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Why Triplebyte Failed

otherbranch.com

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Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#241

Post by metadat »

philsnow wrote: post #239
metadat wrote: post #238

I'm hoping someone will humor me: At the beginning the author states the "shorter version" is at https://www.otherbranch.com/blog/rebooting-something-like-tr... Then in this shorter article: > But maybe we can fork it. (In the Git sense, not that one!) With a wikipedia link to the Good Place TV show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Place I don't get it though, what does The Good Place have to do with any kind…

In the show, the characters can’t swear (non-spoiler: because they’re in the Good Place, and nobody can swear there) so they say “fork” and “shirt” and so forth.

Ah, got it. Thank you kindly, philsnow.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#242

Post by vunderba »

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?

I'm sorry, are you serious or being deliberately obtuse?

Even the most minimal pilots license, a.k.a. the PPL, still requires approximately 40 hours give or take of instruction, taking the ground school exam, and finally passing a check ride with a certified flight instructor.

Flying a passenger airliner as you seem to be alluding to basically means that you have a commercial license and likely an ATP - we're talking hundreds if not thousands of hours of flight experience.

Unbelievable.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#243

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #197
josephg wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The triplebyte interviews were pretty tightly scripted to try and remove interviewer bias. If you did two interviews with TB, you would have found them pretty similar. We also did tell candidates what to expect and how to prepare. Most candidates didn’t read our preparation notes. The people who did did better in the interview. (Source: I was one of TB’s interviewers.)

> Most candidates didn’t read our preparation notes. looks at recent interviews Ah, the more things change...

And it turned out “fine” anyway because HR didn’t read the job posting and now the hiring manager is somehow interviewing an SAP developer for a Dynamics position.

/s, but not 100% /s

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#244

Post by Jianghong94 »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #88
Jianghong94 wrote: post #86

I can't help but want to draw the parallel between triplebyte and dating app: both are marketplace for 2 parties, or say networks; both networks are inherently two-tier, one premium tier and one, let's say subpar tier. For the premium tier, the problem is less so the efficiency of the matching process because participants have powerful signals, I would say the problem is the efficiency of negotiating a fair term beca…

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…

> Are you referring specifically to salary negotiation here? I think this is one of the things that makes a trusted intermediary useful.

Yeah, I agree. I do feel like you're not going to take the venture-backed route this time? Cause in my opinion that's part of the reason why drive triplebyte went down this route. Based on your writing you probably concluded triplebyte model back in its heyday was going to be a decent business, just that it can't be a VC home-run.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#245

Post by evilduck »

vunderba wrote: post #242
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm sorry, are you serious or being deliberately obtuse? Even the most minimal pilots license, a.k.a. the PPL, still requires approximately 40 hours give or take of instruction, taking the ground school exam, and finally passing a check ride with a certified flight instructor. Flying a passenger airliner as you seem to be alluding to basically means that you have a commercial license and likely an ATP - we're talking…

Pilots have it easy because they actually have a series of tests they can take to prove they can do something. Once they have it then that's done, proof acquired. I have around thirty thousand hours working as a software engineer and have been part of many successful product deliveries, have progressively greater accomplishments, and hold a degree in computer science and all of that is worth almost zilch to the next interviewer.

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#246

Post by cipheredStones »

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…

Oh, that brings back memories. When I interviewed with Triplebyte in 2018 and was rejected, my first item in the 'positive feedback' part of the email was "We saw some real strength on the tic tac toe section.", and my first item in the immediately following "the areas we think you can improve" paragraph was "We didn't see the coding proficiency we were looking for in the tic tac toe section--you didn't make very much progress."

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#247

Post by wging »

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…

It's not covered extensively in the article, but it was alluded to at one point via the phrase "pissed them off with anti-privacy decisions". (In context, 'them' refers to the engineering side of Triplebyte's user base.)

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#248

Post by altdataseller »

kenschu wrote: post #48
minimaxir wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs + hiring is a very very risky combination.

One that we have to tread carefully! I should have clarified - we're not just putting an LLM on the other side of the candidate and letting it drive decisions. Instead think of things use cases like content generation (we don't have a problem library - we create custom problems/modules for each customer of ours), etc. That's where I think you can improve signal a lot, by setting up a better situation to assess the ca…

By content generation, do you mean take home problems or interview questions?

Re: Why Triplebyte Failed

#249

Post by wodenokoto »

itronitron wrote: post #162
rachofsunshine wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even though interviews between companies are wildly different, there is a correlation between doing more and getting good at them.

There’s a lot of performance and interview skills involved in the talking part of an interview. It’s not just the hacker code part that benefits from training

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