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Rethinking Triplebyte

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Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#231

Post by rachofsunshine »

prirun wrote: post #223
rachofsunshine wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 reac…

One thing I didn't like about TB is that I couldn't see my own score, or how I compared to others. They sent me follow-up emails, tried to engage me in interviews, asked if I had any questions, and when I asked about my score or how it related to others (top N% for example), they didn't even respond. If a company asks me if I have questions, and I ask them, and they ignore me, I'm done. I wasn't looking for a job, bu…

This must have been a long time ago! We've told you what your scores were and how they compared for quite a long time now. Even the current version of that page, which is like the third or fourth iteration, is now many months old. (That said, we've got a bug breaking that display right now. Working on it!)

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#232

Post by ipaddr »

curryst wrote: post #174
dvt wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz. If this is actually true, which I highly doubt (I've interviewed people, too), your process is terrible at preselection. I've heard so much about this "programmer charlatan" that lies on his resume and ends up blowing up million dollar systems, but have yet to see any tangible proof. > Past companies and open source contributions are not perfect indicators. This is self…

> If this is actually true, which I highly doubt (I've interviewed people, too), your process is terrible at preselection. I've heard so much about this "programmer charlatan" that lies on his resume and ends up blowing up million dollar systems, but have yet to see any tangible proof. I've seen similar. I wouldn't say 80%, but somewhere in the 20% range of people on phone screens. If I ask a similar modulo question…

Programming verbally over the phone is a skill that requires learning.

I can run a marathon but I can't run 100. Your interview is one of many that I am making time over lunch. I'm tired and getting a perfect mark on a take home isn't as important as getting it done quickly so I can find time to apply to other positions before I go back to work.

If you are not paying someone to do the interview you are not going to get anyone's best. Even if you pay people are trying to juggle things to get the interview to work.

And to the parent post. 50% of people being late means they took the time out to talk to you and come to your offices and didn't gage the time or didn't think it mattered. That doesn't make them bad programmers and shouldn't even matter to the interviewer. Was the car service the employer used late picking the employee or did they have to come on their own?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#233

Post by ryandrake »

musicale wrote: post #198
an_opabinia wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? ;-)

Companies just adjust their definition of "qualified" upwards until it looks like there are too few qualified candidates, then call it a shortage.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#234

Post by deathanatos »

dvt wrote: post #138
hellcow wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth on the hiring side, applicants lie (or more charitably, wildly overestimate their own abilities) all the time. Of resumes I see, 50% of them will not show up on time to their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz. Past companies and open source contributions are not perfect indicators. I've seen people with stellar resumes fail to even know the syntax for an 'if' statement in any…

> Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz. If this is actually true, which I highly doubt (I've interviewed people, too), your process is terrible at preselection. I've heard so much about this "programmer charlatan" that lies on his resume and ends up blowing up million dollar systems, but have yet to see any tangible proof. > Past companies and open source contributions are not perfect indicators. This is self…

> If this is actually true, which I highly doubt (I've interviewed people, too), your process is terrible at preselection. I've heard so much about this "programmer charlatan" that lies on his resume and ends up blowing up million dollar systems, but have yet to see any tangible proof.

I dunno about the back half (blowing up million dollar system) but the front half, certainly.

We used to ask "write min()" at a previous employ, and the pass rate was probably all of them, simultaneously. Since I can't establish any proof of anything, so… what other choice is there, but to pass?

¹while there are parsing libraries, yes, and I'll use those first / when I can, I would also say that 50% of the time, for whatever reason — better error reporting, better control — I end up going with a partially or mostly hand-rolled state machine or recursive descent parser. Also, while I wish people would just encode their data in something like JSON, or YAML, or whatever, it doesn't really matter, they. keep. making. new. grammars. Often inside those other grammars. Just today I had to deal with a config — a YAML config! — that wanted "key values". Turns out, it wanted strings formatted like "key:value", not YAML mappings.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#235

Post by usaar333 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #208
tdeck wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

A particular problem with doing that is discussed in the post; you risk everyone's time being wasted if the company will never be able to meet your target.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#236

Post by treis »

Leoeer wrote: post #24
maverick2007 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the exact same way. I went through the interview process with a handful of good startups through Triplebyte (and got offers from almost all of them) and even though I ended up taking a job with a company outside of TB, I still walked away extremely impressed and confident that I'd use the platform again in my next search. I loved that I was pre-qualified and didn't have to intensely prove my technical chops at…

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

The problem is that once an automated quiz has any significance people will cheat on it.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#237

Post by jedberg »

ammon wrote: post #126
ninetax wrote: post #92

I'd love to work with Triplebyte (as someone who's running a hiring process), but a while back they removed their option to work on contingency, and it's a difficult sell to fork over $X,000k for another source of engineers when it would just be one of 10 sources we already work with. Maybe I'm wrong here, but it gives me the impression that Triplebyte doesn't believe in it's ability to get candidates into jobs. If c…

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…

What about a sliding scale for the commission? The higher the salary the bigger it is? So a junior engineer would practically be free, but a senior engineer would bring in more revenue than the subscription.

Then the company is incentivized to use you for junior hires. Maybe you'll get a few freeloaders who only want to hire juniors, but even those will eventually be seniors who love your platform, and at the same time, will boost your stats on the number of juniors you got jobs for.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#238

Post by cinquemb »

ammon wrote: post #218
shkkmo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would be interesting if you could do something like:

-You vet engineers with however you/or individuals engineers see fit (test/ past work/ opensource / interviews/ etc), they highlight what they want + maybe what your data says would help them stand out for the "type" of dev they are.

- force companies to pay you $xk - $1xk to hire them right away if they "match" with someone they select, but with the ability to get a refund if they fire them within 3 months (but like 60 business days to get a refund, and allow them to keep picking but reset the window if they match with someone else again).

- keep in touch with those employees during that window

That way, companies will eventually get their money if they make a bad hire and still be willing to use you again, you can collect more data on the larger part of the employment life cycle and basically get 60 day interest free loans at worst.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#239

Post by prepend »

ipsum2 wrote: post #179
tdeck wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was pretty telling: > We got jobs for over 1000 engineers Given how many years Triplebyte has been running, "over 1000" seems surprisingly low. I wish them luck with their pivot.

How much is a referral worth to companies? $1,000? If so, their revenue is only ~$1m, but they've raised $48m.

When I last used headhunters they charged 20-30% of a years salary. So they are likely making $25-50k each. So that could be as high as $25-50M

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#240

Post by failwhaleshark »

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…

What made me instantly distrust TB was the Publisher's Clearing House-style "you had the best score on our online assessment we've ever seen." C'mon, don't blow smoke up my ass right off-the-bat. If it's that easy, then it needs to be more difficult, broader, and deeper to pre-test candidates with proficiencies in particular areas with questions that are AI-generated: algorithms, data structures, particular languages, operating systems, networking, front-/back-end technologies and tools, software engineering, customer service, team communication common-sense, professional workplace behavior, and engineering ethics.
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