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Can we not doxx someone over a benign comment thread on HN?
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They're very basic tests in comparison to Triplebyte though.
Even if that's true it's sort of irrelevant if your requirements make Triplebyte's matching garbage.
I just retook the Linux LinkedIn test and what a bunch of garbage it was. Lots of memorising commands (e.g. nm-connection-edit) and obscure Bash nonsense.
And it only says whether you're in the top 30% or not, which apparently I am despite the fact that I guessed half of the answers. I just guessed the least intuitive option every time heh.
I hope all of these interview assessment companies go out of business. They don't produce quality candidates, and they're dehumanizing for the folks that have to use them.
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To be clear, we gave a ton of feedback and direction before the demo. All of that was completely ignored. If it was a problem of just tweaking things or making changes then I would have done that, but the fact is that they completely ignored all of the input we had already given. I'm curious why you're so intense about this- do you have some sort of stake in karet?
They worked for Karat, according to their comment history. So yes.
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In summary, the beginning of a brand new business relationship, you demoed a single, first version of your custom purchase, you understood that it needed tuning, and then proceeded to immediately cut them without providing further direction. (EDIT: Note that I previously contracted with Karat and feel loyalty to them, but have no formal association or stake in them, nor do I represent them.)
Well, witnessing this behavior has certainly turned me off from considering Karat in the future. I often appreciate how on Hackernews, you can voice a criticism for an online service and someone from that service will show up, take accountability, and help out and/or take feedback - happened to me with the CEO of DuckDuckGo a while ago, a product I really like but had an issue with. What a contrast this is.
Karat is probably the best/fairest you can do for purely algorithmic interviews, but I'm not sure they're even able to do anything else (the parent commenter's experience suggests not).
I would also consider it more of an exam than an interview - the process is very standardized and sterile, and obviously since it's being outsourced there is no way for the candidate to ask any questions about the company.
(disclaimer as well: went into the interviewer onboarding with them as a contractor but dropped out as I wasn't comfortable proctoring tests that I myself wasn't an expert at).
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Might be a little elitist but it always seems like these sites go for the broadest applicable market rather than sticking to their lanes of catering to at the very least experienced engineers. TripleByte felt like a premium product that cared about both sides of the transaction but when I came back to it years later, maybe I had changed but the site just felt... bad, like that it was just a job mill. It didn't feel p…
They start elitist, people love them for it but that's a niche market as the top "1%" is, well, only 1%. So to justify valuation/please VC/increase revenue, they have to increase the pool of candidates which basically destroy the value-prop of their service.
This is essentially correct.
Our original model worked, more or less, for a small pool of candidates. But acquiring those candidates was extremely expensive in ways that scaled poorly as Triplebyte grew. Basically, we were dependent on ads for growth (anyone who used Reddit at the time probably saw a lot of our ads, shout out to /r/againsttriplebytemike), and the marginal cost of ad conversions grows as you try to scale how many people you're bringing in.
Slightly less cynically: if your business can't exist without VC funding, but can't justify the expectations of that funding, you never really had a business to begin with. You borrowed one temporarily. This is normal for startups, and VCs know that they won't always (or even usually) succeed, but you can't sit on your break-even-ish business when that's not what VCs were funding you to do.
For what it's worth, early TB's efforts (and for that matter, late TB's efforts, both before my tenure and during it) were sincere, it's just that that sincerity is predicated on actually being able to make a working business out of it.
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Even if that's true it's sort of irrelevant if your requirements make Triplebyte's matching garbage.
Yeah I agree. It's just a shame LinkedIn's tests aren't as good as Triplebyte's. I just retook the Linux LinkedIn test and what a bunch of garbage it was. Lots of memorising commands (e.g. nm-connection-edit) and obscure Bash nonsense. And it only says whether you're in the top 30% or not, which apparently I am despite the fact that I guessed half of the answers. I just guessed the least intuitive option every time h…
Tell me more. Having trouble thinking of something that wouldn't change how I'd percieve a senior dev's skillset.
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Can we not doxx someone over a benign comment thread on HN?
Not the GP but it's not "doxxing" to point out someone has a conflict of interest, and it's important that we all be open about our potential biases when discussing topics like this. And perhaps even more important is that hiding these potential biases get called out to disincentivize bad actors.
I remember when Triplebyte had a blog post and/or job ad every other day on Hacker News, and a bazillion physical ads in San Francisco. It's surprising how quickly after the public-profile-incident ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037 ) they fell off the radar.
We were simply never able to make the marketplace version of Triplebyte work after moving away from the transactional model we had in the early days. We tried some new tactics near the end that seemed to be bearing fruit, and I think in a world where tech hadn't crashed in mid to late 2022 we would have had a reasonable shot. But sometimes you find product-market fit right around the time the market goes sour. C'est la vie.
The reason we fell off the radar is that we'd been spending a lot of money on ads and stopped at around the time of that backlash (due to a change in business, not due to the backlash itself). Turns out you can boost your profile quite a bit when you're pouring a lot of your cash into ad campaigns! (Also, the physical ads wouldn't have made much sense since that pivot also coincided with all of us sitting in our tiny Bay Area apartments for the next year, lol.)
I'm not surprised Triplebyte isn't standing on its own. I set up identical profiles and passed all the relevant quizzes at Triplebyte, Hired, and LinkedIn (all 3 offer timed, multiple choice question tests with limited retries), but only LinkedIn was able to match me with opportunities willing to pay what I was asking. Triplebyte and Hired both let you set a floor salary, but have no ability to set a floor total comp…
Their biggest issue was probably corporate politics, no HR org wants to hand over a huge chunk of their power and purpose within a company. Their business model also didn't fit a VC startup model, no real room for exponential revenue growth