[HN Gopher] Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
___________________________________________________________________
Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte
Author : luu
Score : 99 points
Date : 2024-07-07 23:01 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.otherbranch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.otherbranch.com)
| stmw wrote:
| How is this different than https://interviewing.io/ ?
| laurent_du wrote:
| Sounds like a different offer. interviewing.io prepares you for
| interviews, while the triplebyte reboot is a way for companies
| to outsource their interview process. I think it makes a lot of
| sense. Interviewing, or, more generally, filtering the 1% of
| good candidates, is a difficult task and could be indeed a job
| in itself. The company has a strong incentive to take this job
| seriously since they will acquire a reputation after some time
| and will lose clients if it turns out they are being too
| lenient.
| leeny wrote:
| Founder of interviewing.io here.
|
| A few differences. We do mock interviews. Other Branch doesn't
| (at least not yet). Otherbranch has one very good standardized
| assessment that they use (like the early Triplebyte one). Our
| way of assessing candidates is by aggregating mock interview
| performance (and doing some stuff to correct for interviewer
| strictness etc). Basically people come to us for mocks and stay
| for the jobs (if they do well enough in mocks).
|
| We both do hiring, but OtherBranch focuses on a different type
| of employer: earlier stage startups, and we tend to focus more
| on hiring for later stage ones/FAANGs/FAANG adjacents.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| Triplebyte overhyped their promise by lying to candidates. They
| told me I "had the highest score they ever saw" on their
| screening thing. Then, they submitted me as a candidate to Meta
| _without my consent_ during the middle of the pandemic.
| (Ironically, it got me a job at Meta but I was laid-off in 2022
| due to being remote and new.)
| ajkjk wrote:
| That sounds really frustrating. They did things like that a few
| other times too, as I recall.
|
| Companies burning their goodwill is such a painfully negative
| thing about the modern world. Like just.. don't do it, even for
| the money. It's shameful.
| griftrejection wrote:
| What's more shameful is that we've done nothing to make that
| behavior illegal, at least in the US.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| (Otherbranch founder)
|
| The privacy thing is a legitimate criticism. It was not my call
| (I wasn't part of the leadership at the time) and I disagreed
| with it both then and now. It was a screwup, and it is a big
| part of why I want to make aggressive honesty one of our major
| cultural points - because I think once you start with spin it's
| easy to roll down a slippery slope to "well it's in our
| pragmatic interest so sure do whatever".
| banish-m4 wrote:
| @sama was hyping 3B on podcasts ~2016-2018. I thought it
| would've had an iota of integrity because he put his name out
| there with it, so I gave it a go not expecting much. I've
| interviewed ~100 candidates, have been on the other side of
| the table ~300x lifetime, and been a client-facing consultant
| with basic sales experience. I've seen and heard pointless
| shit, crazy shit, and illegal shit in hiring process but
| thankfully these situations revealed themselves early enough
| in process so I could bounce before getting too involved in
| less professional shops.
| psawaya wrote:
| I'm very excited to see this. I hired several people through
| Triplebyte as CTO back in 2017-2019. It was a great service. :)
| martypitt wrote:
| Similar to another post from the same company - Why Triplebyte
| failed (https://www.otherbranch.com/blog/why-triplebyte-failed),
| discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774
| ajb wrote:
| Interesting, but the website still does the usual thing of
| pushing people to the sign-up page without giving much
| information. If you're pitch is "we are aggressively honest" then
| an an indication of the jobs available seems like a good idea.
| Established recruitment firms list them all. I know it's tough
| establishing a two sided market, but it leaves a bad taste in my
| mouth when companies waste my time by inviting me to sign up and
| give a bunch of data, only to then then be told things like
| "We're not in your country yet" or even "We've put you on a
| waiting list".
| ajkjk wrote:
| They do seem comparatively honest otherwise, but, I agree. More
| honesty only helps (the users).
| timr wrote:
| > Interesting, but the website still does the usual thing of
| pushing people to the sign-up page without giving much
| information. If you're pitch is "we are aggressively honest"
| then an an indication of the jobs available seems like a good
| idea. Established recruitment firms list them all.
|
| No, they don't. In fact, the opposite is usually true:
| established recruiting firms will keep the company name pretty
| quiet, and only reveal it on outreach to specific candidates.
|
| Just because someone doesn't list that kind of information on
| the homepage does not automatically mean "dishonest". It's very
| common for "allow my company's name to appear on your website"
| to be a negotiated item in a partnership contract. Getting it
| approved can require involving people all the way up to the
| CEO. The juice often isn't worth the squeeze, and the companies
| you can get to agree to it are the ones you least care about
| putting on the website anyway.
|
| Particularly for recruiting agencies working on contingency, I
| can easily see why clients wouldn't want their partners to
| plaster their open reqs + brand on the front page of the
| website.
| ajb wrote:
| They don't list company names. That's why I didn't say they
| list company names. Generally, they list everything but the
| company name.
| timr wrote:
| Well, ok...but I'm not sure "software engineer at a
| company" is particularly trust-building...
| ajb wrote:
| There's a bit more signal than that. Also, it's harder
| for them to try and sell you into any random role, as you
| can tell that they are doing it when it doesn't match the
| description you were interested in.
|
| On first look, though, unfortunately now basically any
| website content could have been made by GenAI. That looks
| to be what we're living with from now on :-(
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| This is a fair criticism. You kind of hit why we don't -
| _established_ firms list them all. We 're not established yet,
| we're a baby deer trying to take a few steps through the
| forest. I would like to say that "not actively calling
| attention to our weaknesses in a way that is detrimental to
| users on both sides" is different from lying, but I think you
| could reasonably think differently.
|
| Since you asked: we have two roles currently hiring, and one
| with a contract out (although I think it's <50-50 to actually
| get signed, they've been extremely difficult to get responses
| from). We work primarily with engineers and roles in the US
| (both because that's where we are located and because that's
| where the revenue needed to make this model work can be found.
| However, we're not closed to engineers abroad. One of the roles
| hiring right now is open to remote in most of the world (they
| prefer not the EU for time-zone reasons), the other is in-
| office in New York City.
|
| If your criterion is "I don't want to sign up for this unless
| it'll get me a lot of jobs right now", well...don't. It won't,
| not yet. The pitch right now is "if you want to see this thing
| exist and would like a job if we can find you one, give it a
| shot, you've got nothing to lose".
| ajb wrote:
| Well, okay, but turn it round: what do you have to lose by
| listing the jobs? Some people will be convinced to sign up
| without them, but if you list them, some additional people
| will sign because they are interested in those jobs.
|
| Maybe some that would have given you their CV would be put
| off if they see only listings for jobs they don't match - but
| they don't match them, so they're not going to help your
| business any time soon anyway. So: the ones you gain by not
| listing don't help you, and the ones you lose are the ones
| that would.
|
| Having only a couple of jobs just makes you look small, not
| weak. But there are many small recruiting forms that do well
| - for example, one guy who I've used, Mark Ashton, only
| listed a couple of roles on his website[1]. But when I was a
| hirer he was still a great recruiter who found candidates
| that were matches, because he knew the market. As an
| individual, I still go to his website to see if there's
| anything of interest. (Okay, he seems to have changed his
| website and it doesn't show any jobs, so not as good a piece
| of evidence as I thought. But probably that's because he
| doesn't have a client right now, rather than because he
| wouldn't list them).
|
| [1] https://the1stconnection.co.uk/
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > what do you have to lose by listing the jobs?
|
| Because that makes Otherbranch no different than an
| ordinary recruiting firm!
|
| IE, when you're starting a business, not only is it
| important to be selective about what you do, it's also
| important to be selective about what you don't do.
| ajb wrote:
| What they don't do is cold approaches to candidates.
| Candidates applying to their website is - actually what
| they do. It sounds like they would probably do listings
| when they are big enough, so I don't see how it's a
| differentiator.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| > Well, okay, but turn it round: what do you have to lose
| by listing the jobs?
|
| Years ago, Triplebyte had a blog post on the front page of
| this very site where we mentioned, offhandedly, that we'd
| gotten jobs for "hundreds of engineers". That was true -
| the number was roughly 800 that we could track, probably
| into the low thousands counting ones we didn't - but there
| were extended threads analyzing that number to prove that
| we never actually got anyone jobs and our whole brand
| identity was a lie.
|
| Had you done the numbers, you'd have found that 800 was
| totally consistent with TB's stage as a company. At 30k a
| placement, 800 placements would amount to 26m in revenue;
| at 10m or so of annual revenue and rapid growth that's a
| totally reasonable lifetime number. The complaint was, I
| think, totally unfounded. But that didn't stop it from
| being the top thread on that post (IIRC) for some hours.
|
| That's the kind of thing that makes it hard to be
| transparent. As much as we want honesty from companies, we
| (or at least a lot of us) also want to go with the winners,
| and we often have unrealistic expectations of what
| "winning" looks like (because our intuitions are tuned on
| inflated numbers that are either lying or selected). In
| fact, just down this thread, you'll find someone arguing we
| can't really be serious about recruiting because our
| website was not made by a graphic designer.
|
| > Maybe some that would have given you their CV would be
| put off if they see only listings for jobs they don't match
| - but they don't match them, so they're not going to help
| your business any time soon anyway. So: the ones you gain
| by not listing don't help you, and the ones you lose are
| the ones that would.
|
| The problem is that, in the limit, this results in no one
| ever signing up for anything. Because candidates want us to
| already have the job they're a match for, and companies
| want us to already have the candidates they're looking for.
| And even if clients were willing to go for it even without
| candidates in the pool, it's not like candidates regularly
| check to see if new ones are posted on a small site. (If
| you did do that on your recruiters' site, I can tell you -
| with the backing of considerable data - that you are in a
| rare minority.)
|
| One person we have at an onsite literally right now signed
| up a month ago when we had no roles for him. We had a role
| that was a fit come in a few weeks later, matched him with
| it and then with another, and now he's got a 50-50 or so
| shot to get a job in the next few days. Had he just bounced
| day one, that wouldn't have happened.
|
| There's an analogy here in terms of chemistry. Trying to
| get both candidates and companies to both be around at the
| right moment is second-order kinetics, proportional both to
| the rate at which candidates check your site and to the
| rate at which companies have open roles they want you to
| fill. Trying to get one side to sign up provisionally - and
| it makes sense for that to be candidates, since job
| searches tend to last longer than open reccs and candidates
| aren't having to pay for it - is first-order kinetics,
| proportional only to the rate on the other side. Since at
| small scale n^2 is << n, it's really important for us to
| encourage the first-order state of affairs rather than the
| second-order one.
|
| Of course, none of that gets at whether not posting all our
| open roles is consistent with honesty. But you're making a
| strategic argument here, and I think it's incorrect.
| ajb wrote:
| Okay, that's a good analysis. I'm too tired to work
| through the math bit right now, but you may be right.
|
| One question in my mind, though, is why is it that that
| most recruiters solve the coordination issue the other
| way - first finding companies, and then hunting for
| candidates to match them. IE, there must be some reason
| why it's more effective for them to do it that way round,
| and theoretically this presents an obstacle for you. But
| perhaps Triplebyte already figured out the answer.
|
| I only know of one established recruitment company which
| does it the other way round - they don't hunt for
| candidates - and that's ecm selection. They operate in
| science-heavy areas mainly, and the chip industry, where
| there's a particular need for the recruiter to have a
| good grip on what the role means, otherwise they end up
| flooding their client with inappropriate candidates. But
| they are probably not as scalable as you want to be.
| sam2426679 wrote:
| TripleByte changed my (professional) life. Around 2019, I was in
| a bit of a professional lull but knew just enough coding to be
| dangerous.
|
| I got roped into the TripleByte funnel through a Reddit ad, which
| eventually culminated in moving out to SF for a YC startup.
| Several years later, I had a role at FAANG and reached a level of
| professional $ucce$$ that was orders of magnitude better than
| where I had been ~4 years prior.
|
| I wish TripleByte was still around. I remember interviewing.io
| doing a study on whether there was any signal from LinkedIn
| profiles with "skill badges." TripleByte was the only badge that
| had predictive value for ability-to-receive-an-offer, but the
| flip side was that recruiters negatively associate these badges
| with profiles of people in early-stage careers, which means that
| you're better served by not having any badges on your profile.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I was working construction and doing part time web design
| before triplebyte, afterwards I was working in SV as a senior
| engineer. To say it changed my life is an understatement
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| I wrote this post, and TB changed _my_ life, even though I 'm
| not an engineer. They hired me almost literally off the
| street, and now I'm...well, running an attempt at a
| successor. Not a bad six years.
|
| If you want one reason I wanted to start _this company in
| particular_ , it's that it seemed like a good idea to try to
| make something everyone wants to see exist.
| baron816 wrote:
| I went through a bootcamp at the end of 2014, then spent the
| next three years unable to get a job in tech. I didn't have a
| paycheck for those three years.
|
| Triplebyte was my last ditch effort. I failed the online test
| the first time I took it, came back and then failed their
| interview. Came back again, got five in person interviews in
| the Bay Area. Didn't get offers on the first four (one place
| even kicked me out halfway through the set of interviews). But
| I managed to get an offer from the last company, which I then
| spent the next four years at.
|
| Had I not gone through Triplebyte, I probably would've given up
| on working in tech. Instead, I'm an L5 at Google.
| judahmeek wrote:
| That's still an amazing level of persistence.
|
| What motivated you to push through so much failure?
| baron816 wrote:
| Overconfidence. I had built some cool stuff, but I didn't
| know much I didn't know. So having interviews where I
| wouldn't get any feedback left me in the dark about how far
| off I was.
|
| I've always had sterling reviews as long as I've been in a
| job. I'll leave it to you to wonder how much of that is
| competence and how much is successfully pretending to be
| competent.
| leeny wrote:
| Here's the post: https://interviewing.io/blog/why-you-shouldnt-
| list-certifica...
| HoyaSaxa wrote:
| I was excited to see this at first. We used early Triplebyte on
| the company side pre-COVID and it was a good experience.
|
| However the 20% commission is non-starter for us. We only used
| Triplebyte because it had a fixed annual cost ($35k for up to 5
| hires).
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| FWIW, the 20% commission was what TB used when operating under
| this model. The deal you encountered - which would have been
| offered only briefly during an era in late-2019/early-2020 -
| was an unsustainable honeypot meant to ease the transition to
| the post-pivot SaaS product.
|
| Even regular recruiters, who aren't running a high-touch
| interview on top of selling matchmaking on top of a candidate
| network, charge more than that!
| philbo wrote:
| Not sure if anyone from Otherbranch will see this but there's a
| tiny error in the description part of the coding problem on this
| page:
|
| https://www.otherbranch.com/practice-coding-problem
|
| Under step 2, the description says: > If the
| selection is not a mine, > but has adjacent mines in one
| of the squares next to it (including diagonally), >
| change that square to display the number of mines adjacent to it.
|
| However, the example output alongside it shows a square that is
| changed to the value zero. That square has no adjacent mines, so
| if the description were correct it would not have changed value.
|
| So either the "but has adjacent mines" clause should be deleted
| from the description, or an additional "otherwise change that
| square to display zero" clause should be added, or the example
| output should be changed.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Should be fixed now! Thanks for the note.
| noname120 wrote:
| The website[1] (not the blog) looks like it was designed using a
| Bootstrap theme from 10 years ago. It doesn't inspire confidence
| about the legitimacy of the business.
|
| [1] https://www.otherbranch.com/for-engineers
| neilv wrote:
| > _The website[1] (not the blog) looks like it was designed
| using a Bootstrap theme from 10 years ago. It doesn 't inspire
| confidence about the legitimacy of the business._
|
| The post is of a somewhat candid, high-information
| concentration blog post, by a bootstrapped company... and the
| stereotypical HN response is to criticize them for not using
| the latest purely stylistic glossy marketing brochure
| Webrogrammer resume keyword on their Web site? :)
|
| Maybe just like tech companies are still stuck in VC growth
| investment scam kinds of thinking, where the quality of their
| software developers didn't matter so much (since Potemkin
| Villages don't have to be structurally sound), and now
| companies institutionally have little clue how to hire or even
| recognize great software developers... So are we stuck in
| forming opinions of companies based upon our VC scam era
| criteria?
|
| "You're not investing in the most frivolous image BS, and any
| good VC scam company knows it's all about what image you
| present to the marks, so you're not even a legitimate
| business."
|
| Did we swap the definitions of _legitimate_ and _illegitimate_?
| monkpit wrote:
| It looks like they don't have a designer, which is a smell
| for sure if you were looking for some indication of how
| serious the place is. It's not the choice of framework that
| makes the difference, it's the fact that it looks like it was
| made by 1 lone engineer who is doing their best, but still
| isn't a designer.
| neilv wrote:
| Can they be serious without taking on VC (which they've
| implied is misaligned with customer goals)?
|
| If so, what would that serious look like?
| threetonesun wrote:
| Using memes as marketing material was more questionable
| than the design (which I agree is equally uninspiring).
| tptacek wrote:
| No, it isn't.
| monkpit wrote:
| Do you have anything to back up your claim other than
| anecdote?
|
| I was able to find this study:
|
| https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/8/6347
| tptacek wrote:
| I didn't even supply an anecdote; why would I need one?
| It's a self-evidently false claim.
| monkpit wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow, but you have a good day.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| We _don 't_ have a designer. In fact, I appreciate your
| optimism in thinking the website was built by an _engineer_
| , because it wasn't (I did it myself over a weekend).
|
| We're a bootstrapped startup in a hostile environment being
| funded by me throwing a chunk of my savings at the problem.
| Do you think that's the most important thing for us to
| spend money on?
| monkpit wrote:
| You do what you want, but you might consider listening to
| potential users and being a little less defensive.
|
| Nobody is forcing you to use your savings for this, I can
| understand that you'd take any feedback personally but
| you should try not to.
| griftrejection wrote:
| It's true. Everyone knows you can actually only judge a book by
| its cover.
| joeatwork wrote:
| I ran the interview team for TripleByte FastTrack early on (I'm
| not part of or in touch with the otherbranch folks) and I'm
| excited to see something like it return! The program was good at
| uncovering different sorts of engineering excellence. We could
| identify and attest for folks who were particularly fluent
| coders, or particularly deep systems folks, or particularly
| excellent debuggers, and then match them with shops that needed
| the sorts of things those people could do well. If the
| otherbranch process is like early TripleByte I'd encourage folks
| to give it a try because they'll have a shot at landing jobs that
| are better fits for their skills and interests (in addition to
| just saving a bunch of time during the search!)
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| (Otherbranch founder here) Thanks for the support! If you're
| interested in advising at all, I'd love to have you around. I
| reached out to everyone whose contact info I had, and I've got
| a fair number of people back in a room, but obviously didn't
| hit everyone.
| chantepierre wrote:
| The little test was fun. I scanned it a bit too quick, and was
| confused when my tests failed with real user input. I did not see
| the "1-indexed" instruction for user-supplied coordinates while
| playing against the clock. I guess that's what can happen when
| you want to hit a target..
| zug_zug wrote:
| I mean good for them. I guess before I'd make a profile (either
| for my employer or myself) I'd want some basic stats:
|
| - How many fully remote jobs paying over $200k base do you have
| in your pipeline? Basically I have no interest in making a
| profile to be a sales object to help a startup, I want the
| company to show value to me first [Now maybe somebody who has no
| current job is in a different situation]
|
| - My current employer is largely hiring non-US. What countries do
| you hire out of?
|
| Basically why before I give away hundreds of dollars of my time,
| what am I getting and how likely? It's not even clear to me to me
| what types of roles they place (e.g. SREs?)
|
| Lastly I want to throw in a tidbit that it's my personal belief,
| at the later stages of a long career in tech, that technical
| skill is really not that important to most employers nor even
| most roles nor getting promoted (as compared to things like Jira-
| fu, making your manager look good, handling conflict). As a
| thought experiment consider otherbranch itself -- other than the
| interviewers (who could be consultants) how many engineers if any
| would such a company even need? Seems like it could be wordpress
| + coderpad + salesforce.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| One, you wouldn't be giving away hundreds of dollars of your
| time unless we had a role for you (unlike Triplebyte, we
| interview you only if, conditional on you doing well, we have a
| job you'd be interested in). So the only time you'd be losing
| is the time to do a signup form.
|
| But to answer your question:
|
| > How many fully remote jobs paying over $200k base do you have
| in your pipeline?
|
| Depends on your standard for "pipeline", but we have one such
| role active right now. It's a performance-heavy low-level
| (Rust-based) role for a startup doing real-time video
| processing.
|
| > Basically I have no interest in making a profile to be a
| sales object to help a startup
|
| Sure, that's fine. You don't owe us anything, but I'd encourage
| you to think about the incentives that creates for founders.
| What you're saying, in essence, is "you should lie to me and
| tell me you're bigger than you are if you want to get off the
| ground". Which is what most startups - I believe early TB
| included, by the way - do, and something I'm trying not to do.
|
| > My current employer is largely hiring non-US. What countries
| do you hire out of?
|
| We're primarily US-focused, but it's not a hard limitation. The
| open remote role mentioned earlier is open to remote worldwide
| except for close-to-GMT+0-timezones.
|
| > It's not even clear to me to me what types of roles they
| place (e.g. SREs?)
|
| Primarily product-eng roles, although by chance the open roles
| right now skew towards low-level optimization. Our interview is
| definitely not optimized for SREs - you could sign up if you
| wanted, and we could even try and match you, but we wouldn't be
| able to make very strong guarantees about skill for an SRE yet
| (and we'd tell employers that). FWIW, Triplebyte didn't have a
| dedicated SRE track for four-plus years; we haven't even been
| doing business for four _months_.
|
| > Lastly I want to throw in a tidbit that it's my personal
| belief, at the later stages of a long career in tech, that
| technical skill is really not that important to most employers
| nor even most roles nor getting promoted (as compared to things
| like Jira-fu, making your manager look good, handling
| conflict).
|
| There is some truth to this, but it's less true in the startup
| world in which we currently operate (and will be for quite a
| while). If there's not demand, there's not demand, and we'll
| just fail as a company, but even in this market there's so far
| been enough demand to bring in some clients.
| zug_zug wrote:
| > unlike Triplebyte, we interview you only if, conditional on
| you doing well, we have a job you'd be interested in
|
| That sounds really prudent.
|
| > What you're saying, in essence, is "you should lie to me
| and tell me you're bigger than you are if you want to get off
| the ground".
|
| I'm not asking you to do that, I'm glad you're being so
| honest. You're right the network effect is challenging and
| fomo/dishonesty is a common attempt to try to circumvent it.
|
| There's probably no easy legal way to do this, but if there
| were a way to give like $50 bucks of stock to each serious
| resume uploaded, or double that to anybody who recommends you
| to their current company [not sure what's involved with that]
| then it might create more of a sense of "rooting for you"
| 0xpgm wrote:
| What are some other examples of startups that 'failed' because
| their model was not VC friendly i.e. were unable to sustain
| hypergrowth, but were profitable at a small-scale?
| smw wrote:
| I think you really want to let engineers start attempting
| problems without manual onboarding. Doesn't cost you much, and
| gets them the dopamine hit before committing anything?
|
| I got job interviews from the original Triplebyte that I almost
| took just from investigating it as a source to hire engineers!
| 6510 wrote:
| That is a rather wild idea, there could be a single service
| that doesn't care if one is an employer or an employee.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| So the reason we don't do a quiz (I assume that's what you're
| referring to) is just that GPT makes it way too easy to cheat.
| GPT would've gotten almost the entirety of the old Triplebyte
| quiz right.
|
| I have thought about having one available just for nerd-sniping
| growth-hack purposes, for the exact reason you say, but using
| it as a filter feels like it's just going to select for what is
| now very easy cheating. (Not that cheating on the TB quiz was
| that difficult, but it was nonzero effort.)
| peripitea wrote:
| Are companies hiring enough for this to be viable and to get 20%
| of first year salary? I thought all of that had died down
| significantly, but I haven't been following closely.
| joenot443 wrote:
| I'm getting multiple emails a week for web and mobile roles all
| over the country. Seems to me hiring is back at least for mid-
| senior level.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Anecdotally seeing similar things. Had a FAANG hiring manager
| tell me that they over indexed on new grads in the 2010s, and
| the hiring was now focused on 5-10 years of experience. So
| basically the same cohorts, just at a different career stage.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Would not be surprised if hiring showing a trickle of
| coming back, is partly due to the AI overhyping showing a
| trickle of coming down too, based on a couple of recent
| articles I've read (e.g. recent GS (1) one), and also on
| based on common sense, which is not very common, as
| Voltaire said, starting to trickle back too.
|
| Pardon the grammar, no AI used ;)
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Good question! It's certainly not a favorable environment to be
| founding such a company, although we are seeing some signs of a
| change in the weather over the past six weeks or so. That's not
| a huge surprise, one of the optimistic cases for how things
| might go was "we spend time doing all the awkward experimental
| stuff while the market is bad, so we're positioned to ramp up
| when it improves".
|
| Certainly the market is one likely cause if we do fail, though.
| dinobones wrote:
| The volume and compensation of high paying tech jobs that made
| all these companies possible doesn't exist anymore.
|
| There was so much value to be captured that these companies could
| survive on the sidelines just eating the scraps of tech
| compensation, and those scraps fed them well. Now the scraps are
| far too small to support a company.
| sitkack wrote:
| Absolutely not true. Recruiters get between 20-35% of the first
| year candidate salary. Something like Triplebyte can make
| hiring better candidates faster, even if it charges the same.
|
| I never used TB, but their model appeared broken. Instead of a
| tool used by recruiters, they aimed at replacing recruiters.
| dheera wrote:
| If any job exists solely because of an inefficiency in
| information flow, it is at least partially replaceable by
| tech that fixes that inefficiency, and given time, that will
| happen.
|
| I'm stating this more as a sort of universal economic axiom,
| not taking a hit at recruiters specifically as people.
| They're nice people, but a lot of jobs _are_ replaceable by
| tech.
|
| Interviewing is a massive information efficiency problem.
| Companies don't know if I'm good, I don't know if the company
| is good, so we spend 8 hours on Zoom calls trying to hash it
| out, and the resulting signal-to-noise ratio is still
| extremely low in both directions. The interviewer's rubric
| doesn't give a shit if I was in physical pain that day and
| had a brain fart or if my ability to code a binary heap in
| CoderPad is or isn't representative of my ability to code a
| real world app in VS Code on a real task; I don't know if the
| interviewer had a work emergency that made them sound like an
| asshole even if they usually aren't, etc.
| sitkack wrote:
| Of course they are, but you can slam your solution into the
| market and try and fight the whole thing. Or you can slip
| in as a tool that is effective, eventually anyone can hold
| the tool, not just a master craftsman.
| dheera wrote:
| Unfortunately, in a free economy, all ranges of tools
| will be built and distributed and ultimately the market
| will decide.
| leros wrote:
| One of these reasons these sites failed is they tried to scale
| to $1B companies, which made sense 10 years ago. They were
| successful except for scaling. These sites can totally exist as
| $XX million companies even today.
| sitkack wrote:
| Meta comment on the post, if you just land on the blog post,
| there is little to no context to what they solving or what
| Triplebyte was. One sentence saying, "Triplebyte set out to
| innovate the ways that highly skilled computer technologists are
| hired" or something.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| My experience with Triplebyte was quite negative. After going
| through their test, I wasn't finding many companies I was
| interested in in their roster. At their request and in the
| interest of giving them a chance, I interviewed with a couple but
| realized those companies definitely weren't for me.
|
| When one gave me an offer, I knew I had to decline but
| Triplebyte's recruiter told me on the phone that they were having
| a company party that night and they wouldn't drink unless I
| accepted the offer. It felt really manipulative and weird. I
| decided to completely drop their service after that.
| xingped wrote:
| That is an extremely bizarre manipulation attempt by the
| recruiter. Every interaction I have with recruiters seems to
| just further and further solidify my hatred for them.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| How is Otherbranch different from traditional recruiting?
|
| (IE, the article talks a lot about how they are different from
| Triplebyte, but I never used Triplebyte.)
|
| FWIW: I really like the idea of the recruiter doing in-depth
| technical screens and matchmaking:
|
| When I'm in the US job market, the most frustrating aspect is
| dealing with recruiters. Most have so little "tech" experience
| that they can't evaluate companies or me. I often feel like I'm
| talking with a salesman, and it's a crapshoot if the job is a
| good match for me, or if I'm really what the company wants.
|
| When I'm hiring in the US, it's a lot easier to work with
| overseas contracting firms. They all screen candidates very
| carefully, and only present candidates that are _probably_
| capable of doing the job. In contrast, recruiters for US-based
| employees perform very little filtering, so we end up
| interviewing a lot more poorly-chosen candidates.
|
| IE, as both a candidate and someone who's hired: I want the
| recruiting firm to do more "work:" Better filtering, better
| matchmaking, and better technical knowledge. I don't want to deal
| with "salesman."
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| The biggest difference is that we do interviews ourselves. That
| means we aren't relying just on resumes, it means we can make
| stronger, more data-backed recommendations to companies, and it
| means we can cast a wider net in terms of candidates without
| strong resumes. As an example, we have a candidate doing
| onsites as we speak that had a few years of a somewhat job-
| hoppy resume who, as it turns out, is an amazing engineer and
| has been easily clearing technical hurdles with the companies
| we recommended him to.
|
| What you're talking about in the context of overseas
| contracting is essentially what we do for (primarily domestic)
| full-time roles.
|
| We are much more technical than most recruiters. I'm the
| founder and the least technical person involved with candidates
| right now, and I would pass most whiteboarding interviews (I'll
| take yours if you want, just to make the point). Our
| interviewers are senior engs who've done a lot of interviewing
| before, most have FAANG experience, engineers generally seem to
| think highly of our screenings, and our matchmaking is built
| around technical traits (as a simple example, our matchmaking
| tools will infer you know JS if you know React).
|
| As for the salesperson thing...I mean, at some level trying to
| pitch you on why I'm not a salesperson is a bit of an "I am no
| orator, as Brutus is". But I think if you talk with me, you'll
| get a sense that that's just not what we're about.
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