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Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

triplebyte.com

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Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#61

Post by thecombjelly »

Do programmers love numbers and algorithms so much they want to be reduced to them? Programmers are people and should be treated as such.

Also, shouldn't we be concerned that giving one company's algorithms control over who gets hired will be too much power in too few hands? And algorithms are not neutral. The people that make the algorithms have biases and discriminations just like regular people do but at least if your company does its own hiring you can work on figuring out what those are and how to address them. How can you do that if you depend on some proprietary algorithm?

And what about disabilities? How does your algorithm handle those? Racial bias? So many unanswerable questions.

I have many issues with the way most companies interview but giving up that process to a proprietary algorithm seems like the worst solution. This is not news to be celebrated.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#62

Post by wtvanhest »

fludlight wrote: post #2
Harj wrote: post #13

What was always most interesting to us about starting a recruiting company was seeing what would happen if you treated hiring as a data problem. Partly we've raised more funding for the same reason any startup does, so we can grow faster to get more customers = more revenue = more success, etc. But we're also driven by how the larger the scale we operate at, the faster we can run experiments to answer questions about…

It would be interesting to see stats on new grad engineers by college in a similar way as the very popular hard drive stats from backblaze. I would like to test my hypothesis that grads from the top 10 cs schools as determined by US News et al. are generally good, but overvalued.

It highly depends on how you measure value. If you measure value in terms of what they bring to the overall organization, people from top 10 schools are very likely overvalued. If you measure what value they bring to the team, top 10 schools are probably correctly valued. The difference is that the manager of the team hiring from Harvard can speak to people in more senior roles about how great their team is and how they have the best talent.

At the end of the day, value is driven by how much political leverage a hire can give a manager, not by how much value they add to the org.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#63

Post by dikaiosune »

tomtheelder wrote: post #43
dsacco wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the transparency. So for the sake of clarity, it sounds like ~40% of engineers who pass the initial quiz ultimately go on to be hired?

Also there is no guarantee that an engineer who passes the interview will end up getting a job through the platform (speaking from experience). I'd guess a very large portion of that 40% just end up getting a job the old fashioned way.

AFAIK when most recruiters talk about placement rate, they're not talking about "engineers who we worked with who happened to get jobs," they're talking about "engineers who we placed and received payment for the placement." While Triplebyte hasn't explicitly stated that distinction here, I think a good faith reading of that phrase would suggest that the 40% is actually people who are getting jobs through Triplebyte.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#64

Post by [deleted] »

mrnobody_67 wrote: post #8

$50m in job offers last 6 months at $130,000 average salary, with 70% of job offers being accepted/signed = 267 people got hired in the past 180 days after completing roughly 30,000 interviews (based on the 5000/month quoted in the article). That means the chances of being hired after doing a TripleByte interview is slightly under 1% if my back of the napkin calculation is accurate.

[deleted]

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#65

Post by gossipundercut »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #4

Anyone care to comment on how the whole Triplebyte process goes as a person who wants to be hired? I'm interested since I never got past the set of questions due to some kind of bug in the beta.

I ended up not taking a job through them (I did the math and relocating to SF meant I would have a longer commute and only slightly more pay after housing my family of 6), but the process was great.

After the initial test, there is a fairly long phone/remote desktop interview that consists of:

* Writing code (on your actual machine with the tools and language of your choice!) to solve a simple problem.

* Debugging (a smallish program with 5 failed unit tests)

* General knowledge questions (databases, web (both html and http), data-structures algorithms)

The phone interview then ended with them giving you a couple of tips on answering the non-technical interview topics that a lot of engineers flub (why do you want to work here, when can you start, compensation).

The next day I got a list of over a dozen positions with the recommendation that I pick at least 5 to move on to phone screening.

The phone screenings went well (3 of them were just varients of "all the candidatese triplebyte has sent us were great, so we just want to talk about our company"). This was also my first hint that compensation would be an issue; one company was immediately ruled out because they were early stage and I can't pay a mortgage with equity.

Then triplebyte scheduled the on-sites all in the same week so that I wouldn't have to go back-and-forth to the bay area.

Ultimately Apple was the only company on my list paying enough to get me to relocate, and they passed on me.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#66

Post by dilatedmind »

My experience with triplebyte was positive, but the interviews with the companies I matched with was not.

The first thing every company asked for was my resume, clearly they had not bought into the triplebyte process. Some seemed entirely unfamiliar with triplebyte.

Interviewing can be a sad process. Triplebyte gave me a taste for what things could be like, but didn't give me any advantage in the application process.

The companies triplebyte matched me with resulted in some of my worst interview experiences. Think disinterested ceos, hostile line of questioning, and a focus on my previous job experience vs things I would have liked to talk about (open source, personal projects)

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#67

Post by CryoLogic »

treis wrote: post #26
taurath wrote: post #17

"Evaluating" 5000 engineers a month almost seems low to me - they've been going full bore with advertising and have been on the top of reddit for the last month or two (and if I remember correctly I think I've seen them on twitter and FB). With this much spend I would have thought they'd have more candidates. Maybe thats a lot!

Google says there are 3,500,000 software engineers in the USA. If they are doing 5,000 a month, that means they are interviewing about 2% of all the engineers in the US each year. That's not totally accurate because it doesn't account for those breaking into the field or if international candidates are going through the process. Either way, that's a lot of candidates.

Define "software engineer"? I know for example the US gov puts basically all tech jobs in the same bucket of IT. Hardcore low-level assembly programmers with people who set up office on business machines.

I would speculate the total number of people the average HN reader would consider a software engineer is much lower.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#68

Post by zenophobia »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #4

Anyone care to comment on how the whole Triplebyte process goes as a person who wants to be hired? I'm interested since I never got past the set of questions due to some kind of bug in the beta.

I worked with them roughly a year ago, and it was incredibly straightforward and enjoyable! I went through the online test and two video conference interviews before being matched with a generous list of companies that matched my preferences, both small and large. The people I worked with (shoutout to Michelle and Buck) also kept in constant contact throughout the entire process, ensuring that things were going smoothly from the company-side after matching. All in all, I heartily recommend Triplebyte to anyone who's looking to streamline their search process, and to see how much better the interview procedure can become.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#69

Post by cgag »

dsacco wrote: post #38
Harj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter.

Thanks for the transparency. So for the sake of clarity, it sounds like ~40% of engineers who pass the initial quiz ultimately go on to be hired?

Things may have changed but when I did it I think ~2 years ago the projects and in person bit were much harder than the initial quiz, I'd expect the drop off to be higher.

Edit: I admit didn't pass the in person part and I have some issues with things I think were held against me when it was more confusion about what they were looking for, but overall I thought it was a great process and have recommended it to people.

Re: Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

#70

Post by gossipundercut »

Spoom wrote: post #32
aeling wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a great experience, even as someone primarily working in embedded development. They only targeted SF & NY when I went through their process, which wound up unexpectedly being a dealbreaker for me, but if it weren't for that I absolutely would've taken one of their offers.

I have a very similar situation. I started taking pitch calls and then ran the numbers on what it would cost our family to move to San Francisco / Silicon Valley, and it didn't work out. But their process was fantastic, and if my situation is different in the future I'd absolutely use them again. Edit: By the way, you should email them about the bug with your profile, they'd probably want to know about it / give you…

Same here. The bay area has now priced out professionals with families. I was looking at $40-$60k more per year for housing depending on where in the bay area I would live and I'm currently making over $120k...
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