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Rethinking Triplebyte

triplebyte.com

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Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#61

Post by TuringTest »

> We want to stop being a placement agency, and instead become a job search platform that leverages that unique power to create a better hiring process for engineers

> Triplebyte has hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform, and that means we can flip the script on companies. The collective power of thousands of engineers is enough to change their incentives in a way that individual engineers cannot.

> We can change their incentives directly by rewarding or punishing certain behavior. For example, companies aren’t normally incentivized to provide salary and culture data. But we can force their hand by promoting transparent companies in our search rankings. When a company’s access to thousands of engineers is on the line, their incentives are very different. The same goes for honesty: a company often has no reason to be honest with any one engineer, but we can disincentivize lying by making their behavior with one engineer affect their access to the next.

So... a union? In digital, online format?

I'm glad that someone there is now realising the advantages of joining forces to negotiate workers' conditions. It was about time high-tech engineers noticed this.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#62

Post by manv1 »

guessmyname wrote: post #55

TripleByte is awful. Take a look at the question they just asked me when I was doing their General Coding Assessment: What is the output of the following function? (1m 12s) function foo(a, b) { a += 1 b.push(1) } const a = 0 const b = [] foo(a, b) console.log(a, b)

Depending on the language and how it passes in values, you'll have different answers. Assuming it's javascript the answer is 0,1. In other languages it might be 1, 1.

That's a tricky question, and if you're not good enough to understand why they're asking that then you fail!

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#63

Post by MuffinFlavored »

towergratis wrote: post #58

The problem with Triplebyte IMHO is that what the originally promised, while a great idea and concept, it cannot scale. Also after interviewing with them for a role in their company I got to realize they don't know how to conduct interviews themselves. I used them two times. The first one was very early on, where I was given a home assignment and interviewed on it by Aaron himself, if I am not mistaken. The dude was…

> The problem with Triplebyte

is that they say they have companies like Apple and TrueCar posting job listings and hiring but they actually never respond and all you get is offers for companies between 10-200 people in size (aka, startups)

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#64

Post by cj »

ammon wrote: post #48
yangez wrote: post #36

> We want to be the job search platform that puts engineers in control. I love this, but I'm curious about the incentives here. Triplebyte only makes money from companies, not engineers. In the long run, can engineer-centric intentions override a business model based around companies and recruiters staying happy? I hope so!

Companies do pay us. But I think that our real long-term incentives still pull toward building what engineers want, not what companies want. I think that platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed have just gotten this wrong, because they focus on all jobs (not just engineers), and because demand for engineers is stronger than it has ever been. Take a look at this thread from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2…

> our real long-term incentives still pull toward building what engineers want, not what companies want.

> There is danger that we get pulled toward building for companies.

A common phrase thrown around with free services is "if you're not paying for it, you are the product".

> For example, companies aren’t normally incentivized to provide salary and culture data. But we can force their hand by promoting transparent companies in our search rankings.

Maybe I didn't read the article carefully enough, but are you planning to continue charging companies $15k - $30k for the ability to access candidates on your platform?

If so, companies are still your customers. And if you're building and optimizing your product for people who aren't your customers, your real customers (companies) may not be happy with you which will hurt retention, etc.

Maybe I skimmed the article too quickly, but it seems strange to charge companies $20k+ to post a job on your platform, and then actively do things that "force their hand". It might be a net benefit to the engineers on the platform, but I wonder how it will work from a business model perspective since you're potentially creating adversarial relationships with your "real" customers (companies paying you to access your candidates).

Edit: But maybe it's by design, if you actively remove employers who aren't abiding by your philosophy. Although again, that means turning away customers, which means turning away revenue, which in my mind raises questions about the overall business model. A lot of conflicting interests.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#65

Post by Terretta »

A benefit of Triplebyte to big enterprises not mentioned in Triplebyte’s discussion here: acting as engineering assessment proxy for engineering hiring managers stuck with pathologically risk averse enterprise HR departments.

Often enterprise HR is paranoid of honestly evaluating anyone for anything, to the point that many HR teams tell one another and engineering hiring managers that it’s “illegal” to assess candidate abilities on the way in the door, at all.

If you think about joining a dev team where no one checked if any candidate could FizzBuzz, you can imagine the workplace environment that can end up with.

Triplebyte is able to provide engineering managers with a stack of pre-vetted resumes so an enterprise can interview by its lowest common denominator HR policies, while still having a prayer a team will at least be made of candidates who can code.

The value of this to an enterprise stuck in this position is hard to overstate.

Hopefully along with expanding the talent pool per this post, Triplebyte can figure out a way to get well paid for this ability to help land actual coders on actual dev teams despite enterprise HR.

The need for this is huge.

// I see a comment below from a Triplebyte PM about score matching: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27542621 … That would be slick: land candidates that genuinely raise the bar, but aren’t so far ahead as to be speaking a foreign language to the team. Of course, this would require also assessing the target team, and oops, we’re right back up against that HR policy…

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#66

Post by bboylen »

manv1 wrote: post #62
guessmyname wrote: post #55

TripleByte is awful. Take a look at the question they just asked me when I was doing their General Coding Assessment: What is the output of the following function? (1m 12s) function foo(a, b) { a += 1 b.push(1) } const a = 0 const b = [] foo(a, b) console.log(a, b)

Depending on the language and how it passes in values, you'll have different answers. Assuming it's javascript the answer is 0,1. In other languages it might be 1, 1. That's a tricky question, and if you're not good enough to understand why they're asking that then you fail!

0,[1] right? :)

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#67

Post by [deleted] »

guessmyname wrote: post #60
dang wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's bad about that? It's obviously testing understanding of scoping and side effects. It's not hard if you understand those things and confusing if you don't, which seems like the kind of question you'd want on a "general coding assessment", no? The only thing that bugs me about that question is that "the output of the following function" is confusingly worded. It's the sort of question that a competent candidate…

> What's bad about that? The timer is what is bad about this. I do not care about the question. As you say, any competent programmer could solve this in a few seconds, if they are proficient, or minutes if they are not. In my opinion, they should not put a count down because they are interrupting the programmer’s flow. If they really want to measure time, they do it without interrupting the programmer, hide the timer…

[deleted]

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#68

Post by google234123 »

manv1 wrote: post #62
guessmyname wrote: post #55

TripleByte is awful. Take a look at the question they just asked me when I was doing their General Coding Assessment: What is the output of the following function? (1m 12s) function foo(a, b) { a += 1 b.push(1) } const a = 0 const b = [] foo(a, b) console.log(a, b)

Depending on the language and how it passes in values, you'll have different answers. Assuming it's javascript the answer is 0,1. In other languages it might be 1, 1. That's a tricky question, and if you're not good enough to understand why they're asking that then you fail!

I think it's pretty necessary to know how your chosen language passes values.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#69

Post by rachofsunshine »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #63
towergratis wrote: post #58

The problem with Triplebyte IMHO is that what the originally promised, while a great idea and concept, it cannot scale. Also after interviewing with them for a role in their company I got to realize they don't know how to conduct interviews themselves. I used them two times. The first one was very early on, where I was given a home assignment and interviewed on it by Aaron himself, if I am not mistaken. The dude was…

> The problem with Triplebyte is that they say they have companies like Apple and TrueCar posting job listings and hiring but they actually never respond and all you get is offers for companies between 10-200 people in size (aka, startups)

I'm guessing this is your experience - was this more than a couple of months ago? We made some changes about ~6-8 weeks ago to how we order jobs to prioritize responsive companies much more than they were in the past. We also use responsiveness as an input to the "Likely To Accept" score shown for each job (here's a screenshot of a posting from my own prod-testing account: https://imgur.com/wSmGCEL).

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#70

Post by google234123 »

guessmyname wrote: post #60
dang wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's bad about that? It's obviously testing understanding of scoping and side effects. It's not hard if you understand those things and confusing if you don't, which seems like the kind of question you'd want on a "general coding assessment", no? The only thing that bugs me about that question is that "the output of the following function" is confusingly worded. It's the sort of question that a competent candidate…

> What's bad about that? The timer is what is bad about this. I do not care about the question. As you say, any competent programmer could solve this in a few seconds, if they are proficient, or minutes if they are not. In my opinion, they should not put a count down because they are interrupting the programmer’s flow. If they really want to measure time, they do it without interrupting the programmer, hide the timer…

> any competent programmer could solve this in a few seconds, if they are proficient, or minutes if they are not.

You've found exactly what they are looking for.

Also, it's pretty bad manners to leak test questions imo. You probably agreed not to in the TOS that you accepted.

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