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Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

triplebyte.com

151–160 of 183 posts

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#151
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t get skipped past phone screens, you still have to do those. I don’t think you skip resume filter either. They claim they don’t share the resume, but on multiple occasions I had someone from the company magically view my LinkedIn soon after I was paired with them. It’s not difficult for them to find you, there’s not really much anonymity built into TripleByte after you’re accepted. You do get to skip remote…

Skipping the resume filter meaning making it to starting the phone screen process in the first place.

Triplebyte is just a different filter.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obtaining endorsements is a different skill from RN. Those on linkedin with all the endorsements are not the ones doing the work but the social operators that value networks and symbols more.

I 100% agree about LinkedIn endorsements. But those seem pushed on users without their consent in order to drive engagement metrics. I often get garbage endorsements for vague skills like "mobile development". But what if you could self-identity your skills (Erlang, Vue.js, etc) and there was a low friction way for your peers to +1 those skills?

Utterly meaningless to me as an employer. It measures how big the group of friends is that decide to +1 each other.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwaway, because I'm well-known on HN. I ran the TripleByte course once, and it was 100% not worth my time as a professional. The "coding test" was criminally simple, but got me in the door quickly for an interview. I spent a number of hours building out projects with a paired interviewer, as well as answering questions. This part I enjoyed, it felt like a nice back and forth while building an interesting bit of so…

The giants fail people for the same reasons as well. I've learned over time that qualifications matter far far less than interview skills at software companies, and even a maximally qualified person only has a 60-70% chance of passing any arbitrary interview.

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Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#154
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Triplebyte they have a two hour interview with a real engineer who has passed their own interview. Even if you cheat on the live interview, you still have to do an on-site at the company that might hire you, so it’s not a huge benefit to cheat.

Waste time doing an online test, for an opportunity to waste time with a faux interview, for the opportunity to..have an interview at $bigcorp. What’s the TripleByte value add here, why should I spend time with them? Why not send my CV to $bigcorp directly?

Using a burner because I don't want to tie this to my company.

You can send your CV to $bigcorp directly, but $bigcorp is inundated with CVs, and many CVs have a casual relationship with reality.

I do a lot of interviews on the hiring side. I look at a lot of resumes. And other than "worked in a similar position at a big-5 tech company or well regarded unicorn," nothing on a resume provides much signal. There are a handful of universities that make me pay attention, and a few particular programs outside that handful, but even that is weak signal. A candidate saying "expert in [whatever]" is useless.

I spend about 10% of my work week doing technical phone screens. This comes after a recruiter reads a candidate's resume, talks to them on the phone about their experience, and decides they're a plausible candidate. I get on the phone with them, we fire up coderpad, and I ask them to start coding. Nothing requiring exotic data structures or algorithms, just a straightforward "make a class with a couple of properties" type thing. Something along the lines of:

Part 1: Make a class that represents a playing card. It should have a suit (clubs, diamonds, hearts, or spades), and a rank (two through ten, jack, queen, king, or ace). Make a way to print out the card as a string. And make a comparison function that can tell whether two cards are the same (same suit and same rank).

Part 2: Make a deck of all 52 possible cards.

Part 3: Make a 5-card hand by picking 5 random cards from the deck.

and one or two more similarly straightforward parts after that.

There are a few places where a candidate can show off (e.g. override the default string representation for the class, anticipate that we might want a comparator that does more than just check for identical cards, or use a special data structure, use an optimized algorithm for picking 5 random cards) but none of that is necessary to pass the interview. More than half the candidates I talk to can't get through part 1. Half of the remainder can't get through part 3. Most people who get through part 3 move on to an onsite interview.

70 or 80 percent of candidates who say on their CV that they can code, and have convinced a recruiter that they can code, can't write a class and a couple of functions. So a lot of companies do the easy thing, and just toss out (or at least don't fast track) all the resumes that don't include particular schools or companies, or come from referrals. And in the process, companies lose out on tons of qualified candidates, and those candidates lose out on jobs.

If Triplebyte can reliably identify candidates who can pass a phone screen, when I'm sorting through resumes I'd be happy to treat a Triplebyte stamp of approval the same way I'd treat a degree from a top school.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#155
post #13

What was always most interesting to us about starting a recruiting company was seeing what would happen if you treated hiring as a data problem. Partly we've raised more funding for the same reason any startup does, so we can grow faster to get more customers = more revenue = more success, etc. But we're also driven by how the larger the scale we operate at, the faster we can run experiments to answer questions about…

Wow. Is it just me or does that sound like a downright horrifying company to deal with as a candidate?

At our company, we try to painstakingly craft our recruiting experience to make sure each candidate we interview has a good experience and ends up with a positive impression of our company regardless of whether or not we end up sending them an offer. At the end of the day, we're all human beings, each with something unique to bring to the table, even if that something might not be what we're looking for for a particular role at the moment.

Maybe past some scale we'll have to start changing our approach and start reducing candidates down to data points and "run experiments" on them like lab rats, like Google, et all, and these guys here seem to be so proud of themselves for doing, but I'd sooner quit than to stay a part of a company that does that.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#157

Marissa mayer literally ran yahoo into the ground, she has come to mean disaster. Marissa = Disaster. I hope she doesnt overemphasize her position as an investor and again runs an enterprise into the ground.

Yahoo wasn't doing well at all before Marissa took over. Do you have some compelling evidence as to why their continued demise was her fault?

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#158
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwaway, because I'm well-known on HN. I ran the TripleByte course once, and it was 100% not worth my time as a professional. The "coding test" was criminally simple, but got me in the door quickly for an interview. I spent a number of hours building out projects with a paired interviewer, as well as answering questions. This part I enjoyed, it felt like a nice back and forth while building an interesting bit of so…

That first sentence, if true, already narrows the search space drastically for anyone who wants to find you, especially given the length of your comment.

Plot twist: it's pg!

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#160
post #157

Marissa mayer literally ran yahoo into the ground, she has come to mean disaster. Marissa = Disaster. I hope she doesnt overemphasize her position as an investor and again runs an enterprise into the ground.

Yahoo wasn't doing well at all before Marissa took over. Do you have some compelling evidence as to why their continued demise was her fault?

When she joined yahoo in 2012, Microsoft was willing to pay $51 Billion for Yahoo thats how the valuation was, But after running it for 4 years the valuation reached a low of $5 Billion. She said she will turn it around. In 2016 she said she will turn yahoo around in 3 yrs. And very soon yahoo was sold, she misguided a lot of stockholders with that statement. Also the blame of a sinking ship goes to the captain as does the credit to the loot of a pirate ship. If she didnt run yahoo into the ground then who did ?
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