Live data from Hacker News

Why Triplebyte Failed

otherbranch.com

211–220 of 282 posts

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#211
Go look at the resumes of everyone in a leadership position at that company. Find me the person who has ever run a recruiting desk. You can't do it. Every engineer has an inner know-it-all recruiter who just instinctively knows not only how to recruit, but how to run a successful recruiting business.

Which is why almost none of them have ever been successful at building a recruiting company. Because recruiting is a people problem, not a technical problem, and people problems are vastly harder to scale.

If you don't believe me, go talk to third party technical recruiting firms and ask them what the backgrounds of their top contributors are. Unless they're being spoonfed with a sweetheart deal from a former employer, virtually all of these people can barely operate their own PCs, much less know anything about engineering. I used to be a recruiter. The three most successful third party technical recruiters I know (with incomes in the 300k+ range in Texas, not SV) are a high school dropout, a college dropout, and a theater major. These people know how to communicate with other people, are as nice as can be over the phone, and they will fight you over a stray nickle.

Being great at recruiting is about being great at building relationships. Building relationships is built upon trust. Clients need to trust that the recruiter can find candidates and convince them to sign on when the time comes. Candidates need to trust that the recruiter is motivated to find them a position. As long as the effort is there, the better the recruiter balances that trust factor, the more money they make.

Triplebyte sucked at the people game. They sprang public opt-out on people and couldn't figure out why that would be such a big deal to potential job seekers. They assumed that their process was so great that experienced devs who had jobs and lives and lifestyles and families would just jump at the chance for impersonal coding evaluations. They started a company with no idea how to recruit and hired people to build a recruiting product who had no background in recruiting. And no, founding a company does not give one recruiting expertise, even if they're doing the hiring. It is both a talent and a skill.

Oh, and here's a fun one: they failed to recognize that along with being a people game, recruiting is a numbers game. Being highly selective in your pool of candidates is a genius way to run out of money as a recruiting firm, especially when you've already chosen to place numerous self-own barriers in front of you.

The average third party technical recruiter with a year of experience actively maintains and prunes their own database of 3-400 candidates. More than that is too many people to manage. You can either pay a bunch of engineers to attempt to automate a small part of their process, or you can simply hire people to do the work and pay them according to what they produce.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#212

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…

This process is also pretty much guaranteed never to yield mid-career geniuses at the height of their powers. Those candidates don't go looking for work at all. Work comes looking for them. Why would they go on _any_ jobs platform, ever? Effective filtering of the candidates who actually engage with the platform can, at best, accurately identify the next tier down: effective engineers in mid- and late-career, and ine…

> Those candidates don't go looking for work at all. Work comes looking for them. Why would they go on _any_ jobs platform, ever?

Because I don't know what’s out there, or who will give me the best offer. If you’re skilled and in the middle of your career, it’s easy to find a job, but if your options are wide open, a matchmaking service like this with a wide pool of companies is very valuable.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#213

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…

> If they can't do Data Structures, are they worthless to Silicon Valley companies?

I think you might be overthinking this - understanding how to model a problem with a data structure is a core competency of any developer. This isn't a "gotcha" question where you need to know union find sets or how to invert a linked list in place.

If the question was rephrased, "design a JSON schema for the state of the board" would you know how to approach it? Because that's essentially what step 1 is asking.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

After 30+ years in the field..it definately wasn't always the case. All the leet code and take home stuff is a pretty new thing. Can't say I've seen it result in higher quality teams. Seems mostly a way to rank recent grads that are working from memory and not experience?

Well, companies aren’t looking for someone who grinds leetcode problems. They’re looking for the people who can pass their hiring bar without needing to do that sort of practice in the first place.

In my more cynical moments I think a lot of the tech hiring process is just a complex IQ test dressed up as a skill test to work around the fact that IQ tests are illegal.

And there’s only so many great engineers around. More companies fighting over the same candidates doesn’t result in a lot of high quality teams.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#215
This is a very interesting, very well written post. The part that stands out the most is:

> if you needed venture capital to produce a viable small-scale business, you didn't really have a viable small-scale business to begin with. Triplebyte's break-even status was an illusion, predicated on funding that would probably never have existed if that scale were the founders' only ambition.

I wonder if there's a way to build a viable business out of a product like FastTrack that does not depend on venture capital to get going?

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me wonders if the recruiting itself is over-engineered anyway. I mean, imagine if you just asked: Implement Bubble Sort, in 2 Languages of your choice, with multithreading or other language-provided parallelism, with the correct number of parallel threads to be most algorithmically efficient Would that really not weed out a lot of people? I think it would. I know the above algorithm is hardly production-ready…

Our coding problem is easier than that (by a fair margin, it's all completely synchronous single-threaded procedural code unless you're doing something extremely weird) and it weeds out the vast majority of applicants. The same was true of all three of the standard coding problems Triplebyte used. They're not quite literal fizzbuzz, but they require - at best - some basic critical thinking and basic language features…

Triplebyte used to send candidates a link to a page which basically listed everything that was in the interview. Most candidates didn’t read it. They could probably have done away with the interview entirely and just put a link at the bottom of the prep material saying “click here to pass the interview”.

If anything I think it would have lowered the triplebyte passing rate.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#217
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

I was one of triplebyte’s interviewers years ago and I can speak to this. In short, you’re right. But two notes: First, you massively underestimate the range of coding speed you see in an interview. The slowest programmers weren’t senior people who were out of practice. (I interviewed plenty of them). It was people who just seem bad at programming. Like, so bad it takes them 25 minutes to make a hello world program r…

We plan to, for the record. We just didn't have it ready for prime-time yet, so it isn't there right now.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#218
post #202

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…

So, having completed the practice problem with about 45 seconds to spare, what sort of openings are there for the aging-but-not-aged Canadian who can probably only manage part-time remote work?

I don't anticipate us getting a lot of clients with budget for a part-time employee anytime soon, unfortunately. I imagine a lot will be remote, but probably not part time. Still happy to have you in our pool in case we do (I think I see you in the signups list - something about oddball proprietary languages, yeah?) but it's not a wildly high-probability bet in the short term.

I really, really, really wish I had a better solution for this sort of thing.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#219

This is a very interesting, very well written post. The part that stands out the most is: > if you needed venture capital to produce a viable small-scale business, you didn't really have a viable small-scale business to begin with. Triplebyte's break-even status was an illusion, predicated on funding that would probably never have existed if that scale were the founders' only ambition. I wonder if there's a way to bu…

Your curiosity might be sated by clicking one of those buttons on the navbar <.<

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#220
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think https://qntm.org/clean makes a good case that the advice it gives can be taken to very bad extremes -- and that the author of the book does so in some cases when providing "good" examples. That's not to say that the advice is all bad, but that the book as a whole is not a good presentation and inexperienced programmers can enthusiastically learn the wrong lessons from it. Edit: grabbed the wrong link from my…

I think the root problem is that a lot of people want books to tell them how to think. I think that's why I hate things like Oprah book clubs, complete with quizzes to make sure you think the right things now.

My best reading experiences involve arguing with the book. And talking about those books and my disagreements with them has been useful, too.

Orthogonally, all humans tend to overuse new knowledge/skills. That's part of how humans learn. We try to find out how far the use stretches and in what ways we can apply our new toys! I would expect any successful book on practices to be seen as overused.

Post reply on HN