Rethinking Triplebyte

#1

Post by Harj » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#2

Post by dawnho » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

Interesting idea. But it seems like there’s room for abuse - won’t engineers, who are unhappy that they didn’t get an offer, just report companies? Don’t you just become Yelp in that case, full of reviews from salty customers? How are you going to get useful data when you’re worried about that?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#3

Post by minimaxir » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

The overall idea seems like Glassdoor with extra steps.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#4

Post by throwaway273575 » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

Will this newfound respect for users' privacy be backed up by a contract or some other legally-enforceable commitment, or do we all have to worry about when you decide to pivot again in another couple years?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#5

Post by ammon » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

dawnho wrote: post #2

Interesting idea. But it seems like there’s room for abuse - won’t engineers, who are unhappy that they didn’t get an offer, just report companies? Don’t you just become Yelp in that case, full of reviews from salty customers? How are you going to get useful data when you’re worried about that?

This is certainly an issue. As you say, it’s a problem on yelp and glassdoor. It’s why most nightclubs have low yelp ratings (people they exclude give them low scores). There are a few things I think we think we can do:

1) Look at relative data, not raw ratings. Written reviews or raw numerical scores are what show the nightclub effect the most. What we care about is a ranking of companies (showing the better companies first in search results). This may not be as impacted by the problem. If sour grapes from people who failed interviews overwhelm other signals, we can only look at the scores from people who pass (or normalize the two groups separately).

2) Ask very specific questions (and maybe provide dummy options to attract sour grapes). I suspect that questions like "did this company say they could meet at $250 salary and then offer you less?" will get more accurate answers than "does this company have a toxic culture?". (We do actually want to get culture data, but I want to be really specific about the culture questions we are asking).

3) Use objective facts, not subject opinions. For example, we can tell when a company ghosts a candidate (because they reply through a proxy email that we control). So we're listing the 'ghost rate' for each company.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#6

Post by ammon » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

throwaway273575 wrote: post #4

Will this newfound respect for users' privacy be backed up by a contract or some other legally-enforceable commitment, or do we all have to worry about when you decide to pivot again in another couple years?

I hadn’t thought about this from a legal contract perspective. I like the idea of making our commitment enforceable. Do you have ideas of what you'd want in a contract?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#7

Post by ammon » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #3

The overall idea seems like Glassdoor with extra steps.

The difference is that I think we're in a position to actually change behaviour (require companies to not do bad things like ghost candidates, lie about salary).

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#8

Post by wayoutthere » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

In 2021, you don’t even have to search for engineering jobs. You either start out with a shortlist of companies and roles or a recruiter reaches out to you and kicks off the process.

Maybe this would be useful for folks just starting their career, but on the hiring side of this, in the last year I haven’t made an offer to a candidate who didn’t already have at least one other offer on the table.

Overall I think there are a lot of misconceptions about how people are hired from the recruiter side — which is why most of these platforms see the recruiter as the target customer, not engineers. I get that y’all are trying to change that, but without insight into the hiring practices at any given company (e.g. my company gives a lot of latitude for salary negotiations but every hiring manager negotiated differently) it’s going to be hard to pull a signal from the noise.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#9

Post by jawns » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

Some Hacker News context and discussion from last year around the "fiasco" that CEO Ammon Bartram mentions in this blog post:

Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public (1543 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837

Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology (1030 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#10

Post by acarl005 » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

I got my job through TripleByte. I consider it my dream job. Honestly, I loved the experience with TripleByte. I got a bunch of interviews to happen at the same time. Having them all together increases our bargaining power. It's hard to get the processes with different companies to coincide if you're just waiting around for recruiters to reach out. I already felt like it gave me the power. I'm sad to hear it's changing, because I would've used it again. I've also referred tons of people out of genuine liking of the service. Not sure if I can recommend it anymore. Still, I'm very thankful for what they did for me. I hope their new style works out.