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Why Triplebyte Failed

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Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#111

Post by janalsncm »

judahmeek wrote: post #89
salade_pissoir wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you chose not to address this incident is exactly everything we need to know about why Triplebyte failed.

That doesn't make any sense. How could addressing that single incident help explain Triplebyte's failure to find product-market fit? Privacy violations sure haven't stopped any other successful corporation I can think of from finding product-market fit.

Their product was a two sided market. Two sided markets are always hard, but it doesn’t get any easier if one of the sides (job candidates) loses trust in the platform. Glassdoor is finding out the same thing.

If you’re looking for examples where privacy violations hurt a company’s chances for success, look at Instagram for Kids. It was cancelled largely because the kinds of parents who would even consider such an app don’t trust Meta.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#112

Post by evantbyrne »

janalsncm wrote: post #99
listenallyall wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A standardized test exists for lawyers (two, if you count the LSATs) but law firms still interview potential hires.

Is law a good example? My understanding is if you didn’t go to a top 14 school (whoever came up with that arbitrary number) it basically forecloses on the best opportunities.

A similar pattern exists in tech startup hiring practices and which ones attract VC funding. Not unusual to see funded startups with founders who have no work experience but Stanford degrees. Before my time at The Atlantic, I had a couple recruiters for no-name startups tell me I didn't have a prestigious enough background to be hired. There is a highly-visible class hierarchy in tech that many people in the industry seem unaware of. Perhaps this is because base salaries are high-enough that the middle class is just happy to be included at all.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#113

Post by racional »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #71
racional wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A meaningful explanation of why a bridge collapsed would be: "Facing financial pressure, the board voted to re-open the bridge despite advice from its own experts that it was unsafe and faced a high chance of catastrophic failure."

What I'm hearing instead -- is a categorical focus on "incentive pressures", rather than on the obvious lapse of sound judgement on the part of those responsible. As revealed, quite plainly, by their decision to not go with what should have been seen as the only reasonable course of action here -- to resist the temptation to resort to dark patterns, despite the incentive pressures to do so.

You say you're "not defending it", but by attempting to but more focus on external factors ("incentive pressures") rather than on the poor judgement on the part of those responsible -- you're doing just that. You aren't denying that an error was made, but you are very clearly attempting to minimize the significance of it. The point of literally saying it was a "result of" external business conditions.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimisation_(psychology)

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#114

Post by rachofsunshine »

waprin wrote: post #101
Apocryphon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People underestimate how much cultural baggage influences things. I'll give a very simple example. I did a few SWE interviews in 2020, and several companies did the initial screen over the phone, and the on-site over Zoom. In both cases it was a remote interview. There was no reason not to do both over Zoom. The only reason was that the previous process was a phone interview and then an in-person onsite, and they rea…

This is definitely a factor. "You don't understand, we have a really high bar and we only hire the best people" is a bit of a meme in recruiting circles because you will never ever ever ever not hear it on a call.

I don't think we found it a barrier to getting adoption from companies though - perhaps because "we're a really advanced company using this state of the art YC-backed assessment" satisfies that psychological need? Unclear.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#115

Post by rachofsunshine »

evantbyrne wrote: post #112
janalsncm wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is law a good example? My understanding is if you didn’t go to a top 14 school (whoever came up with that arbitrary number) it basically forecloses on the best opportunities.

A similar pattern exists in tech startup hiring practices and which ones attract VC funding. Not unusual to see funded startups with founders who have no work experience but Stanford degrees. Before my time at The Atlantic, I had a couple recruiters for no-name startups tell me I didn't have a prestigious enough background to be hired. There is a highly-visible class hierarchy in tech that many people in the industry…

100%. I'm not sure if this was always the case or if it was a slow result of tech becoming overrun by finance, but it's a very motivating thing for me. I started a company for a lot of reasons, and this isn't the top one, but I sure would love to show success without playing the class-signalling games that the valley seems overrun with.

On the other hand, I'm posting my content post here in part because I know the HN candidate pool is about a trillion times better than I'll get anywhere else. So perhaps I've already lost that battle.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#116

Post by shalmanese »

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…

It's a market for lemons but it's also an incredibly inefficient market for lemons. It's amazing just how much gold is randomly lying on the ground on the lemon market you can just occasionally pick up.

The classic story is some engineer who got picked up by a company when they were 22, did well and got promoted a few times and then runs into a terrible boss that makes their tenure untenable at 29 and goes out onto the market any interviews exactly like a 22 year old again by just shooting off random resumes from LinkedIn. I've had to slap so many of my tech friends on the head and be like, no, look, there's a so much more pleasant path you can now go down.

But like, why wouldn't it be that way? The median number of hours any engineer spends thinking about how to get hired in any one year is zero, there's an extreme minority who love the system and think about it all the time and they all talk to each other so they think everyone else is an idiot but the majority of good engineers spent most of their time getting good at engineering, not being hired.

I have an alternative theory which I call the "5th most important problem syndrome". At any company/department/team/individual, we have all the aspirations in the world but we really only have the bandwidth to work on our 1st & 2nd and maaaaybe 3rd most important problems. Getting better at hiring usually slots somewhere around the 5th most important problem which is a dangerous space to be because we oh so aspirationally want to get around to it this quarter but life inconveniently gets in the way so it gets pushed onto the backburner where it will forever be the 5th most important problem.

Startups have to be super careful to make sure they're not solving the 5th most important problem in their user's lives because the initial feedback will be overwhelming that this is definitely one of the top 10 most important problems the company/user faces and everyone is gung ho about fixing it but every time it's time to make forward progress, some "unexpected" emergency appears that derails the project.

Working on technical debt is a classic 5th most important problem which is why it's a perennial topic for debate in engineering circles. Startups that aim to optimize your cloud cost, IMHO, also run into this quite a bit. I've seen so many of them come and go throughout the years and my conversations with them tend to all follow this same trajectory.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#117

Post by neilv »

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…

Airline pilot is not a great choice for comparison.

Airline pilots are selected to be entrusted with many lives, with the utmost professionalism, and to perform with ability under stress.

And it shows, in the amazing track record of aviation safety.

Most software developers, on the other hand, are mainly paid to mechanically type out code, cribbing from StackOverflow or ChatGPT whenever they don't know something, to "get it done".

And it shows, with the atrocious track record of the entire industry at information security, for one obvious metric.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#118

Post by FlyingSnake »

reidjs wrote: post #103
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…

Just out of curiosity, what are some of the problems with "Clean Code"? I thought most of it made sense as basic guidelines. It's been a while since I read it though

Here’s a great example of why it could be ineffective: https://youtu.be/tD5NrevFtbU

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#119

Post by jiveturkey »

perspectivezoom wrote: post #34

I was Triplebyte's first engineering placement. I still remember going to a random SoMa apartment with Harj and Ammon and Guillaume and coding up tetris in ruby, having no prior experience with game loops. That landed me a job with Flexport in 2016. I doubt that I would have gotten that placement without Triplebyte. So I am quite grateful that they existed, for jumpstarting my early career. With that said, when it ca…

You're not evaluating this on a proper A/B basis. I dare say, you might not have landed at Flexport but you would have landed somewhere?

pedantry: surely you didn't go to a random apartment, rather it was their apartment.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#120

Post by janalsncm »

evantbyrne wrote: post #112
janalsncm wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is law a good example? My understanding is if you didn’t go to a top 14 school (whoever came up with that arbitrary number) it basically forecloses on the best opportunities.

A similar pattern exists in tech startup hiring practices and which ones attract VC funding. Not unusual to see funded startups with founders who have no work experience but Stanford degrees. Before my time at The Atlantic, I had a couple recruiters for no-name startups tell me I didn't have a prestigious enough background to be hired. There is a highly-visible class hierarchy in tech that many people in the industry…

That sucks. It can definitely be an uphill battle if you didn’t go to an “elite” school or have a non traditional career path. That said, I think tech gives many more chances than law. Bigger companies discriminate far less (also not perfect) and once you have that on your resume it’s a strong social signal moving forward.
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