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Triplebyte acquired by Karat

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Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#101

Post by Nextgrid »

jamiepenney wrote: post #97
Nextgrid wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rules at Karat may be that giving any kind of help pretty much automatically disqualifies the candidate, so technically they're better off giving you no help at all in the hopes you make as much progress on your own rather than ruining your interview by giving you help prematurely.

Yep pretty much this. I was a contract interviewer with Karat for a few years and taught people how to conduct interviews. There's a graded scale of assistance, anything more than gentle prompting to re-read your code or the error output starts counting against you. If I have to point out a block of code or even a line, then that's getting to the point that most clients will pass you over when they review your interv…

I used the "may" word as I wasn't sure it's something we are meant to be disclosing, but now that the cat is out of the bag you are indeed 100% correct and this matches my experience.

One thing I didn't appreciate with these rules from a candidate perspective (and encouraged my decision not to continue my onboarding with Karat), there seems to be no way to learn from the process. I actually bombed my practice interview (and knew it would happen even before the interview) but the interviewer was very reluctant (due to the above rules) to actually solve the problem with me, where as a conventional non-Karat failed interview would at least give me the solution in the end and I'd at least learn something.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#102

Post by jsemrau »

baron816 wrote: post #89

I did a coding bootcamp in 2014, and couldn’t get a job afterwards. I spent the next three years trying to break into tech. I had tried starting a startup, failed at that, interviewed at a handful of companies, failed those too. At one point, I was literally begging startups to let me work for them for free. Nothing. I finally managed to get into Triplebyte’s program. I did a phone interview with them, failed it, the…

Love that story!

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#103

Post by lazyant »

I was interviewed by Karat for an SRE position and I found it a joke. Questions like "a web server goes down but the site stays up, why?" - me: "well, define 'down', also is there a caching layer in front?". "No, what happened is that there was a load balancer and two web servers and only one went down". ffs

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#104

Post by x_juisnka »

candiddevmike wrote: post #5

I hope all of these interview assessment companies go out of business. They don't produce quality candidates, and they're dehumanizing for the folks that have to use them.

This is a very honest assessment. If a 3rd party service like Karat has more trust with an employer than their own employees in terms of what is needed for that specific employee's role within their own company then that is a sign of poor management and practices.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#105

Post by Terretta »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #59
minimaxir wrote: post #2

I remember when Triplebyte had a blog post and/or job ad every other day on Hacker News, and a bazillion physical ads in San Francisco. It's surprising how quickly after the public-profile-incident ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037 ) they fell off the radar.

That incident was obviously pretty damaging to us from a PR perspective, but it isn't really what killed us. It's not like no one ever used TB after that, even though it did reasonable damage to our brand (and for what it's worth, that kind of blowup really is damaging - we got asked about it during basically every one of the acquisition conversations we did at the end, so please don't think that PR backlash never ma…

Thought you were onto something back when pilot helping mega-enterprises with talent.

You were the only way to get well-assessed devs in the door despite non-technical hiring managers and an HR department asserting any assessment was discriminatory.

Government can't buy open source since lack of support fails due diligence, so wash OSS through vendors offering enterprise support. Similarly, talent can't be hired well directly, so wash great talent assessment for enterprises while they stay compliant, it should be a gold mine.

Most every enterprise in America needed (needs) that, and any of them running a Transformation had someone that would have been a sponsor.

(Btw, looking for folks interested in setting up a new kind of systematic person-role matching, and while still somewhat marketplace-like, profit could be on the order of $500K per match. Know anyone interested in trying that?)

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#106

Post by Terretta »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #83
devstein wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We tried some new tactics near the end that seemed to be bearing fruit, and I think in a world where tech hadn't crashed in mid to late 2022 we would have had a reasonable shot. Is this referring to Magnet? I thought that was neat product idea.

Yeah. (For those unfamiliar with it, Magnet was basically an attempt to automate sourcing. The way it worked was that companies would complete a questionnaire about what they wanted, we would message candidates on their behalf, and they would review only candidates who indicated interest. We applied some throttling and quality thresholds to try to make this a good experience, because taking control of the messaging l…

This is model-adjacent to what we're looking for someone to help try again, but with a return per match that makes it easier to make a company out of.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#107

Post by xapata »

hayst4ck wrote: post #68

I had a friend get a job through triplebyte and generally had a positive opinion of them. I also had a generally positive opinion since I had wasted time phone screening candidates. Every phone screen a company does is at least $100 of wasted time. The value proposition of outsourcing phone screening for fizzbuzz is clear. The value proposition of doing one phone screen for N companies is also clear. Then they starte…

There's a difference between a mistake and no ethics.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#108

Post by theonething »

naet wrote: post #80
hayst4ck wrote: post #68

I had a friend get a job through triplebyte and generally had a positive opinion of them. I also had a generally positive opinion since I had wasted time phone screening candidates. Every phone screen a company does is at least $100 of wasted time. The value proposition of outsourcing phone screening for fizzbuzz is clear. The value proposition of doing one phone screen for N companies is also clear. Then they starte…

I got my foot in the door in tech through triplebyte after a couple months of job applications. I had a very small number of triplebyte company "matches", but I got a good review on my triplebyte front end interview and ended up landing a good job at a growing startup... only for the company to lay off the entire office 3 months later after the initial Covid outbreak (but the production experience taught me a lot and…

What is the used car architecture question?

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#109

Post by rachofsunshine »

theonething wrote: post #108
naet wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got my foot in the door in tech through triplebyte after a couple months of job applications. I had a very small number of triplebyte company "matches", but I got a good review on my triplebyte front end interview and ended up landing a good job at a growing startup... only for the company to lay off the entire office 3 months later after the initial Covid outbreak (but the production experience taught me a lot and…

What is the used car architecture question?

It was a question from Triplebyte's old FastTrack interviews, back when we did a more active high-touch placement model. The gist of the question was "you're setting up a site that sells used cars, and you have information like make, model, milage, etc. for each car that you want to search by, how do you go about setting up your architecture?" Good candidates would ask about things like scale, or note that this system probably doesn't need to be ultra-reliable, or ask about the kind of constraints they can assume on the car data. Things that showed they understood the relevant tradeoffs and could apply them to the specifics of the situation.

Once they gave a basic architecture, we'd make some tweaks like scaling or adding other complications and ask how they'd modify that architecture to fit.

Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat

#110

Post by rachofsunshine »

hitekker wrote: post #95
rachofsunshine wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That incident was obviously pretty damaging to us from a PR perspective, but it isn't really what killed us. It's not like no one ever used TB after that, even though it did reasonable damage to our brand (and for what it's worth, that kind of blowup really is damaging - we got asked about it during basically every one of the acquisition conversations we did at the end, so please don't think that PR backlash never ma…

TripleByte once told me it was aiming to becoming “the hiring division for Google, Apple and all of big tech” As a mere jobseeker in the pipeline, I wasn’t sure if the representative understood the reality of recruiting. To me, the ambition sounded ignorant; companies do not want to outsource and centralize their hiring in a third-party that is also hiring for their competitors.

This wasn't as much of a barrier as you'd expect. Yes, recruiters mostly didn't like the idea of framing a recruiting process as "you're getting people X other company didn't hire" (even though, frankly, that's most candidates you get anyway and hiring processes are not that strongly correlated), but that interpretation usually didn't come up in the first place.

The biggest single barrier we faced for early TB was pricing (we were charging 20% of first year's salary) and the demand that companies skip candidates straight to onsites (which we were promising them at the time).

Later on, our biggest barrier was differentiating ourselves from Linkedin and the like: companies saw Linkedin as the primary sourcing tool, and because they were hiring non-engineers there, it was one they usually wouldn't get rid of. So we were always the secondary tool, which meant (a) we tended to get the roles they couldn't hire for elsewhere, which selected for the hardest roles, (b) we had to justify ourselves in a way linkedin didn't, and (c) we were the first to be cut when the economics turned against us.

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