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Rethinking Triplebyte

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Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#431

Post by llbeansandrice »

sgerenser wrote: post #416
llbeansandrice wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 my experience this is worse than nothing, because the posted pay is so much lower than the companies are actually willing to offer. Positions posted for FAANG that I know are offering $250k+ total comp are posted with statements like “pay starting at $110,000 but varies based on your unique qualifications and experience”.

I'm unsure of exact enforcement and such but you could report them if you wanted. I also don't mind FAANG so much since there's so much info available for those positions on like levels.fyi.

The biggest strength for me is that I can ask them and they have to tell me. When I was job searching before I'd ask the recruiter and then they'd always ask me what my target is. Not showing your cards is like negotiation 101. Plus it's made fielding messages and emails easier. If they provide a range, I can just easily say "This position sounds interesting but unfortunately the salary range isn't what I'm looking for currently."

You're right that a lot of positions aren't great about this, I've literally seen "Pay starting at $0.01" or ranges literally $30k to +$200k. But I've seen it as a benefit in the negotiation process and it's just been easier to field recruiters.

> total comp

This law only covers salary as far as I know, so equity and such aren't included. Total comp is different.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#432

Post by rachofsunshine »

caffeine wrote: post #395
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…

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 “g…

This was our original theory when we started doing user research, and we were surprised at the degree to which it didn't pan out. We assumed (in line with how these things usually go) that engineer interest in filters would follow some sort of very lopsided power law, where a few filters dominated among almost all engineers. But in practice, everyone wanted something different: some people were excited by salary, some by tech stack, some by pair programming, etc. One guy went on for like fifteen minutes about how much he hated open office plans.

That said, the idea of "we will offer X to anyone with Y quiz scores" as a showing a company can make is pretty cool, and is definitely in a "company makes public conditional guarantees" space that we're interested in exploring.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#433

Post by rachofsunshine »

staticautomatic wrote: post #281
rachofsunshine wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. Ammon and I spent many, many hours in research calls prior to this launch, and we'll be doing them on a regular cadence going forward.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#434

Post by twphysicsphd99 »

pc86 wrote: post #412
twphysicsphd99 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the word astroturf doesn't matter this post is marketing with commenters associated with the company

If you want people to take your point seriously you should probably learn how to communicate it.

what does astroturf mean?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#435

Post by rachofsunshine »

headgasket wrote: post #329
samatman wrote: post #168

My random Triplebyte anecdote is that I did good on the quizzes and gave a solid interview, but they declined to represent me. They were transparent about their reasoning: they saw me as somewhat of a specialist in parsing, and they didn't know how to place someone with that peculiar skillset. Which turned out fine. I found a job where my pre-computer programming work experience was relevant, and here a couple jobs l…

Same thinking here. Can’t bite the hand that feeds. The thing is you have to chose a camp these days, it seems. Either the corp or the devs. If choosing devs, i think the biz model would work if it would be a meritocratic limited partnership that actually owns the new TB. As such the interviewer has skin in the game. Maybe like an Order? Or a League? The mission statement is not a match right now.

What companies want from us, more than anything else, is volume. They want to find as many engineers as possible and make hires. That's the thrust of the economic argument we're trying to make here: our incentives even with companies as our paying clients are to create an engineer-friendly platform.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#436

Post by bigbillheck »

cwp wrote: post #293
heavyset_go wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Oh HELL no. Collective bargaining is inherently about eliminating competition between workers. That is, it creates a labour monopoly to balance out a labour monopsony. That might (might!) be a good thing for autoworkers. It would be an unmitigated disaster for software engineers, and the tech sector in general. People who write code are unbelievably productive compared to just about any other job function, and softwa…

I don't want to compete with my colleagues, I want to co-operate with them.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#437

Post by rachofsunshine »

forbiddenvoid wrote: post #265
rachofsunshine wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, at least of developers who lack both experience and impressive credentials. A new grad from, say, UC Berkeley might be fine, a new grad from my own alma mater (which has a direction in its name) will often struggle, and a hobbyist without a CS degree has an even bigger uphill battle. The reason we didn't talk about it as much in the main post is that our approach to the problem of credentials hasn't cha…

> hobbyist without a CS degree has an even bigger uphill battle This was me when I tried Triplebyte. I wish it had worked out. I don't really blame TB for the failure, but I think there was a lot of optimism on the part of TB that wasn't shared by the companies I interviewed with. TB was just another placement option for every one of them, and I found it challenging to overcome what felt like walking into several ons…

This (what's expected of you in a specific company's onsite) is exactly the sort of data we'd love to make available and searchable.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#438

Post by IncRnd »

failwhaleshark wrote: post #256
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…

Pedigree filtering is most often myopic elitism, especially in a business context. Anecdotally, I avoided MIT and Harvard because of Boston's snow and traffic. CalTech is Pasadena: too frick'n hot. I didn't study at all for the SAT-I and aced the math section. (The SAT should be more like the JEE.) I went to an expensive, "top 50" public university where I liked the area. Also, it was more practical and rigorous acad…

> I bombed an Apple interview for a mid-career role by being too intelligent and too maverick compared to the group of compliant, I hate to say, yuppies. It was an interview panel of about 9 people and they were just speechless.

Are you sure they were speechless due to your high intelligence and maverick qualities?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#439

Post by sgerenser »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #431
sgerenser wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience this is worse than nothing, because the posted pay is so much lower than the companies are actually willing to offer. Positions posted for FAANG that I know are offering $250k+ total comp are posted with statements like “pay starting at $110,000 but varies based on your unique qualifications and experience”.

I'm unsure of exact enforcement and such but you could report them if you wanted. I also don't mind FAANG so much since there's so much info available for those positions on like levels.fyi. The biggest strength for me is that I can ask them and they have to tell me. When I was job searching before I'd ask the recruiter and then they'd always ask me what my target is. Not showing your cards is like negotiation 101. P…

True but if equity is ~50% of compensation at many tech companies, but also varies hugely, being forced to reveal base pay doesn’t mean much.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#440

Post by shagie »

opportune wrote: post #254
shagie wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I doubt people only wanting to move to Seattle/SF/NYC is the problem. What about all the people who only look for jobs in their hometown or regional hub where there are approximately 0 jobs for software engineers? From what I’ve seen that is a much more common problem, people basically limiting their search parameters to a very small set of all open jobs, rather than looking at the three cities that have the most job…

That was a bit of the "Reluctance to move" aspect.

I've moved across country twice and from one end of a state to another twice... its a pain, but I like new places.

One of the companies that I worked for (smallish city in rural midwest). There were a few tech jobs there (and a reasonable sized tech company)... several of my co-workers had never been further than about 100-200 miles away from where they were born (and then, only as vacation).

Yea... the reluctance to move is a problem.

I attribute part of this to my (gen X) and the "this is how things are" that I got from my parents (boomers).

My father's family had a few moves through the years... not too many, but a few. My mother's family moved several times (and once even to another territory) as part of my grandfather's career. Once my parents were married, they moved twice before settling down.

For me, when I graduated college, it was almost expected that I move somewhere else for a time. And I did. My brother too... and my sister. My brother (gen X) has moved five times since graduating college and my sister (gen X / millennial cusp) has also had five major moves since graduating college.

I believe there's a generational shift in that expectation of moving out - possibly from the financial insecurities that the dot com crash, '09 recession, and the '20 recession have instilled in the millennials and gen Z as they look for jobs... though that's just a guess.

> rather than looking at the three cities that have the most jobs.

There are a lot of cities/metro areas that have a lot of jobs that people tend to pass by. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151251.htm - note that there are other classifications that are applicable, but I can't get a page that has a set of them together... so just using this one as an example.

If you look at the raw employment figures, Dallas, Chicago, DC, and LA are way up there too.

If you expand this to the location quotient (based on how many jobs there are compared too other jobs) you'll find many other cities have quite a few jobs too. Huntsville, Durham, and Madison are also up there.

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