[HN Gopher] Triplebyte acquired by Karat
___________________________________________________________________
Triplebyte acquired by Karat
Author : forbiddenvoid
Score : 104 points
Date : 2023-03-16 16:46 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (karat.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (karat.com)
| the_jeremy wrote:
| 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 compensation, which meant it
| was effectively worthless for determining if a company was
| competitive for me.
|
| In Oct-Dec '22, I got ~400 LinkedIn recruiter messages (3% with
| high enough total comp), ~20 triplebyte messages (0 with
| competitive comp) and ~10 hired messages (0 competitive). None of
| these recruiters were connections beforehand on any platform, so
| it's just representative of the total number of recruiters on
| each platform. (In case anyone is interested, I also cold-applied
| ~20 places, and none of those resulted in me making it past the
| hiring manager stage, if that. I ended up with 2 offers, both
| from random LinkedIn recruiter outreach.)
| pc86 wrote:
| LinkedIn cold messages get a lot of (well deserved) flak but
| they can be very useful for moving to the next step in your
| career if you're willing to sort through the cruft. Of those
| ~dozen messages with competitive TC, I'm sure half probably had
| projects you wouldn't be interested in or were with
| companies/industries you didn't want to associate with. Some
| percentage of the remainder would choose not to move forward on
| their end for one reason or another. So out of 400+ messages
| you're likely down to 2-3 offers at the end of the process, and
| likely at different points in time.
|
| Especially as the hiring markets starts (continues?) to
| contract at the middle and lower ends, being willing to give
| these types of outreach a chance is going to become a
| differentiator.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| Triplebyte made more sense as an internal tool for YC itself,
| from an efficiency perspective it makes sense to have a company
| like Triplebyte for vetting general programming skills and
| saving candidates and companies time by having a somewhat
| standardized level so neither party is wasting their time.
|
| 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
| maxk42 wrote:
| Curious... I've been using LinkedIn for a job search and am
| unfamiliar with the questions to which you refer. How can I
| find and pass this test?
| burkaman wrote:
| https://www.linkedin.com/skill-assessments/hub/quizzes/
| IshKebab wrote:
| They're very basic tests in comparison to Triplebyte
| though.
| pc86 wrote:
| Even if that's true it's sort of irrelevant if your
| requirements make Triplebyte's matching garbage.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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 heh.
| benatkin wrote:
| > obscure Bash nonsense
|
| Tell me more. Having trouble thinking of something that
| wouldn't change how I'd percieve a senior dev's skillset.
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| That incident was obviously pretty damaging to us from a PR
| perspective, but it isn't really what killed us. It's not like
| no one ever used TB after that, even though it did reasonable
| damage to our brand (and for what it's worth, that kind of
| blowup really _is_ damaging - we got asked about it during
| basically every one of the acquisition conversations we did at
| the end, so please don 't think that PR backlash never matters!
| it absolutely does!).
|
| 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.)
| edgyquant wrote:
| I got my big break through triplebyte but once you switched
| from the "personal" site that connected me to companies I was
| actually a good match for and moved towards being just a jobs
| site I've had zero luck so I got my last job via
| workatastartup (which is also going downhill.)
|
| It's a shame because I know there's people like me stuck in a
| dead end job somewhere despite being a senior level engineer
| (I was working construction!) and these people will have
| nowhere like triplebyte to help show the industry their
| skills.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Yeah. You weren't alone. My favorite was some guy who'd
| been packing boxes for Amazon for like ten years and
| couldn't get anyone to give him the time of day, who ended
| up getting a like 200k a year job at one of the bigger SV
| companies. That kind of story was something I couldn't shut
| up about during my first couple years at TB, and it was
| definitely something lost when we changed models. (We made
| that change for a reason - discussed elsewhere in this
| thread - but it was still sad to see that model go.)
|
| The issue of "talent but no experience" is a glaring
| inefficiency, but it's the kind of inefficiency that (so
| far, at least) it's been very hard to make a business out
| of. (And to be clear, this isn't just employers being evil,
| a lot of their behavior is rational and it's not like
| candidates never lie or cheat either.)
|
| I have some thoughts on this that I'll probably be batting
| around with my new bosses a bit once we're settled in with
| Karat's teams. Since Karat focuses more on screening than
| on trying to be a marketplace, it's a more natural fit for
| their (our, I guess I should say now) existing business
| anyway. Hopefully we can make it work.
| hitekker wrote:
| TripleByte once told me it was aiming to becoming "the hiring
| division for Google, Apple and all of big tech"
|
| As a mere jobseeker in the pipeline, I wasn't sure if the
| representative misunderstood the reality of recruiting. To
| me, the ambition sounded ignorant; companies do not want to
| outsource _and centralize_ their hiring in a third-party that
| is also hiring for their competitors.
| devstein wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Is this referring to Magnet? I thought that was neat product
| idea.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Yeah. (For those unfamiliar with it, Magnet was basically
| an attempt to automate sourcing. The way it worked was that
| companies would complete a questionnaire about what they
| wanted, we would message candidates on their behalf, and
| they would review only candidates who indicated interest.
| We applied some throttling and quality thresholds to try to
| make this a good experience, because taking control of the
| messaging let us actually do that.)
|
| Magnet grew out of four main observations:
|
| * Our users got much better results when we helped them
| search rather than leaving it to them.
|
| * What company users fundamentally wanted was to - as our
| head of finance put it during a discussion last January
| that ended up leading to the creation of Magnet - "swipe a
| credit card and get candidates".
|
| * The most interest we'd seen on the candidate side was
| when we could tell them what companies really wanted, and
| bringing that in-house meant we could show that information
| very accurately and without incentive for companies to be
| dishonest, and
|
| * We had a fundamental lack of activity problem. We talked
| often about how nice it would be if we had Linkedin's spam
| problem, because we had lots of ideas for how to solve that
| problem _if we actually had it_ , which we didn't.
|
| So we built Magnet, which ended up increasing activity on
| platform by a factor of like five and made companies way
| happier. We scaled it up over time, and right as we really
| turned it up in June, the market fell out from under us.
| And it's a testament to just how well it worked, at least
| on paper, that our number of connections between candidates
| and companies actually _grew_ through much of fall 2022
| despite the collapse in hiring.
|
| That's not to say Magnet didn't have problems. It did. It
| had issues with fraudulent profiles (there turned out to be
| quite a few of these - a lot of job sites are dealing with
| this problem at the moment in the remote-work world), and
| we were definitely hitting a point of diminishing returns
| as we scaled it to some extent. But given how quickly it
| was built, and how bad the market was, the fact that it
| took off at all suggests that there was probably something
| there.
| NSMutableSet wrote:
| They completely destroyed the value of their brand with that.
| It was crazy. I really liked the concept of Triplebyte, even
| though I never found a job through them. I would get requests
| from reputable companies occassionally. After that incident, I
| never got anything again. I would have considered using
| Triplebyte from the employer side prior to that, but not after.
| What a disgrace.
| madamelic wrote:
| 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 premium, it felt
| like a hokey recruiter site with a Silicon Valley skin.
|
| It doesn't help that companies also treat(ed) it like a job
| mill. I would have companies reach out, tell me my resume
| looked great and fit all the criteria then would turn me down
| for lack of experience when I responded.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I had a weird experience with Triplebyte. First I take their
| intake test and then I'm ghosted for a year or two. I email
| them and I got unghosted somehow. They said it was some kind
| of glitch but it didn't really appeal to me...
| titanomachy wrote:
| I had the same experience. In 2017 it was amazing and I felt
| like I'd discovered an incredible career-boosting hack. I
| told all my friends about it. By 2020 it felt exactly the
| same as every other low-grade career mill.
|
| To be fair, none of my friends that I referred to TripleByte
| actually passed their (2017) screening process. So it was a
| site that was very useful to a very small subset of
| engineers. I'm sure there's a viable business in that premium
| market, but probably not a unicorn scalable tech company.
| Xt-6 wrote:
| 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.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| (TB's head of product for the last ~year and a half here -
| I wasn't involved in the decision to pivot away from the
| old model, but I'm retroactively aware of its reasoning.)
|
| 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.
| compumike wrote:
| (The engineer formerly known as "Triplebyte Mike" here.
| Hi Chel!)
|
| Harj recently described Triplebyte's user acquisition
| trajectory publicly in a video from Y Combinator:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s from
| timestamps 7:53 to 9:33. But yes, ads worked for a while,
| until they didn't.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| I got my current job through TripleByte, so thanks for
| that! I feel like the niche exists for how Triplebyte was
| set up, but maybe it is not a VC-scale "unicorn" type of
| business.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| But has anyone learned the lesson? I'm sure the founders will
| go their merry way to another plum position and continue
| thriving on VC Twitter.
|
| In the past 10 year being unethical wasn't considered immoral
| by a lot of such startups. I remember the intern incident at
| Repl.it or how AirBnB destroyed the rental market in certain
| geographies or the whole Uber incidents.
| cutenewt wrote:
| Will Karat be around after the AI revolution?
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if an OpenAI + Zoom solution makes Karat
| obsolete.
|
| I, for one, won't shed any tears. I've wasted too much time
| conducting interviews. I'd like to have more time to focus on
| work.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| I went through Triplebyte's process as a candidate ca. 2019. I
| got a lot of positive feedback from it, and while they didn't
| have a company in their portfolio at the time that was a perfect
| match for my skills, the process (and its results) gave me the
| confidence to pursue roles that I would not have otherwise. I
| just recently got a role with a really wonderful organization and
| Triplebyte deserves some of the credit for that, just for
| building a process that made talented shlubs feel hireable.
|
| When they made some missteps and got (deservedly) bad press for
| it, and then struggled after, I felt bad for them in the way I'd
| feel about a friend that screwed up.
|
| The honest comments in this thread from Triplebyte folks is
| refreshing too and I really hope for the best for them.
| tedivm wrote:
| I demoed Karat as a customer and I think they're just awful. They
| pretended that the interview process was customizable, so we sent
| them what we wanted. Then to demo it I signed myself up as a
| candidate.
|
| Literally all of our feedback was completely ignored. They didn't
| touch on any of the topics they said they would, and even though
| we explicitly told them it wasn't an algorithms heavy position
| that was their entire focus. On the plus side I did pass the
| interview, but we ultimately decided that using Karat would have
| had a real negative impact on our hiring.
| warent wrote:
| I don't get this. Karat provides their customers with full,
| detailed text writeups of every single interview, as well as
| full recordings both of the interview video call and the code
| timeline. Why didn't you just review that material?
| tedivm wrote:
| I absolutely did review the interview, that was the whole
| point. I just wasn't willing to risk sending a potential
| candidate through a pipeline I myself hadn't gone through.
| I'm happy I caught the problems in advance myself, rather
| than subjecting someone I potentially wanted to hire to a
| useless interview.
|
| I do want to stress the useless part here too- even with the
| notes of how the interview went I wouldn't be able to make a
| decision on things, since they didn't hit the points that
| were actually relevant to the role.
| metadaemon wrote:
| Good on you for not subjecting someone to that.
| warent wrote:
| 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.)
| tedivm wrote:
| 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?
| warent wrote:
| I contracted with Karat previously, but don't have any
| present relationship with them or their executives.
|
| Communication is hard, and not everyone has time or
| energy to bridge the gap, which is fair! It's just a
| bummer to hear that this has somehow lead to words like
| "awful", "real negative impact", "useless". That feels
| very intense to me, and I have probably responded in an
| intense way as well. There was no harm intended
| bovermyer wrote:
| They worked for Karat, according to their comment
| history. So yes.
| warent wrote:
| I'm seeing now that I should have disclosed this again at
| the beginning of this thread with my first reply, because
| now it's coming across as a deception, which was truly
| not the intent as shown my by earlier comments. Apologies
| folks
| triyambakam wrote:
| [flagged]
| tedivm wrote:
| Can you delete this? I don't want a conversation that I'm
| having to lead to someone being harassed.
| warent wrote:
| It's okay, I'm not anonymous. Thank you for looking out
| though. I appreciate you and apologize for coming across
| as adversarial, the company has a special place in my
| heart and I'm obviously very biased. What you experienced
| sounds like it was pretty bad, and I hope that they have
| grown from it
| S201 wrote:
| Can we not doxx someone over a benign comment thread on
| HN?
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| tedivm wrote:
| It's possible to say "this person works at this company"
| without sharing their entire work history and other info.
| Several people did this.
| Operyl wrote:
| It's not really doxxing someone when they freely put
| their name out there, in many places, including in
| content they themselves have posted to Hacker News. That
| said, parent probably didn't need to post a linked in
| profile either heh.
| [deleted]
| ficklepickle wrote:
| You should probably disclose that you are a Senior
| Interviewer at Karat
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| 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.
| EricDeb wrote:
| Hello I work at Karat in engineering (have had a great
| experience so far). I will make sure someone hears about
| this. I know there is some degree of customization in the
| format/content of interviews but sounds like it wasn't to
| the degree it was advertised which is unfortunate.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| He seems to be a (former) independent contractor rather
| than an employee/representative, so I think this is more
| just misguided fanboyism rather than intentional
| astroturfing/reputation laundering.
|
| 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).
| EricDeb wrote:
| I commented below. I work at Karat in engineering and have had
| a good experience so far. I'll make sure someone hears about
| this. I'm not aware of exactly how customizable our interviews
| are but it should be consistent with what is advertised or that
| needs to change.
| elijaht wrote:
| +1, we had a similar experience using it to hire engineers. It
| felt like our feedback went into a black hole and they did not
| change their process.
|
| We had a few months of really painful full interview loops with
| candidates not appropriate for the positions.
| flyandscan88 wrote:
| From your comments it seems you're at Google. Isn't Google
| mostly algorithm/leetcode problems? I thought Karat was
| mostly that as well. Wouldn't Karat be a good screen for that
| sort of thing so as not to waste Google Engineer time?
| barcode_feeder wrote:
| I used Triplebyte in 2018 and had a great experience with it. I
| enjoyed the interview process, I found my talent manager
| tremendously helpful as a new grad, everything about it was
| great. I was a kid from the midwest who went to a relatively no-
| name school and it opened a lot of doors for me. A few years
| later and all the candidates I've interviewed for that came
| through the Triplebyte pipeline were spectacular. Sad to see the
| turn it took. At least I've got the jacket :)
| noncoml wrote:
| I had a couple of interviews with Ammon in their very early
| stages. You know how sometimes you meet someone and from the
| first moments you realise he is an awesome person? That's the
| feeling I got with him. He definitely knew what he was doing.
| Wish him the best!
| guywithabike wrote:
| It's unfortunate that their reputation took such a massive hit
| with the public profile debacle. The folks I talked to / worked
| with at Triplebyte were all great people with their hearts in
| the right place. It's just an incredibly tough market to be in.
| noncoml wrote:
| I think the problem was that what they were trying to do
| couldn't scale. As I said I interviewed in the early stages
| with Ammon and it was a great experience. He knew what he was
| asking and he knew how to evaluate your skills. But how can
| you have a hundred Ammons interviewing and assessing people?
| It just doesn't scale.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Interviewers actually _did_ scale reasonably well, which is
| part of why Karat (which stayed focused on that part) was
| in a position to buy our stuff to begin with.
|
| What didn't scale was the ability to get high-quality
| candidates in the door in the first place.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| I had a friend get a job through triplebyte and generally had a
| positive opinion of them. I also had a generally positive opinion
| since I had wasted time phone screening candidates. Every phone
| screen a company does is at least $100 of wasted time. The value
| proposition of outsourcing phone screening for fizzbuzz is clear.
| The value proposition of doing one phone screen for N companies
| is also clear.
|
| Then they started abusing trust and implementing dark patterns:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27255742
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037
|
| I was honestly thinking about using them myself until it became
| clear that they had no ethics. Once trust is lost...
| naet wrote:
| I got my foot in the door in tech through triplebyte after a
| couple months of job applications. I had a very small number of
| triplebyte company "matches", but I got a good review on my
| triplebyte front end interview and ended up landing a good job
| at a growing startup... only for the company to lay off the
| entire office 3 months later after the initial Covid outbreak
| (but the production experience taught me a lot and helped me
| get my next role).
|
| I had less success when I came back 2-3 years later and tried
| to get another role through them, but I'll always be thankful
| for the initial foot in. At at time when many places didn't
| want to consider me at all for having no professional
| experience, triplebyte was willing to give me the chance to
| interview and judge me on my answers instead. Even just the
| interview process was a good learning experience and I could
| research any topics I didn't know afterwards.
|
| I like to riff off one of the questions from my triplebyte
| interview when I now interview candidates- the "used car"
| architecture question. Makes for a great open ended technical
| discussion.
| tdumitrescu wrote:
| Yeah, our experience with Triplebyte really fluctuated a ton
| over the years. Made some hires pre-vetted by them who were
| real badasses and contributed a lot, but then there were
| periods when they sent us numerous candidates who could barely
| squeeze out a line of code and clearly must have gamed their
| process somehow. Feels like they were searching for some
| sustainable growth model and never managed it.
| baron816 wrote:
| I did a coding bootcamp in 2014, and couldn't get a job
| afterwards. I spent the next three years trying to break into
| tech. I had tried starting a startup, failed at that, interviewed
| at a handful of companies, failed those too. At one point, I was
| literally begging startups to let me work for them for free.
| Nothing.
|
| I finally managed to get into Triplebyte's program. I did a phone
| interview with them, failed it, then came back a few months later
| and passed it. They flew me out to California where I interviewed
| at five companies. No offers at four of the five. It was the very
| last company that I interviewed at where I got a job. Had I not
| gotten that job, I would probably be trying to sell insurance
| right now or something.
|
| I've been at Google for a year now, so it ended up working out
| pretty well in the end.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| warent wrote:
| I worked with Karat as an interviewer for a few years at the most
| senior level and loved the experience (back then they were still
| Karat.io!). Pleased to see this success for them; it seems like a
| partnership made in heaven.
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| I briefly worked as an interviewer -- it wasn't for me, but I
| like and appreciate everything they're doing to make things
| fair across candidates and removing subjectivity where
| possible. Of all the bad ways we interview SWEs, Karat is one
| of the better ones, IMO.
|
| The way I saw it, it removes a lot of stress and pressure for
| the candidate, and puts some of it onto the interviewer.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| 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.
| newaccount2023 wrote:
| [dead]
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| I've only been interviewed through Karat once, but it was a
| positive experience. It was a coding screen round. The
| interviewer was personable and fun to talk to, which made the
| whole process more pleasant. He was skilled at listening and
| asking the right questions to gauge where I was at throughout
| the conversation. He also transitioned smoothly into follow-up
| questions, and I got the impression overall that there was a
| wide range of skill levels he could evaluate (ie. the result
| was not just pass/fail, there was a high ceiling).
|
| Given the usual nature of coding screens - intentionally
| generic and standardized, so a company can use the same
| screening process for different teams - it made a lot of sense
| to me that a task like that could be outsourced. Since you are
| usually not developing a relationship with the interviewer at
| that point, there's no real reason they need to be and employee
| of the company you are interviewing for. A couple of times I've
| had coding screens where the interviewer didn't seem to be
| paying attention. Since some engineers get forced to do these
| screens, they might not be focused on giving a good candidate
| experience.
| madamelic wrote:
| > a company can use the same screening process for different
| teams - it made a lot of sense to me that a task like that
| could be outsourced
|
| It actually makes a lot of sense to do it this way on both
| ends.
|
| You know the interviewer is going to be a good interviewer
| who knows what they are doing & how to judge you. The
| interviewer can be completely independent from the decision
| without having bias or judgement attached to where the
| candidate ends up.
|
| I've certainly had interviews where I knew I was doomed from
| the second I walked in the door because the interviewer was
| in a bad mood, they didn't enunciate clearly, just a bad
| vibe, whatever. That sucks as a candidate. This situation
| would make a fairly demeaning process slightly better if done
| well.
| azemetre wrote:
| Agreed, as I progress through my career I'm starting to value
| companies that are willing to actually speak to me instead of
| using these middleware services to find out if I'm even
| qualified. It's a complete time waste for me (and them) to pass
| these assessments and realize the culture of the team is
| something I want nothing to be a part of.
| warent wrote:
| This is not the feedback I've received, and I conducted like
| nearly 1000 interviews with Karat. On average we actually heard
| from people that Karat was their best experience by far, and
| that we made them feel like we were treating them as worthy
| individuals.
|
| Even people who got declined usually still left feeling quite
| positive, because we would turn the obviously-failed interview
| into, basically, a free hour coaching / teaching session for
| them to succeed next time.
| coward123 wrote:
| My experience was the same as tedvim above - it was utterly
| dehumanizing and there's no way I want that either for myself
| or for the people I hire. The interviewers were smug little
| shits who didn't take feedback to ask questions relevant to
| the position.
|
| Further - you guys lurk all over HN commenting like this
| every time there's an interview thread. It's submarining and
| it's gross.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| "not trying to sell me a product" indeed.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Presumably it depends on the interviewer. And tbf it seems
| like warent is the only person here defending them.
|
| Still I don't know if I would trust hiring to unknown
| potentially awful interviewers.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The rules at Karat may be that giving any kind of help
| pretty much automatically disqualifies the candidate, so
| technically they're better off giving you no help at all in
| the hopes you make as much progress on your own rather than
| ruining your interview by giving you help prematurely.
| jamiepenney wrote:
| Yep pretty much this. I was a contract interviewer with
| Karat for a few years and taught people how to conduct
| interviews. There's a graded scale of assistance,
| anything more than gentle prompting to re-read your code
| or the error output starts counting against you. If I
| have to point out a block of code or even a line, then
| that's getting to the point that most clients will pass
| you over when they review your interview, so the rules
| are we don't give that stuff proactively.
| confidantlake wrote:
| There is nothing to gain from giving negative feedback. If
| Karat succeeds in becoming the gatekeeper for interviews it
| would be a really bad idea to get on their bad side.
| verteu wrote:
| How so? I had a positive (applicant) experience with TB. It
| saved me time by providing a unified phone screen for several
| companies.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Speaking as an hiring manager: Interviewing and finding the
| right talent is hard and there will always be people swayed by
| these salesmen selling a quick solution to tired companies.
|
| The lucrative cottage industry of interview assessments won't
| be going down so soon as long as there are perverse incentives
| and gatekeeping in place.
| bmcahren wrote:
| I've had incredible success in gauging candidates skill-level
| using TripleByte Screen. Everyone I've hired has taken the test.
| It's not a pass/fail response but it is fairly indicative of
| someone who has worked full-time in their tested language/skill.
|
| If the tests go away, I don't know what I will do to help gauge
| candidate skill without traditional and wasteful live / take-home
| / repo-based tests.
|
| As an evaluation tool, TripleByte was great. As a user of Magnet
| (the recruitment marketplace), it was not so great. We signed up
| during the hiring frenzy of 2020 and the good candidates we tried
| to get were all getting offers from much more established brands.
| We didn't see any success there, but TripleByte Screen is an
| excellent product I hope remains available.
| guywithabike wrote:
| 6 years ago, I did Triplebyte as a candidate, got 6 interviews at
| good companies and 4 fantastic offers (including one from them,
| directly!). I ended up accepting an offer for a company that had
| a life-changing exit for me, and it wouldn't have happened
| without Triplebyte. So I have a lot of love for them. It was sad
| to see them stumble with the weird public profile stuff, but I
| wish only the best for them. I hope this was a good outcome for
| the folks that I talked to all those years ago.
| nrb wrote:
| Nearly same journey for me. I can't thank them enough for
| organizing everything (including the flights, hotel, and
| scheduling) and putting me in front of several great companies
| as someone who at the time did not live anywhere near the bay
| or have easy access to the SF startup scene. It felt like a
| really premium experience, and one that I'll forever be
| grateful for.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| These kinds of stories were really motivating for all of us
| who worked here at the time, and they definitely soften the
| blow of the final result, at least for me (and I think for
| Ammon as well).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| To give a different perspective, I applied to Triplebyte
| when they announced their project track for people who
| don't do well in interviews. They told me I had done a
| great job on the project, but that they couldn't move me
| forward because they needed candidates who could do well in
| interviews.
|
| (What was the project track for??)
|
| They recommended practicing on interviewing.io, a site with
| closed membership that kept me waitlisted for over a year
| (and only then let me in because I complained about the
| situation on HN, not because I'd actually waited long
| enough to get off the waitlist).
|
| So as far as I could see, Triplebyte advertised one thing,
| delivered the opposite at every opportunity (I'm also still
| bitter that the site with the tagline "No resumes, just
| show us you can code" opened its interviews with "So, where
| have you worked in the past, and what did you do there?"),
| and didn't even pretend to be interested enough to give you
| advice that was, theoretically, possible to follow.
| myndzi wrote:
| Same here. Triplebyte quite literally changed the
| trajectory of my life. I wasn't really aware of how things
| have changed over the past 6+ years as mentioned in the
| other comments, but I'm sad to read them. I wish the whole
| team well, regardless. <3
| [deleted]
| lisper wrote:
| I was a big fan of Triplebyte until I went on an interview that
| they arranged for me that turned out to be a complete waste of
| time. I told the company beforehand that I didn't know Ruby, had
| never written a line of Ruby, and they said that it didn't
| matter, they wanted me to come in anyway. What is the first thing
| they ask me to do? Write some Ruby code, of course. I'll spare
| you the gory details of what happened after that, but it was a
| train wreck.
|
| If you're going to try to build a business on the basis of
| eliminating the bullshit from interviewing (which is a terrific
| thing to try to do) you have to make sure your client companies
| are on board.
| muh_gradle wrote:
| I've used Triplebyte the past few months. It hasn't been a good
| experience to put it lightly. The idea for it sounded nice 4 or 5
| years ago, but they've just pivoted in a poor direction.
| topherPedersen wrote:
| I hate it when they don't mention the price. We want to know how
| big the bag was!
| subarctic wrote:
| I'm guessing the pivot [0] to being more engineer-focused rather
| than employer-focused didn't end up working out, and they decided
| to sell the company and move on?
|
| [0]: https://triplebyte.com/blog/rethinking-triplebyte, discussed
| here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27541676
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| You're essentially correct that that effort didn't work.
|
| That pivot was motivated, more or less, by the fact that we'd
| never found a good way to attract candidates that wasn't "dump
| tons of money into ads". (Even in the early days, when our
| branding was good, most of our candidate acquisition was from
| ads; only maybe 25% was word-of-mouth.) It just didn't work:
| senior engineers simply didn't find the things we could offer
| them compelling enough.
|
| Fundamentally, if you're a hiring market paid by companies,
| you're selling access to talent. And finding cost-efficient
| ways to get that talent is a core problem of your business. We
| tried a few approaches to that, but none really took off. (The
| most successful was our Screen tool, but the problem with that
| was that companies mostly wanted to screen candidates they saw
| as low-value - juniors and international candidates, mostly -
| and were terrified of screening high-value senior candidates.
| The product worked well, but didn't get the candidates that
| would let us stand out, basically.)
|
| During 2022, we pivoted back to a focus on companies, and
| actually saw quite a bit of success with our last few efforts
| in a way that, with more runway, we might have converted into
| some really good candidate experiences. Unfortunately, this
| coincided with a collapse in tech that both tanked companies'
| desire to hire and tightened their belts as they braced for a
| hostile fundraising environment, and we couldn't overcome that
| environment even with a product that did seem to have
| reasonable fit.
| nullfield wrote:
| If I want to burn all my data there before Karat "anonymizes
| it for analytics purposes" on 2023-03-31, so they don't get
| it, is there a method for doing so?
| jonahss wrote:
| I used Triplebyte from both sides, as a candidate as well as a
| hiring manager. I hired some great people from them, but over the
| past couple years watched as their standards slid, pricing models
| changed, and sales practices went from friendly to cutthroat :/
| compumike wrote:
| Curious, what would have been a better model?
| coward123 wrote:
| Karat embodies everything wrong with the tech industry, and
| Triplebyte wasn't much better. I've interviewed - and hired -
| hundreds of people in my career. This robotic approach with a
| focus on either standardized test type material and/or the
| leetcode interviews where how we interview doesn't match the work
| itself - it's just all so broken. I don't know the fix, but I
| know this isn't it.
| flyandscan88 wrote:
| I agree but I feel Karat is good/helpful IF we're all still
| stuck in the leetcode/algorithm world because at least it's
| friendly/consistent.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| I went thru Triplebyte in 2019, did well enough on the initial
| quiz to skip the technical screen, but then they matched me with
| a bunch of little tiny startups -- including one on in a
| different hemisphere! -- doing uninspiring work. I talked with
| two, one of which ended up ghosting, and ended up declining a
| flyout to the other.
|
| Three weeks later I got an email from Triplebyte saying they were
| "pausing your process".
| acheron wrote:
| Huh, really? I thought it sounded interesting years ago and
| checked them out. I then read that it was for jobs/people in
| San Francisco only, and my reaction was, as the kids say,
| "lmao". Never thought about them again. Had no idea they moved
| on to allowing places that were potentially elsewhere and even
| in different hemispheres.
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