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Rethinking Triplebyte

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Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#451

Post by clavigne »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #432
caffeine wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, som…

> One guy went on for like fifteen minutes about how much he hated open office plans.

Does this guy have a patreon?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#452

Post by robertlagrant »

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…

People are paid to create value. If they work at a company that reaches a billion people, then writing some software that adds $0.1 revenue per user per year is worth a lot.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#453

Post by seasily »

The only good thing about TripleByte was the structured quiz and interview process. Everything else--inability to edit key portions of profile, the most boring set of tech jobs imaginable, very few companies on there--was a joke.

The quizzes weren't quite a fit for ML, nor was the interviewer or job density there for the domain, but the immediate half-hour call with the promise I'd passed a technical screen was extremely efficient, even if Triplebyte lacked any basic level of market liquidity.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#454

Post by ThePadawan »

tdeck wrote: post #128
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…

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…

> Just Google "recruiter won't proceed without desired salary" and you'll understand how many folks dislike that question.

It's incredible how mileages vary. I recently had to strike companies off my list which demanded to know my last salary.

I offered them my salary expectations, but they would absolutely not accept that, and preferred to take the fact that I would not tell them the exact salary at my last position as a reason to decline to immediately stop the interview (with half an hour left in the call).

This wasn't a one-off either, I would say about 5% of companies (biased sample) try and get away with shit like this.

(This was German-speaking Europe)

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#455

Post by filoleg »

hectormalot wrote: post #367
filoleg wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I still slightly prefer the direct experience for other reasons, the recruiting agency experience was pretty good for me in its own way. More specifically, when it comes to salary negotiation. Let me elaborate. People at the recruiting agency usually get paid a commission as a percentage of the first year of the hiree’s salary (not taken from your paycheck, but just in general). Which means, it is in their inte…

> Which means, it is in their interest to get you as high of a comp as possible. Beware: this is not universally true. What you typically see is that it leads to closing as many candidates as possible. A recruiter can make more by closing 2 candidates at 80% of max comp than 1 candidate at 100% in the same time. This is a well known behavior in real estate sales, which have a similar commission structure.

Agreed, but as you said, it all depends. I am not sure if it was specific to that individual recruiter that I have been working with or if it is just a general practice with fintech recruiters, but if my recruiter was going for the high volume, she had made a really poor choice deciding to continue working with me.

I am saying that because I’ve been working with her for at least 3 years now, and I am yet to take a single offer from the companies she set me up with (either due to them getting cold feet last second or simply due to me not passing some of those interviews or me declining due to some red flags with the companies). If it was all just about high volume for her, it would have been in her interest to drop involvement with me after the 3rd unsuccessful attempt to set me up with a fintech company.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#456

Post by stove »

asperous wrote: post #389
stove wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very informally do this right now. I think of my role as a sports agent for top engineers. The engineers I work with pay nothing and the companies who want access to them give us no bullshit, all access interviews where we're not working with HR or recruiters. It works so well for both parties that I'm scaling it at the moment.

You are the recruiter in this instance. You should be being paid per hire you facilitate (~20k+)

Yes, this is what I'm doing.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#458

Post by duderoso »

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…

ammon,

how do I reply to recruiter contacts? applied to a job, received a request for interview from company. Nowhere to reply on the platform? How do I get in contact with them?

Should there not be a reply button right there with recruiter's message?

p.s. I already emailed support but, my past experience tells me they won't reply.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#459

Post by rytor718 »

cwalv wrote: post #361
rytor718 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I think most people devs, including low skill, understand Fizzbuzz, but performing on the spot is just very difficult for many people. Its the same reason why a top notch, genious writer can turn out to be terrible at giving speeches, even if they're reading from a script. Performing an interview is a different skill from writing code.

> Performing an interview is a different skill from writing code. I think this is true for the day-long leetcode interviews, but to succeed as an engineer, even at the entry level, I think you need to be able to talk through how you would solve fizzbuzz. A big part of the job is communicating trade offs with other engineers.

You're not wrong, but the problem is that interviews aren't actually about jobs. The average person interviews because they need the money. So from the start they're not thinking in the programming space. The pressure for them is to make the interviewer believe they are worthy of the job.

I think if I could describe my personal experiences, I'd say that on a subconscious level, I know that how I speak and articulate details will be observed by the interviewer through a cultural lens more often than not. This may be unique to my personal background, so maybe this is different for other groups. But interviewers often get hung up on the use of different language/terminology, the types of jokes/jests that enter the conversation, how I respond to their language. And there's sometimes been an unwillingness to allow different terminology, perhaps because that's all the interviewer themselves knows and understands.

All that to say, a code interview doesn't always come down to the quality of the code.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#460

Post by bumby »

robertlagrant wrote: post #452
erosenbe0 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People are paid to create value. If they work at a company that reaches a billion people, then writing some software that adds $0.1 revenue per user per year is worth a lot.

*value to the __economy__, not to be confused with value to society.
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