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Rethinking Triplebyte

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Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#281

Post by staticautomatic »

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…

Do you all have anyone doing user research?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#282

Post by sturadnidge »

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…

Do you think more of a peer based approach to recruiting would have any legs? I built something a little while back that was a kind of "keep track of the people you'd hire", and anyone on your list had the power to grant you visibility to various parts of their profile (current employer, whether they are looking or not, what kind of role they are looking for, etc). Never targeted recruiters as a potential user, but I guess that probably isn't a bad use case. I'd much rather get contacted by a recruiter (albeit a recriuter who was known to me) with "hey I see you're looking for X, let's catch up to discuss opportunities Y and Z" as opposed to the cold calls / linkedin messages that are the current status quo.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#283

Post by evrydayhustling »

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…

100% this. They say individual engineers can't exercise this power, but that Triplebyte can use its weight to force their hand. As a hiring manager, I have dozens of recruiting platforms to choose from, most touting the same list of resumes. Yet another resume farm has zero power.

Fortunately, most of the dirt thrown at recruiting teams is wrong in the first place. I don't know any hiring managers who make lowball offers that have a low chance of acceptance - the costs of the process, the risks of hiring someone who starts mad at you, and the value of winning someone who is actually worth hiring, are all way more important than some incremental cash saved.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#284

Post by meowface »

mikeg8 wrote: post #273
ammon wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, under the old model, order 200k engineers applied to us. Because we were exclusive gatekeepers, around 3% of those were "accepted" onto the platform. Around 2/3 of accepted candidates received an offer, and around 1/2 of offers were accepted.

So you accepted 6K onto platform, about 4k got offers, and just under 2k accepted. Roughly a 1% conversion rate for those who applied? Yikes.

I don't know much about them, but the post does say their goal was to be "exclusive gatekeepers". If you consider it from that perspective, they had more like a 1/3 conversion rate (2/3 * 1/2). But conversion kind of seems like the wrong metric.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#285

Post by robocat »

hellcow wrote: post #106
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,…

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…

> 50% of them will not show up on time to their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz.

Of the people that turn up late to the interview, what percentage pass fizzbuzz?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#286

Post by 908B64B197 »

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.

With a bad pipeline, it's extremely likely, especially if you cheap out and try the bootcamp route (there's a reason Lambda is desperate enough they will "loan" a student you can try before you hire!).

It costs nothing to send a resume after all...

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#287

Post by granshaw »

patothon wrote: post #260

10 years ago, I built chooseyourboss.com from scratch for a client of mine (with one of my best friends). Our principles at the time were very similar to what Triplebyte is trying to do now: give power back to developers. We build a version of "hired" (did they die?) before "hired" even exist. A matching platform that was matching people with companies that was sharing both their desires and values. Small/big company…

Very insightful comment that I wish was higher up. The devs complaining here don’t know how tough a nut to crack it is to build a truly applicant-centric platform profitably.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#288

Post by meowface »

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…

>This is self-contradictory: how/why would any open source project let someone that doesn't know fizzbuzz contribute to their codebase?

They could maybe just be making small or simple changes. Or perhaps mostly working on markup, templates, CSS, etc.

It's possible they know a bit of programming but just don't happen to know how to check if a number is evenly divisible by another number. This isn't something an open source project would necessarily know you don't know. (I agree it's something any programmer should know, but I can see how someone could contribute certain things to certain projects without that knowledge gap being discovered.)

I learned about the modulo operator very early on, but if I didn't know it existed, I'd admittedly struggle with the question for a bit and would seem like I don't know how to program; especially in a pressured interview environment. If it were Python or something I think I'd come up with something awkward like `if i / divisor == float(int(i / divisor))` within a minute or a few minutes, but who knows, maybe the pressure would mess with me.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#289

Post by akg_67 »

Should I bet that this pivot will also fail. I will suggest you go on a road trip outside SV, talk to company HRs, small company and startup leaders, education providers, engineering student, and entry to mid level engineers. Also broaden your “engineer” scope beyond software.

“ In short, there is more demand for engineers than there is supply, and that makes engineers powerful.”

This statement is very telling that TB leaders got tunnel vision, a very SV, startup, software centric tunnel vision. Let me rephrase your statement to what you really meant.

In short, there is more demand for “experienced Software” engineers “in startups “ than there is supply “in Silicon Valley”, and that makes engineers “,with pedigree of FAANG or top schools or well connected,” “very” powerful.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#290

Post by robocat »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #149
bigbillheck wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed that too, and when you combine it with "Triplebyte has hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform" it means they aren't doing great with the rate either.

yea, I went through their process on the employer side, and my guess is an average hire is 10k, that means 10m in revenue total

They work on a retainer basis, not a commission basis, so you really can’t predict income like that. See other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27543931
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