Rethinking Triplebyte

In a narrow sense, that's the thrust of the case we're trying to make here: if veteran engineers didn't frequently have competing offers, they wouldn't hold the amount of power they do.

That being said, the experienced engineers who can get that kind of attention have other desiderata in their job search beyond just "get an offer". "Get -an- offer" is a goal more typical of a new graduate or someone trying to break into the industry than it is a goal of experienced engineers.

To people who are sure they can get a job, there's a big difference between a 150k offer at a company that has none of the workplace traits they want and a 200k offer at a company that they'd genuinely love to work for. And right now, they can't necessarily tell the difference between those jobs before going through a bunch of application steps. The example we mention in the post - of a highly credentialed and very senior engineer who kept having his time wasted by recruiters who refused to admit that they couldn't offer what he was worth - wasn't cherry-picked. It came up organically while we were doing user research, because it's a really common problem, and was echoed further by a number of other senior engineers we spoke to.

(Of course, we care about the folks just starting their career, too, so I don't want to totally ignore the importance of solving problems for them. But I think we are solving an important problem for senior devs here, too!)

Tentative agree here, if quiz-taking is prominently displayed i'm still probably going to use the platform

I think my experience sounds like what the article is trying to say…

I tried TripleByte and wanted to like it, but mostly it didn’t seem like anything special. The whole concept of getting pre-screened, getting multiple offers, and jumping straight to final interviews just didn’t pan out. The last company I interviewed with basically treated my application like any other pipeline. I had a standard recruiter call, hiring manager call, and several technical interviews before getting an offer. And the experience with other companies was similar. From the outside looking in, it appeared that there was no special track for TripleByte applicants. In the end it felt like the TripleByte process simply made the interview process longer, not shorter. Eventually I found it faster & more effective to pursue companies on my own.

TL;DR — companies I met through TripleByte ran me through the standard process I’d experience through any third party recruiter without the personal touch one might get from a good third party recruiter.

(I'm a PM at Triplebyte working on this overall direction, joining Ammon for this thread.)

To be clear, we still have quizzes and the ability to show your performance on them to companies. The fact that they’re not completely mandatory to use Triplebyte doesn’t mean that they’re not important or that we won’t build further features around them.

Right now, companies can offer an expedited process as part of their reach-out. We’re working on ways to productize this a little bit better. We didn’t announce the feature in this post because it isn’t done yet, but one thing we’re looking at is allowing companies to set individual score thresholds for various types of expedited process (e.g. “if you scored a 3 on algos and a 4 on back-end, we’ll definitely get on the phone with you” or “if you have a 5 on python we’ll skip tech screens for you”). We certainly recognize that FastTrack was valuable to a subset of engineers, and we want to recreate the value it offered in a way that is a little bit more sensitive to the specific company and specific engineer in question. We imagine, for example, that less-prestigious companies (who are more concerned about attracting applicants) will probably set lower thresholds than the Apples of the world. Under the old system, we had to set a single threshold, which would necessarily either be too low for prestige companies or too high for everybody else.

And just to lean a little bit back into the pitch we’re trying to make here: if you’re concerned about interviewing process, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to search companies by how their interview process works? That’s not an axis on which companies meaningfully compete right now, but with the right incentives, companies will cut a lot of the annoying hassle that they currently have no reason to get rid of.

> part of what made triplebyte valuable (and gave y'all the hundreds-of-thousands-engineer userbase) was the _path to competence-signalling_ which avoided credentials that your platform gave, given the quiz -- companies knew that someone being on triplebyte was a strong signal, and engineers had a path to signalling competence that was one-to-many.

On the other hand, when I applied to TripleByte, their feedback to me was "we think your skills are fine, but we want somebody who can perform well in an interview". Which is exactly the opposite of the value you're attributing to them here.

Quoting them, for reference:

> We really appreciate you taking the time to work on the take home project. We're aware this requires a substantial time commitment and we are really grateful that you invested the time in completing it. We thought you wrote a great, very full featured regular expression matcher. It was especially impressive how much you dug into the academics behind regular languages.

> However we made the decision because we felt that while going through the project together during the interview, we didn't see the fluency of programming when adding to it that we had hoped for. While we specifically designed the take home project track to help overcome the difficulties of coding under time pressure with someone watching, we do still need to see a certain level of programming during the interview.