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Rethinking Triplebyte

triplebyte.com

191–200 of 463 posts

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#191
As always with posts about employment, the idea that there's higher demand than supply for engineers is a lie. The demand for highly experienced cheap engineers is high, the demand for junior developers is almost non existent. New CS grads struggle to find employment, there are tens of thousands of very capable devs in open source that cannot find employment. Nobody hears about it because only those that succeed are actually spending time on forums like these talking about it.

We have a big problem in the culture of employing developers that is closely related to how the startup market operates. The market is willing to shovel money at a problem rather than spend time, therefore the market will pay someone with specific experience in their problem far more than pay someone less and have more time to learn the domain. This results in siphoning of experienced developers away from new developers, which artificially reduces the number of experienced devs. The market is creating the problem for short term profit, and then turning around, lying and saying "there's not enough devs".

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#192
post #56

I see a lot of people in the comments describe triplebyte as a “market leader” and discuss how good they are. I can’t believe how gullible everyone is especially on a startup forum. Let me spell it out to y’all, nobody pivots and changes their entire business model if they are crushing it. So the implication is that triplebyte are not crushing it. So, this probably has gone the same way as lots of other tech startups…

Fair comment. I certainly don't think of us as a market leader. LinkedIn is the market leader. Honestly, the last year has been pretty hard for us (COVID and the problems with our model that I talk about in the post). That said, I think a hiring process that puts engineers in control (no ghosting, get data on when a recruiter looks at your application, search ranking by whether companies lie to candidates) is somethi…

I used TripleByte to recruit people for a startup without paying, by asking people to sign up for the test and screenshot the answers and collecting the scores at the end. I already had an inbound funnel, I just liked your test when I saw it the first time.

In 2015, candidates with the same schooling scored about 20 percentage points lower than 2020, the last candidates I used the test for. The number of questions doubled, and then the test got much easier, by eliminating more challenging programming questions and replacing them with questions with giveaway context. By comparison, according to my data, about N=43, until about 2018 being a senior versus a junior in college CS programs is worth about 10 percentage points on the test; going to Harvard instead of Berkeley is also worth about 10 percentage points. In 2020, the last tests had no predictive features.

I stopped using the test, because it became too easy and too noisy to be informative.

I recognize some of the coded language in the blog post. There are definitely more lucrative opportunities in recruiting for DEI. I don't know if it will last. If you're still jittery about the public-profile-by-default thing, which by the way, was totally irrelevant and overblown IMO, this may not be a pivot for you.

One thing I see in the data is that at MIT, women and men performed the same, controlling for seniority. This wasn't true at the 3 other universities that produced enough data to measure.

That said, what really is the best way to hire candidates? I'm not convinced having binders full of engineers is special, there are almost always more candidates than jobs, at least 5:1, in every non-credentialed industry vertical. Anyone who has worked at a jobs (or indeed any matching platform, like the Common App or Tinder) knows that.

Then there's this long thing about asymmetries or whatever, warble garble about missing information... It has never, not once been my experience that someone seeking a subordinate role at a typical private company with preferences like "pair programming" or whatever have ever been better than someone with no preferences at all.

Maybe it helps to engage in the vanity of whatever trendy workplace trend is hot for whatever vertical. But like, if you're being intellectually honest, if you thought pair programming was important, you'd pair program at TripleByte, but you don't, you know in your heart of hearts none of that shit matters, so why are you putting stuff like that into your search system?

Indeed and ZipRecruiter are ad arb companies. They don't care. Private universities lead, not lag, DEI at giant companies, so it's hard to see how to compete against them in that core business. It will still come down to a real defensible opinion.

Do you have more valuable inventory than ZipRecruiter for DEI candidates? Who knows. What an uninteresting question. Apple also hires people who just make shit up on their resumes, I know two - though they weren't engineers.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#193
post #82

Triplebyte was a dud for me. Way too many garbage startups recruiting. I have started to re-write my resume for each application and that has yielded much better results in terms of quality of the company and number of interviews. If you are submitting the same resume to multiple companies, you are doing it wrong.

FWIW, this isn't really true as you get some experience under your belt and have a stronger resume (meaning, having worked at companies that people know of with a clear story of how your own role made a big impact there).

But glad you figured out an approach that worked for you!

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#194

The problem with Triplebyte IMHO is that what the originally promised, while a great idea and concept, it cannot scale. Also after interviewing with them for a role in their company I got to realize they don't know how to conduct interviews themselves. I used them two times. The first one was very early on, where I was given a home assignment and interviewed on it by Aaron himself, if I am not mistaken. The dude was…

Ammon not Aaron. Apologies

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#195
One of the problem with recruiting is not just power imbalance but information asymmetry (or even plain lack of information).

What Triplebyte is trying to do is give more information back to job seekers. But it will be limited to the companies they actually work with (and punishing your own clients sounds like a peculiar business model...)

Why not build a Glassdoor for hiring, that would cover the entire industry? Anyone can go and describe the hiring process they went through, if they heard back or not, etc.

Does such a thing already exist? If not, why not?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#196
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was pretty happy with triplebyte from the hiring side. Slogging through candidates with good looking resumes that couldn’t actually program was expensive for my employer and unpleasant for me. TB took care of that first big cut down. I guess they didn’t hit product-market fit with candidates. Two sided markets are tough.

How did you determine they couldn't program and what made the resumes look so appealing?

We had a video conferencing phone screen with a shared coding environment. I gave an easy question.

It’s possible that they just couldn’t code with someone watching but the effect was the same.

Note that I didn’t have control over the interview process, so I couldn’t switch to a take home or something else.

The resumes seemed like they had relevant experience. That’s why I pushed them forward to the tech screen.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#197

Without passing the minimum bar, how does Triplebyte distinguish itself from other 1000 platforms where people post resumes? Also, dissing those who have passed the bar as "engineers who like tests" is disrespectful. When they first launched, passing the bar makes you (in their words) a highly qualified engineer, and now passing the bar means nothing except that you only "like tests"...lol Fundamentally, I think this…

> Without passing the minimum bar, how does Triplebyte distinguish itself from other 1000 platforms where people post resumes? We still have the quiz, and we still show performance on it prominently on your profile (provided you've chosen to share those scores). In fact, we've put a lot of energy into improving the trust companies place in our quizzes over the past year precisely because we think that skills data is…

I love standardized tests and I got a little bit of that dopamine hit from the triplebyte test, too.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#198
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair comment. I certainly don't think of us as a market leader. LinkedIn is the market leader. Honestly, the last year has been pretty hard for us (COVID and the problems with our model that I talk about in the post). That said, I think a hiring process that puts engineers in control (no ghosting, get data on when a recruiter looks at your application, search ranking by whether companies lie to candidates) is somethi…

I used TripleByte to recruit people for a startup without paying, by asking people to sign up for the test and screenshot the answers and collecting the scores at the end. I already had an inbound funnel, I just liked your test when I saw it the first time. In 2015, candidates with the same schooling scored about 20 percentage points lower than 2020, the last candidates I used the test for. The number of questions do…

> there are almost always more candidates than jobs, at least 5:1, in every non-credentialed industry vertical

If this were true for "qualified" candidates, there wouldn't be a labor shortage, right? ;-)

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#199

I see a lot of people in the comments describe triplebyte as a “market leader” and discuss how good they are. I can’t believe how gullible everyone is especially on a startup forum. Let me spell it out to y’all, nobody pivots and changes their entire business model if they are crushing it. So the implication is that triplebyte are not crushing it. So, this probably has gone the same way as lots of other tech startups…

I went through triplebyte twice, once in late 2019 and then once again a few months later after the company I landed in shut down because of Covid. I was happy with the process, they promised to take a lot of the headache regarding tech screening and it worked. I think the value proposition is clear - I don't want to do the same tech screens 100 times, and lots of smaller companies may not have the resources or desir…

> Perhaps they were providing asymmetric value to engineers, and at the end of the day the engineers are not the ones paying for the service

This is a very good insight. Unless candidates pay more than companies, the incentives are off.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#200
post #121
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair comment. I certainly don't think of us as a market leader. LinkedIn is the market leader. Honestly, the last year has been pretty hard for us (COVID and the problems with our model that I talk about in the post). That said, I think a hiring process that puts engineers in control (no ghosting, get data on when a recruiter looks at your application, search ranking by whether companies lie to candidates) is somethi…

If you want to put candidates in control, build a CRM tool. When a recruiter pings me on LinkedIn or emails me, I have a URL I can send them to with an intake form. No more calls wasting my time, I can see the company/role/salary/etc. up front. The trick here is you need to figure out a business model where you don't take money from employers, because once you do its just the long slide to becoming a shittier LinkedI…

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