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Rethinking Triplebyte

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Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#391

Post by kortilla »

nostrademons wrote: post #357
baumy wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. For any reasonable definition of "a lot", no they absolutely are not. A lot of people with 2+ years of experience who've either been promoted once and received a strong annual review, or switched jobs as a mi…

Stock price for most of the FAANGs has gone up by about 2.5x in the last year. If you had $200K base, $50K bonus, and $300K stock compensation in 2019, you're now making $1M today. That's roughly L6/E6/ICT6 (staff) level.

Google has not even hit 2x. https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=GOOGL

Also, staff level is a tiny slice of the engineers at FAANG. So still not “a lot” even if your stock appreciation numbers were correct.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#392

Post by kortilla »

erosenbe0 wrote: post #328
haliskerbas wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can guarantee people at my company and level make 3-4x more than me. Push into the next level and you have quite a few $1M+ TC

If "quite a few" non-directors make more than average American cardiologists either: A) your company is engaged in disturbing monopolism; B) your company is engaged in disturbing labor exploitation and arbitrage; or C) your company is engaged in disturbing environmental destruction. Would love to be proven wrong. Am I? Edit: option D) is that American cardiologists are not as exclusive and skilled a labor force as I…

Your whole mental model of how businesses make profit is based on a comparison to cardiologists?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#393

Post by david-wb »

A lot of research on interviews has shown they basically don't work. You just can't grill someone for a few hours and know how they're going to do on the job.

For unemployed candidates, we should do away with interviews altogether and do paid 2-week trials instead. After the first 2-3 PRs it's pretty clear if someone has the skills you need and to what degree. It would also help the candidate decide if they like the company.

Employed candidates are harder to evaluate and I don't think there's a single formula that will work for every company.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#394

Post by twic »

btilly wrote: post #291
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…

Fair warning. There is a large pool of people who think that they are programmers, but are not. This is exactly what the infamous fizzbuzz test was intended to weed out. I personally know a top notch recruiter who credits her success due to learning early in her career how to filter most of the junk out. For example a "Perl programmer" who listed Microsoft Word as a skill was probably not worth looking at. (Note, thi…

AIUI, employers will be told whether the candidate took the tests, and if so what their score was:

> Going forward, our assessments are a purely optional means by which engineers can show their skills to employers (who overwhelmingly tell us that they trust our scoring), rather than a requirement for entry.

I think the idea is that an employer can still filter out the unfizzbuzzables, but has the option to ignore that for candidates whose stellar track record is a stronger signal.

I'm a little bit skeptical, because i think there are lots of people with apparently strong CVs who are still weak when you actually put them to the test. But maybe not at the very top end; i am really thinking about people with experience in various investment banks, which is perhaps less of a signal than Apple then Netflix or something.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#395

Post by caffeine »

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…

Your point in the article about gaining bargaining power for engineers by making the hiring process an iterated game instead of one-shot is a good insight.

But the transparency you need to extract is mainly financial, that’s the big asymmetry. I think people care more about money than they say they do, and less about release cadence or test coverage or whatever than they say they do.

So triplebyte should be called “get me a raise.com”. I tell you what I’m making, smash all your tests, and you find me somebody who wants to offer me e.g $50k more or $100k more, and that WILL be the offer I get. And if the company reneges on that offer then it’s flagged to warn others, and if they do well by their employees they are rewarded as well.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#396

Post by TulliusCicero »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #283
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 of…

> 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.

Well, presumably the idea is that engineers, especially high quality ones, will be drawn to the recruiting platform that has more pro-engineer policies. And so if you avoid using it, you lose access to that subset of engineers.

It's still a chicken and egg problem, though, because engineers have little incentive to join until there's enough companies.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#397

Post by KptMarchewa »

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…

In my country it's common for companies to have public salary range, at least for IT positions - see https://justjoin.it/ for example board, Linkedin recruiters do the same thing.

It seems to be terrible waste of time going through interview process to learn that they won't even come close to what you want. I would not do that to myself.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#398

Post by KptMarchewa »

oezi wrote: post #387
slownews45 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On hiring side we screen folks out pretty quickly who can't discuss money. I used to be much more relaxed about this, but if you get burned doing a few rounds of interviews and it was a waste you wise up pretty quickly - teams do not like time wasted. I've also found that folks who can't / won't talk money - usually not great hires for a bunch of reasons. We're happy to talk through the different positions, levels, p…

The problem is that companies use any salary information you provide as a candidate to adjust their offer. A lot of companies that asked me what I made at my previous job (even though it is illegal to ask in Germany) offered me just 20% on top of my number. This makes me think that all jobs position should have rather narrow target ranges which are stated up-front. Then you can discuss if you are too high level/low l…

What would happen if you refuse?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#399

Post by twic »

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.

No, the conversion rate is the fraction of companies who sign up which eventually hire someone.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#400

Post by swiftcoder »

tdeck wrote: post #369
RussianCow wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a big enough company, you can collect a few data points via Glassdoor[0], levels.fyi, etc to make sure that they pay in the range you're looking for before you even begin the interview process. For smaller companies, you're absolutely right, although I personally tend to give a very broad range[0] at the beginning of the process, and only narrow that down at the offer stage. That's worked well for me in the past.…

In my experience Glassdoor numbers are low. They've been low compared to the reality at places I've worked, at least.

They uniformly underestimate big tech compensation by 50%+, because they've never clearly delineated salary from total compensation (and stock grants are a majority of comp for a lot of senior FAANG employees).

Luckily levels.fyi has fairly accurate data for those same companies.

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