Rethinking Triplebyte • Hacker News Board

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#201

Post by filoleg » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #124

ammon wrote: 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 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 something that should exist. I want to try to build it! This is a space that unions fill well compared to for-profit recruiting agencies. The organizations give engineers control and leverage in hiring, and can help them up-negotiate.…

While I still slightly prefer the direct experience for other reasons, the recruiting agency experience was pretty good for me in its own way. More specifically, when it comes to salary negotiation. Let me elaborate.

People at the recruiting agency usually get paid a commission as a percentage of the first year of the hiree’s salary (not taken from your paycheck, but just in general). Which means, it is in their interest to get you as high of a comp as possible. Which also means that I dont have to bs around with the recruiter about my salary expectations or anything like that. I give them the upper range of what i want, they tell me either “sounds good” or “they are easily willing to pay more, so why not try $X instead” or “they cannot pay that much, but there is this other company that we work with that can offer you as much.”

And if you work with one recruiter consistently, it gets even easier, because now that the recruiter knows my total comp expectations, she pre-filters opportunities for me and only contacts me if there is a position she is aware of that pays at least as much as I want or more.

Of course there are downsides too, for example, the limited choice of companies that the recruiting agency is working with at any given time, so i still have to find some opportunities and interview with those companies on my own. But as a supplementary option, working with a good recruiting agency has been quite nice for me.

P.S. The type of a recruiting agency i am talking about is the one that is focused on a specific sector (in my case, fintech/quant), so it might be a completely different story for a “generic software dev” recruiting agency.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#202

Post by ipaddr » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

gip wrote: post #89

Aperocky wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I graduated I submitted around 50 applications to open jobs around where I live, to almost no feedback at all. I'm in this industry and doing well because of recruiter reaching out to me (multiple times) and not vice versa. The whole idea of applying for jobs just doesn't seem to work at all.

My experience is similar but at a differet level of seniorty. I've applied to ~15 jobs for engineering manager and got 1 answer. On the other end a recruiter reached out to me and I'll be doing the final interview with their VP next week. I don't think we can draw conclusion at that stage (we are a dataset of 2..). But I'd love to have access to the LinkedIn dataset to figure out if applying for jobs is broken at sca…

Waiting for a recuitor to call you limits your potential but makes the process easier for you. Applying yourself takes a lot of work but you get to select who you want and to target a bigger group which. But it's messy, ugly , stressful and filled with rejections for no reason.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#203

Post by crazypython » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #29

I'm personally very excited to see this change by an industry leader! I think that there's a seismic shift waiting to happen w.r.t. engineer hiring. The "old guard" of hazing, quizzing, and gotcha-style interviews are slowly losing ground. The most friction when switching jobs is the interview process -- and the question is why? I've been writing code for a decade+ now, working on startups, for known tech companies,…

Triplebyte quizzes are a much more realistic representation of job skills than leetcode quizzes.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#204

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

devwastaken wrote: post #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…

> New CS grads struggle to find employment

Sorry, but I call major bullshit on this. Sure, if you have a D average at a low tier school, perhaps. But if you are a competent coder who got good grades in school, I see many companies ready to hire new grads left and right (obviously folks who graduated during the height of the pandemic had different issues to deal with). I don't know if we're quite at the "anyone who can fog a mirror can get a job" stage like we were in the original dot com boom, but we're not that far away.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#205

Post by babaganoosh89 » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:26 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #163

babaganoosh89 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I recently used Hired and TripleByte. Hired gave me 2-3x more leads, and they were on avg much higher quality.

I remember my experience as a candidate on Hired. I pretty consistently got low-grade startup trash (think collectible art trading cards, but digital!) with lowballed comp. If Triplebyte was worse, then it's no wonder they placed so few people.

80% of the leads I get from hired aren't too great. But the other 20% are quality.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#206

Post by treis » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

rachofsunshine wrote: post #74

qchris wrote: post #27

By far the most exciting thing about this announcement is this feature: "Detailed information on what a recruiter did with your application." I've been wishing for something like this for years . Especially for early-career engineers or people from non-traditional backgrounds, this is insanely valuable because it helps you to know avoid wasting time on applications that will never go anywhere; avoid typing in your re…

So fun fact, we built this feature as a pretty low-grade experiment, but when we ran it by actual users we got such a positive response that we ended up putting it at the top of our new front page. Like you, we thought (correctly, as it turns out) that it would appeal to people early in their career. What surprised us is that very senior engineers also told us they loved it - we didn't think it was as much of a conce…

It's ridiculous. You can go through a couple screens, 5 coding interviews, and the end is just a "no" due to liability reasons. Literally zero information about why you didn't get an offer or if you were even close.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#207

Post by cactus2093 » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #130

Terretta wrote: post #65

A benefit of Triplebyte to big enterprises not mentioned in Triplebyte’s discussion here: acting as engineering assessment proxy for engineering hiring managers stuck with pathologically risk averse enterprise HR departments. Often enterprise HR is paranoid of honestly evaluating anyone for anything, to the point that many HR teams tell one another and engineering hiring managers that it’s “illegal” to assess candida…

> many HR teams tell one another and engineering hiring managers that it’s “illegal” to assess candidate abilities on the way in the door, at all From the position of a candidate this sounds like a poorly run company I'd have no interest in working for. I wouldn't want to interview with them.

But they'll pay you 4x more than the smaller, better run companies. That's why people still want to interview with them.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#208

Post by pmoriarty » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #128

ammon wrote: 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…

A small bit of feedback here. I tried TripleByte a couple of years ago and the experience was really polished. I passed the interview and got great detailed feedback which I really appreciated. However, I dropped out completely because TripleByte wouldn't let me see companies without entering in a desired comp number. My recruiter at triplebyte said I could just put in "$1 or $1,000,000" to get past it, but that just…

I never, ever, ever give anyone a number until the salary negotiation stage of the interview (ie. after I've been given a job offer), and even then I only give the company a number as a counter to their offer. I always do this negotiation myself, and never let anyone else negotiate for me.

Almost all recruiters have been fine with that, but a couple haven't. To such people I wish a good day and go my own way. There are plenty of other recruiters in the sea.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#209

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #128

ammon wrote: 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…

A small bit of feedback here. I tried TripleByte a couple of years ago and the experience was really polished. I passed the interview and got great detailed feedback which I really appreciated. However, I dropped out completely because TripleByte wouldn't let me see companies without entering in a desired comp number. My recruiter at triplebyte said I could just put in "$1 or $1,000,000" to get past it, but that just…

Semi-serious question, asking for an indeterminate person:

If your desired comp number actually is $1M/year, will that just flag you as a joke to Triplebyte companies? With post-pandemic stock price increases a lot of engineers at FAANGs are making more than that now.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#210

Post by tomrod » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #116

reillyse wrote: post #40

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 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.

Aye, but now they have email addresses for hundreds of thousands of engineers along with a reasonable metric for their capability.

That's worthwhile.