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Why Triplebyte Failed

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Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#61

Post by doctorpangloss »

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #26
racional wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Being (or working with) the son or daughter of a celebrity or prominent rich person / business leader is more important than ever.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#62

Post by nostrademons »

So I founded a couple hiring-related businesses a year or so before TripleByte. I eventually decided to get out of the space for reasons that are touched on in this article, but I would sum that up even more bluntly:

Hiring is a market for lemons.

The really good employees are almost never on the market [1]. They'll get one job, stay for years, and then if conditions change so that that job no longer fits their needs, they have enough of a network that they'll get snapped up by some other company in a jiffy. The folks that do tend to populate the open job market often have one or more dysfunctions that make it hard for them to slot into the corporate job market, the most common of which are not wanting to slot into the corporate job market and not being able to define yourself enough to identify where you should slot into it. Software can't fix this; it's all about making internal emotional choices and then doing what you need to do to make this apparent to other people.

As a result, successful hiring strategies often don't look like hiring strategies. They include things like:

  1. Internships
  2. Contractor conversions and contract-to-hire roles
  3. Sponsored conferences and competitions
  4. Employee networking
  5. Open-source projects
  6. Paying more
  7. Being the only one left hiring in an economic downturn
  8. Investing in retention
  9. Ex-employee outreach
This article seems to make a mistake I made early in my entrepreneurial career, of misunderstanding your competition. The competition for a hiring startup is not resumes, recruiters, and job boards; these are generally terrible ways of finding new employees. It's personal references or open-source projects, which are the actual good ways of identifying new talent that isn't already snapped up by an employer.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#63

Post by debacle »

dataminded wrote: post #6
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 because companies don't want capable, experienced or well-equipped. They want genius and it is really hard to test for genius. Granted, almost nobody that gets through any process is an actual genius....

I have never needed to hire a genius in the last 12 years. In fact, often times I've had to pass on candidates that were overqualified.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#64

Post by racional »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #40
racional wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go into the background because I don't want to assume people are familiar with a specific company that hasn't even existed for a year-plus, and because I wanted to emphasize that these were the mistakes made by smart, serious people doing their best. If people who have done this before, people in whom very smart, very incentivized people are willing to place their trust, can make these mistakes, I sure as hell can,…

How is an obviously foolish and unethical decision to publicly post user profiles without their consent -- "a consequence of pivoting"?

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#65

Post by doctorpangloss »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #40
racional wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go into the background because I don't want to assume people are familiar with a specific company that hasn't even existed for a year-plus, and because I wanted to emphasize that these were the mistakes made by smart, serious people doing their best. If people who have done this before, people in whom very smart, very incentivized people are willing to place their trust, can make these mistakes, I sure as hell can,…

> As a product, Screen was wildly successful (granted, it helps to not be charging anything).

As early as 2015, I just screenshotted the questions from TripleByte and gave them to people to take.

> The one where companies came to us (particularly post-pivot) to hire the candidates (senior engineers in the US, especially ones from top schools or with FAANG-like experience) that are hardest to acquire? Well, it turns out that companies also don't feel much need to pre-screen such candidates and want to avoid putting barriers (like, say, an online quiz) in their way.

I used my ad-hoc TripleByte screen on a lot of top schools, Harvard & MIT students.

Using the quizzes revealed to me that the average MIT or Harvard CS student was like 4 years ahead of knowledge in same-class Berkeley student. Way, way bigger than I ever expected.

This is the real reason the Screen product failed and recruiting is hard: programming skills are not normally distributed, they are exponentially distributed. If you didn't believe in the 10x engineer, you better start believing now.

If you had worked as a recruiter, you'd know the most successful ones do not "just" source better candidates, which you have been belaboring is impossible for a while. They either have tremendous volume, or they are worm-tongued with hiring managers: while skills are exponentially distributed, an average CTO can be persuaded by a very basic, LA Central Casting-level of charisma and good looks.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#66

Post by rachofsunshine »

soneca wrote: post #33
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…

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?

We did, at least in most cases.

At the time, I was working directly with the "live" batches of candidates. We generally considered it a failing on our part if we couldn't get them at least one connection with a company; the typical average (if I'm remembering right) was around 4-5, of which 2-3 would result in an interview. Something like that.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#67

Post by AlotOfReading »

zeroCalories wrote: post #8
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 went through the process and liked it too. The engineer made critiques about my code that I found silly though, which really makes me question if I would really trust a candidate approved by them.

In my case, they didn't support my specialty (robotics/embedded) and focused the tests of DB scaling because that's what the interviewer knew. Like, I'm sure it was a good test for somebody, but it made no sense as a validation of my skills or experience.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#68

Post by crmd »

What I remember of Triplebyte was, out of nowhere, omnipresent and inauthentic advertising that made it very clear someone was spending a lot of money to target me.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#69

Post by Fripplebubby »

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…

The post gets into _so much_ depth around what the company did that worked and didn't work and why it failed as a business. Your comment is about why you personally, one of >250k people who used the service as a candidate, didn't overwhelmingly approve of the product (and, it sounds like you may have still used it...). Do you really hold your own opinion in such high regard that you think it is more privileged than the opinion of TripleByte's head of product giving a painfully honest post-mortem? Your opinion is your opinion but it is just a piece of all-too-late product feedback - this post has so much more to offer than that, it's really strange to me that you'd lead this with "Triplebyte failed because:", implying that the author is wrong and you're right...

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#70

Post by theideaofcoffee »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #58
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe it’s time to start thinking about doing to software what has been done with other professional fields: licensing and checking out of various levels. If I have to spend 30 hours or so learning, practicing and demonstrating my knowledge about aircraft instrument procedures before I can attempt that as a pilot in real airspace, maybe it’s not that big of a jump that we’d license different software features, and going outside of those bounds would be subject to loss of license.

Then we’d know this set of language features you’re familiar enough with to hold that cert. It might cut down on the waste and proliferation of useless tech that seems to be strangling the industry because people just want it on their resume.

It would do enough to dissuade companies from hiring non-licensed engineers (hey you could actually call yourself and engineer and not feel like an imposter), and would put a hard liability on things that definitely need it: financial and health data, which seems to be ripe for exploit and disclosure.

One way or another the insanity of the current system needs to stop.

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