Why Triplebyte Failed • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#131

Post by rachofsunshine » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 7:29 PM UTC

stevula wrote: post #122

giraffe_lady wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, cha…

This might be a regional thing, but I have done probably around 100 technical interviews in my career (both enterprise and startups) mostly in the Bay Area and the vast majority of these involved algorithm questions that had no relation with the job function. Most were around the difficulty of "find the largest palindrome in a string" or "reverse a singly linked list". On the harder end were things like "serialize an…

I'll defend this a little bit in the sense that "had no relation to the job function" is just kind of unavoidable in interviews, or at least hard to avoid without paying major costs. The only way to have an interview that even comes close to reflecting real work is a pretty long take-home, and there are good arguments for not doing those (not least that most candidates really don't want to).

But yeah, the entangling of algorithms questions and coding questions is unfortunate. They're just separate skills. Some people are excellent coders who think "big-O" means something obscene, and some people are a walking discrete math textbook who can't problem-solve to save their lives. Triplebyte split (and Otherbranch splits) the two into separate sections, with coding problems explicitly designed NOT to require any of the common textbook algorithms. It's sometimes a little darkly funny how quickly a particular sort of candidate folds when asked to do something novel that steps outside what they've been able to memorize.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#132

Post by anonymoushn » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 7:35 PM UTC

stevula wrote: post #122

giraffe_lady wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, cha…

This might be a regional thing, but I have done probably around 100 technical interviews in my career (both enterprise and startups) mostly in the Bay Area and the vast majority of these involved algorithm questions that had no relation with the job function. Most were around the difficulty of "find the largest palindrome in a string" or "reverse a singly linked list". On the harder end were things like "serialize an…

I once got dinged at Facebook for using a tree serialization scheme that differed from the expected one in a way that saved linear space but made deserialization slightly harder to explain :)

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#133

Post by rachofsunshine » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 7:36 PM UTC

Glyptodon wrote: post #128

I took their quiz without thinking once from a throwaway account because I was afraid of taking it from a real account and also because I had no context about what would be in it, which made it seem high risk. That made me realize it wasn't as scary a thing as I was afraid it might be, but also kind of summerizes what I don't love about it. Later, I think I took the quiz from a real email. I think could have schedule…

Oooh, this lets me tell a great anecdote that didn't have a place in the post.

So it turns out you were not alone. Getting people who did well on the quiz - whose parameters were trained on interview performance, by the way, so "did well on the quiz" was synonymous with "had a good shot at the interview" - to sign up for interviews was a major problem for a while.

The solution? We told them the first booking was just a "practice" interview. And then if they did well, surprise, it was a real interview all along. (If they didn't, we'd let them try again, though it almost never changed the outcome.) IIRC this like doubled booking rates overnight. I don't really plan to do this at Otherbranch (partly because being aggressively upfront about things is a founding value, even when it comes to white lies of that sort), but it's a fun story that I don't think was actually unethical.

There's a lot I could (do [1]) say about the psychology of interviewing, and it's something I'd love to write more about down the line. Mental health - especially around anxiety and depression - is my #1 personal cause and job hunting touches so concretely on so much of it.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1daumg4/...

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#134

Post by ilrwbwrkhv » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 7:36 PM UTC

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…

I think post mortems often get into a lot of sidestepping the actual blatant issue and indulge in intellectual complex worldbuilding.

Even though the one by Triplebyte is one of the better ones, what this commenter is saying is more realistic and honest. He is the market after all. Triplebyte's "head of product" has the same value as a random commentor when it comes to the market rejecting them; I don't know why it would be any different.

If passing Triblebyte would mean straight to team match that would be solving the actual problem. Otherwise what he is saying is true: they simply added another layer of friction.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#135

Post by zem » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 7:38 PM UTC

rachofsunshine wrote: post #108

duped wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's the exact opposite. There are hordes of unqualified people applying to every software dev role imaginable regardless of what you put in the job description or requirements. The tests are there because people are good at lying but bad at faking skills.

Seriously, if you've never hired before, you have no idea how bad this can get. Here's [1] our practice coding problem. It's quite similar to the one we use on our interview, and not too far from the one Triplebyte used in the past (ours is tuned to be slightly harder at the beginning and slightly easier at the end). The vast majority of candidates, even with some reasonable pre-filtering, do not get past the first s…

that's actually pretty great, but it brings up another issue I have with the state of tech interviewing - it focuses on being able to write code fast. the more senior you get, the more you tend to focus on depth, taking your time to think over the problem and write a good robust solution rather than banging out code fast, so coding up a solution in 25 minutes versus an hour is not really a good test of what the company presumably wants to hire you for.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#136

Post by bhuga » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 7:40 PM UTC

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…

> How do you make them interested in your company in the first place? Triplebyte did not really have a cost-effective solution for that

They absolutely did! It was getting companies to agree to skipping straight to the onsite after a 15-minute recruiter call.

This lets you skip the back-and-forth of screen scheduling and result chats. In turn, that saves weeks of time during a job search, and allows you to have all of your onsites within a short time period, and then and offers come in within a much narrower window of time. You can make apples-to-apples comparisons about which role you might take that way, so it's a much lower cost for a much greater payoff to spend a few hours interviewing with a company you weren't thinking of to see if it's a fit.

In my mind, this was the absolute killer feature. I am still at a Triplebyte job 7 years later that impressed me via their onsite, and I would not have thought to apply if they had not been on TripleByte's skip-to-the-onsite list.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#137

Post by Gibbon1 » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 7:41 PM UTC

Uehreka wrote: post #35

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…

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…

Standardization reminds me of old stories about 1970-80's blue chip companies trying to hire programmers like they hired secretaries. They'd test applicants for things like word per minute typing speed, simple programming tests, hire in bulk and then dole batches of them out to various departments. Which sounds like triplebytes model, the motivation behind things like clean code and the webshitification of everything.

Opposite of that is the idea that work and interpersonal habits, communication skills, and domain knowledge are more important than raw programming skill for most jobs.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#138

Post by rachofsunshine » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 7:42 PM UTC

stackskipton wrote: post #125

rachofsunshine wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, if you've never hired before, you have no idea how bad this can get. Here's [1] our practice coding problem. It's quite similar to the one we use on our interview, and not too far from the one Triplebyte used in the past (ours is tuned to be slightly harder at the beginning and slightly easier at the end). The vast majority of candidates, even with some reasonable pre-filtering, do not get past the first s…

I have and you are right, it's terrible. However, I'm coming from Ops side of the house so my knowledge on Dev Hiring is talking to them and making sure they are not going to launch LedgerStore without talking to us first. Ops I'm more experienced with. However, looking at Other Branch example test, it's another data structure question which I would totally bomb. Is this really the end all be all to dev hiring? If th…

You consider that a "data structure question"? Honest question - I would (do) characterize it as a sort of "fizzbuzz+" that is deliberately NOT data-structure-y, and I'm surprised by this response. Can you give an example of short coding tasks you would consider not data-structure-y?

(For the record, we do ask about DBs and system design in other sections of the interview. The coding is one portion of three for the interview as a whole.)

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#139

Post by narcindin » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 7:43 PM UTC

> (I won’t talk about Magnet much here, because the proximate reasons for its failure are pretty simple: we ran out of money and the market fell out from under it. It might have - smart money says probably did have - other means of failure, but we didn’t last long enough to find them in any great detail.)

This has the same voice as patio11. Did he start this style? Is it new? Who else talks like this?

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#140

Post by clpmsf » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 7:49 PM UTC

Not all (or most) people-problems can be solved with software. Recruiting/hiring is a pure people-problem. No two people are the same. No two groups of people (i.e., companies) are the same. It's a "problem" that everyone has felt, but it honestly seems like an unsolvable problem... and "problem" mostly likely isn't even the right word - more of an uncomfortable reality.