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Why Triplebyte Failed

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Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#71

Post by rachofsunshine »

racional wrote: post #64
rachofsunshine wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

To be clear: it was a bad decision both ethically and tactically, and I am not in any way defending it. I am explaining it, in the same way that one might explain why a bridge collapsed. (I will also note that one piece of the backlash somewhat misunderstood things - the profiles were "public" to subscribers, not to the internet at large, insofar as that distinction is meaningful.)

The reason it was a consequence of pivoting is that that decision was made in the context of that pivot. Getting the hypothetical "linkedin for engineers" network up only made sense in the context of existing data, so there was a powerful incentive towards grey/dark-patterns in getting it up and running and, as relevant here, towards motivated reasoning about how it would be received. Or at least, I think it was probably motivated reasoning, because as far as I can tell the surprise at the backlash was sincere (I was not part of the leadership at the time, so this is a retroactive best guess on my part, but one I'm fairly confident in.)

That incentive pressure only existed in the context of a company trying to figure out what to do next in somewhat desperate circumstances, and it's in that sense that it was a consequence.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#72

Post by ElevenLathe »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #43
Uehreka wrote: post #35

Earlier 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?

Obviously the current situation is crazy, but part of the issue is that the specific asks for a particular developer job are dependent on 1) the stack in use and 2) the org chart at that company.

1 is obvious: if you need JS devs, most hiring managers won't want to hire Pascal devs and hope they figure it out. We can question the wisdom of this, but it is the reality.

2 is less obvious but not super obscure. Depending on how you structure your teams, similar positions at different companies might require more full-stack knowledge, or better people skills, or something else. IME there is little to no standardization here for developer roles, especially compared to something like HR or Accounts Payable, or even very similar IT-adjacent industries like game development.

Fix both of these issues and we would be able to have something more like a formal apprentice/journeyman/master system for various classes of software developer. As it is, each role actually is pretty much totally unique, at least compared to similar roles in other companies (there tends to be more standardization within the same company).

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#73

Post by Jianghong94 »

nostrademons wrote: post #62

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 need…

Maybe we can add: 1. going remote and support remote; 2. set up offshore offices.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#74

Post by rachofsunshine »

lacker wrote: post #31

It sounds like the core problem is that companies don't really have trouble screening large amounts of incoming low quality resumes. It's annoying and time-consuming for the software engineers, but it's a well-known process and the CEO/CTO/COO/VP who controls the budget can just make the engineering team do it. The core problem that companies are willing to pay for is "top of funnel". The obviously skilled, experienc…

They can just make the engineering team do it, but that's really expensive.

A failed onsite is more expensive than if the candidate walked in the door, grabbed someone's laptop, threw it out the window, and left. That's a big deal. Even a 15-minute phone screen at typical Bay eng salaries is like a nice steak dinner (particularly if you include disruption to actually go do it).

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#75

Post by mepiethree »

Fripplebubby wrote: post #69
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 t…

This is especially true because the (very good) post addresses both points that this commenter raises and _so much_ more. It's really shocking how few people in this comment section seem to have read the (again, very good) OP. It's like I'm on Reddit.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#76

Post by giraffe_lady »

Apocryphon wrote: post #54
Uehreka wrote: post #35

Earlier 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…

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…

> The current system is already gamed and virtually standardized.

This is only remotely true if you're looking at a very narrow slice of software development jobs. Those companies and jobs are overrepresented here, but remember that even in the US the majority of developers do not work at recognizable "tech companies." Much less the rest of the world.

I've been a professional software developer for over a decade, changed jobs many times, and never done an intense algorithm interview and I haven't been going out of my way to avoid them. I've even worked at some startups, though never one based in NY or SF. A handful of massive tech companies and their practices are disproportionately influential but they are not actually the norm speaking broadly.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#77

Post by rachofsunshine »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #67
zeroCalories wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, we didn't have a good embedded track. We called it "generalist" (well, we didn't call it anything at first, but it became "generalist" later), but it was really back-end-leaning full-stack web dev.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#79

Post by IshKebab »

There's a funny contrast between the beginning where they want a meritocracy of candidates and the end, where they are only interested in Americans from prestigious universities.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#80

Post by rachofsunshine »

cbanek wrote: post #51

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 us…

See [1] for more on that (to avoid duplicating threads).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40635518

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