get any data about whether they can code anything aside from what was memorized.
The other problem is that implementing bubble sort will tell you about their skills in a particular dimension, but being a software engineer these days may look very different depending on the job.