With Marissa Mayer's investing, I take it the idea is to get their $50MM valuation to $5MM over 3 years before they sell it?
Absolutely, the Ratio works the same Yahoo Valuation in 2012 $51 Billion, in 2016 $5 Billion and sold.
Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
161–170 of 183 posts
Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
#162What 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…
For giggles (I work on OS kernels and high performance TCP, there's no way this kind of meatgrinder would ever place me correctly) I did the online quiz thing and got to the interview piece just to see why this was generating buzz. The quiz was easy and when I saw the interview prep I was disgusted. It's gamified hiring practice done in an outsourced fashion.. the kind where you are supposed to read a book that tells you what kind of questions a hiring party will ask you. I guess if you are a lousy engineering manager and want to offload and emulate the hiring process of something like Google this is up your alley. If you want some relatively fungible developers that can work on CRUD applications it may be fine but I don't think that's hard to hire for in any case.
Engineering managers MUST do recruiting - never let HR take this from you. HR can do clerical work, but they should have little role in search and outreach. I'd instead recommend finding new talent at local universities, mid level talent give recruiter like bonuses for employee referrals and poach from competitors, and extraordinary talent go look at commit logs of the open source software you use and hire people from that list. Easy, cheap, and effective.
Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The chance of a kitchen appliance endangering a human is much lower than a car going haywire or a doctor making a mistake due to inadequate training. The chance of any device on the internet of things leaking your personal habits online is not low. Furthermore, the risk of death or injury from electrical devices is only due to regulation upon such devices before commercial software was ever imagined. I would also s…
> Is insecure online software not harmful? Are credit card data breaches not harmful? Harmful, yes. Life threatening, no. There is a world of difference between losing a kidney due to incompetence vs. losing money.
So lawyers shouldn't have to be licensed or certified? They cannot take a kidney from you. Neither can truck drivers, real estate agents, or police officers.
Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
#164Unfortunately, my experience with TripleByte was terrible and a waste of my time. I completed the interview with a very high evaluation across all categories as provided by the interviewer. There were certain areas where the interviewer messed up in their evaluation, e.g. they felt I "was a little weak at hashmaps and API design", which is probably because they did not know what I was talking about when I described t…
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…
You can always learn Technology X and try again.
Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
#165Anyone care to comment on how the whole Triplebyte process goes as a person who wants to be hired? I'm interested since I never got past the set of questions due to some kind of bug in the beta.
I passed the quiz and moved on to the phone interview. Overall I don't think it was a good experience for me. The interview was pleasant but long. Since they are more of a recruiting firm than anything, they are able to ask questions in a way that an organization looking to hire won't. It allows the candidate to be more candid and detailed with their knowledge and expectations. I thought it went well enough but I did…
looking for a specific type of developer - a type which I reckon probably doesn't need Triplybyte in the first place
This is the business model of “elite” universities - admit people who would be successful anyway then claim credit for their success
Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
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.
Any other hiring managers here see this? It just seems hard to believe. Are you sure it's not the case that they can code just fine but just can't balance a red black tree in 5 minutes in a language that was never mentioned as a requirement before while a stop watch is shoved in their face while also having to jump through rings of fire to the background noise of some people sighing disapprovingly.
Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
#167Earlier 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…
Before reaching any conclusions, would you let us know how specific is Technology X? Is it like a library or a framework? How uncommon is that? If it's something commonly used by lots of developers and needed by lots of companies, I think it'd be fair to think of it as a bad signal at least. The giants (Google, etc) have great engineers, but they also often use technologies that's very different from the general publ…
> Before reaching any conclusions, would you let us know how specific is Technology X? Is it like a library or a framework? How uncommon is that?
> If it's something commonly used by lots of developers and needed by lots of companies, I think it'd be fair to think of it as a bad signal at least.
From GP:
> I'd list the tech here by name, but it's so specific I'm afraid of it being linked back to me. It's not something most engineers would run into.
GP specifically said it it isn't something "something commonly used by lots of developers and needed by lots of companies".
Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
> 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.
I work for a large non-Big-5 and our failure rate at that level is far lower. Is this only or predominantly for juniors?
Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
#169While I can totally understand the need for this by hiring managers who need to get people onboard without wasting too much time, I am a little bit skeptical of being reduced to a simple number in some sort of a machine learning algorithm. Especially if this algorithm is then being used by half the companies in my area.
I think hiring is a difficult process because we need to work with others and people are different in general.
I have personally worked with people who started programming just because they were interested in it - they had no knowledge of algorithmic complexity but they were very open-minded, had a great perspective on the domain and were a pleasure to work with.
This is very anecdotal of course but I sincerely hope that they would have been able to make it past the online quiz...
(If you're thinking they should be smart enough to be able to game the quiz, then my question would be - why not just screen everyone in person then? Of course, that's not scalable and not worth the 50 million then...)
Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
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. Any other hiring managers here see this? It just seems hard to believe. Are you sure it's not the case that they can code just fine but just can't balance a red black tree in 5 minutes in a language that was never mentioned as a requirement before whi…
Years ago, while hiring people claiming to know C, at least 75% could not do a simple “reverse a string (char*)”.