Rethinking Triplebyte • Hacker News Board

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#211

Post by flavius29663 » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #91

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…

As a candidate, I'm willing to put up with sometimes shoddy interview outcomes (e.g., ghosting) if my funnel is far greater and consequently leads to a more competitive offer, which is the end goal. A narrower funnel, that pre-selects for higher expectations of how companies engage in the process, may end up falling short of what I'm optimizing for.

Exactly, I don't understand all this moaning. You're only doing this every some years, you might as well try to optimize it rather than be picky, because it can make a big difference both career and compensation wise. Idiotic HR does not correlate in any way with a worse or better company, at least in my experience.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#212

Post by devwastaken » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:30 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #204

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 ca…

I know 3 of them. They only receive responses from jobs similiar to, but not actually software dev. Basically tech support jobs but you have to know the basics of a windows/bash command line. No dev work involved.

Companies advertise they're hiring. Like they advertise that they're profitable, make the best products, and are better than their competition. That doesn't mean it's true. Many positions are "nice to have", so they will stay there until they get someone with far more experience on paper than they actually need - someone willing to get paid less of course.

People lie, especially companies. That's the nature of the market. Even if we had 5x the devs than employers, employers would still say otherwise. This is because more competition between applicants means you can pay people less.

Infact even during the dotcom boom my sister actually got a degree in "web development", and nobody wanted anything to do with her. I don't know who comes out with these lies about "high demand" employment but so far all I've seen is confirmation bias by those already employed - ignoring all the rest of the people who can't get anywhere, leave it behind, and go work at something else.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#213

Post by tomrod » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:31 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…

Seriously. People ache for feedback in low information environments. Good on yall for taking customer surveys seriously (even if the data underlying it isn't always clear) because enthusiasm, though noisy, is a strong signal.

I wouldn't charge for the service, however, unless building it as a freemium model.

/economist hat

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#214

Post by ucm_edge » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

The candidate me likes cutting out some of the bullshit involved.

The hiring manager side of me on the other hand continues to remember that mishires are expensive. I've also very skeptical in that once a month some staffing agency comes along, tells us they have some fancy heuristic for matching good candidates to our jobs, and then unleashes a tsunami of mediocre leads into our recruiting database. They'll then proceed to act upset and surprised when we don't want to intervene sixty percent of them and most of those we do interview wash out. I guess TB can somehow promise that a certain baseline technical competence is present, but even that's of moderate value. If I really need a candidate who is skilled at X, I might be willing to sacrifice some skill in Y because I already have two engineers strong in Y. I never found TB sufficiently granular in how you configure the automatic screens to allow for that. Secondly, it's totally useless in soft skill assessment.

The cynic in me just sees a lot of this TB now trying to force you to expend internal resources to rank the unqualified people or people whose skill sets don't align with what you want (forcing you to respond with data on how you handled the application) because they can't crack the nut of doing it themselves. So they're going to leverage the customer's recruiting teams to code the data for them.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#215

Post by ammon » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

ghiculescu wrote: post #167

ammon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem we had with the contingency model is that it resulted in companies using us for a few of their "hardest" hires, rather than as a bread-and-butter part of their recruiting. For example, almost no one wants to pay a contingency fee on junior or remote hires (because they are perceived as 'easier'). This made our platform kind of suck for junior and remote engineers. The subscription model is more of a…

That business model is optimising for large customers that are probably better equipped to replace you with something in house. And leaving the long tail of smaller customers on the table. I wanted to use triplebyte - but I only want to make 3 hires per year.

We do have discounts for smaller startups (under $10m in funding). Happy to talk about that if you're interested. ammon@triplebyte.com

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#216

Post by DylanDmitri » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

ammon wrote: post #56

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…

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 referred my friend to triplebyte and never received the promised $5000 referral bonus. My emails to support were ignored.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#217

Post by bpiche » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:33 PM UTC

I would probably take this down if it was me but I can also appreciate TB's radical transparency and putting themselves out there for public criticism.

Ever thought of building a recruiting recommendation software product, instead of just selling people? You have the data.

edit: I want to be more constructive with my feedback. You have four years of data on hundreds of thousands of candidates. I don't know what the legal implications are regarding using that stuff as training data, but.. embeddings. doc2vec. Thank me later.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#218

Post by ammon » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

shkkmo wrote: post #173

ammon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem we had with the contingency model is that it resulted in companies using us for a few of their "hardest" hires, rather than as a bread-and-butter part of their recruiting. For example, almost no one wants to pay a contingency fee on junior or remote hires (because they are perceived as 'easier'). This made our platform kind of suck for junior and remote engineers. The subscription model is more of a…

Why not a combo where the subscription isn't paid until a hire is actually made through the platform?

We experimented with this, as well as with trial periods (which are sort of the same thing, but with a time limit). Trial periods ended up being easier to think about and optimize (each account either converts or not at the end of the period). But we may revisit this in the future.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#219

Post by shagie » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #204

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 ca…

I believe a bit of the difficulty that new grads have with trying to find employment is a combination of:

* Reluctance to move / restrictions on where they want to move (only SF, Seattle, NYC)

* Extreme focus on product development (and not applying for the operations jobs that keep many large orgs running).

* Focus on working for a high salary at a big tech company (and not applying to jobs at companies that aren't seen as big tech... say... this job - https://csx.taleo.net/careersection/basic_faceted_search/job... )

I believe that there is extreme saturation in certain desirable sectors of the field and "where is everyone?" in other areas.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#220

Post by dmlittle » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

llbeansandrice wrote: post #151

mike_d wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> salary Colorado now requires job postings to include something more or less like a "reasonable salary range". It hasn't been perfect, for example there are some companies who now just restrict their online job postings to say "except Colorado" instead of adding a salary. But as someone living in Colorado it's been nice to know the salary range up-front more often and to have confidence that I can ask them for a sal…

In California recruiters are legally obligated to disclose the salary range upon request.