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Why Triplebyte Failed

otherbranch.com

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Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#161

Post by rachofsunshine »

neilv wrote: post #130
rachofsunshine wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We talked about the dating-app analogy a LOT, and I think it goes quite deep. It applies to almost all competitive markets, especially matchmaking ones. > I would say the problem is the efficiency of negotiating a fair term because both parties are not incentivized to go to a public auction, hence no market price. Are you referring specifically to salary negotiation here? I think this is one of the things that makes…

> > Okay, what are your salary expectations? [...] This is just so we know what jobs you might be interested in - the only thing we'll communicate is whether you match a client's salary range or not and vice-versa. > [...] I'm trying to get an amazing developer with a mediocre resume an amazing job, or a good eveloper with a mediocre resume a good job - one better than they could have gotten on their own. Is the reas…

> Is the reason that you can get employers and workers to commit to salary ranges like this, that you're focusing on mediocre resumes?

I don't think so. Of the signups that have come in from this thread, most of whom have pretty respectable if not quite impressive resumes, about 80% chose to give a salary range and about 2/3 of those are OK sharing it.

I don't think most people are averse to sharing salary information. I think they just don't like the guessing game or the feeling like they're weakening their negotiating position, and having someone in the middle revealing things only with precommitments by both sides alleviates that quite a bit.

> (BTW, the below sounds like it could be a good/great thing. I'm not criticizing it, just curious whether that's also why requiring salary ranges upfront would work here, when normally both parties would be resistant.)

Yeah, no offense taken at all! It's a reasonable question. To be clear, though, we don't require salary ranges; we just ask for them voluntarily.

If one side or the other doesn't want to share that info, that's fine - we just won't give them the info the other party gave us either. If they don't want to share it even internally with us, they can do that, but that just means they get noisier matches, which isn't really to their benefit. But that's their choice.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#162

Post by itronitron »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #133
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…

I've never had two in-person interviews that were at all similar in any way.

Maybe instead of a 'practice' interview people can just be told what to expect so they know how to prepare.

Offering practice interviews just makes it sound like the interview is a performance.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#163

Post by recursive »

shalmanese wrote: post #116
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 t…

So, what's the more pleasant path? I'm well more than 7 years in at this point. And I've spent precious little time in the job market at large. But if my current employer had a problem, it's occurred to me that I don't really know how to find a job. What do people do?

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#164

Post by rachofsunshine »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #134
Fripplebubby wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

OP chiming in here to say that there's truth to this perspective. It is very easy to miss the forest for the trees in product work.

That being said: the product the top of this thread was talking about did have users and did break even financially, even operating with some pretty major inefficiencies. So while it would be wrong to argue with that poster about what they liked, they are empirically wrong in the claim that no one liked it.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#165

Post by geoelectric »

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…

I felt that was an odd omission in the article. Maybe it didn’t have a huge market impact outside the local crowd, but it was a big deal then. I seem to remember the CEO posting in the threads apologizing, etc.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#166

Post by webel0 »

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…

I would love to learn if TripleByte's data was sold off somewhere? I also had this concern (which was probably a bit overblown). One of the main scenarios I was concerned about was a case where the firm was sold off for parts.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#167

Post by itronitron »

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…

The fundamental truth is that companies that want to hire people do hire people.

There are many more job positions posted than will ever be hired for, despite the availability of suitable talent.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#168

Post by teaearlgraycold »

TripleByte worked amazingly well for me. I even use my TripleByte backpack every day on my way to work.

Back in 2018 I was a new grad in Pennsylvania trying to move to the Bay Area. Attempting the process of interviewing, scheduling everything so I can fly out and do on-sites, booking a hotel in a new city for the first time etc. would have been overwhelming. But the whole process was taken care of for me. I got 5 interviews scheduled across Monday through Friday. The hotel was paid for. Uber rides to and from offices were paid for. My flight was paid for. I ended the week with 2 offers. I got them to fight over me and then picked the job with the clearly superior work culture.

Since then I've worked at seed stage companies, Google, and moved around the bay a bit. It would have been possible without TripleByte, but the value prop as a candidate was tremendous. The employer I joined continued to use TripleByte, almost exclusively, until we got an in-house recruiter. Even then we still used it as a solid side channel. I think 3 or 4 of the engineers that joined were TripleByte candidates. They really were excellent at digging up people who wouldn't have seemed like the right pick just given a resume, but in fact were perfect fits once settled in.

The only problem, now that I've got some experience under my belt, is that my professional network makes something like TripleByte unnecessary (unless I move to a new area, in which case I could use help finding a good job). But once we're hiring some full stack web devs at work I'll take a serious look at OtherBranch.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#169

Post by itronitron »

ff317 wrote: post #155
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…

The problem is that software development is less like hiring an airline pilot or a structural engineer, and more like hiring an artist. Try making up a "standard exam" that will tell you whether an artist will produce several great unique works for you in the future, so you know which one to hire...

Will they be required to use Scrum and forced to use Jira?

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#170

Post by supernewton »

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?

For air transport in the U.S., it's not just one certificate, it's many. You get your private license, instrument rating, multi-engine rating, commercial certificate, instructor certificate, and finally the air transport certificate. And you're not allowed to even think about that last step until you've accumulated 1500 flight hours on the previous steps. Being allowed to write a Javascript login page is easy pickings compared to that.
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