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.<p>Then they started abusing trust and implementing dark patterns: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837</a> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27255742" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27255742</a> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037</a><p>I was honestly thinking about using them myself until it became clear that they had no ethics. Once trust is lost...
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.<p>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.<p>I’ve been at Google for a year now, so it ended up working out pretty well in the end.
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.<p>It's surprising how quickly after the public-profile-incident (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837</a> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037</a> ) they fell off the radar.
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.
I'm not surprised Triplebyte isn't standing on its own.<p>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.<p>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.)
Years ago, I took a Triplebyte test and at the end of it learned critical (and accurate) insights on my strengths and weaknesses. I realized if I can screen my candidates in this same way, they will be incredibly valuable employees.<p>After confirming the skill-ranking capabilities with our first hires, we integrated Triplebyte into our hiring process to save developers hours of wasted time on pointless coding exercises that are thrown away after each interview only to start over again with the next company. This was an advantage for us, we had a better signal to noise ratio on candidates and we found more talent willing to take a triplebyte test than our own in-house tests. Further, the triplebyte tests were maintained and refined over the years to an accuracy I believe is going to be very difficult to replace.<p>Yesterday, Karat announced a shutdown of Triplebyte with less than 2 weeks notice. They don't care to offer a solution to any of Triplebyte's customers. In their words they "only purchased a technology that Triplebyte made available to other companies" i.e. "we don't want anyone else using this".<p>The Karat website uses floaty words like "interview cloud" and emphasizes live-coding interviews as part of some legacy product that would put us back into the stone ages when it comes to our current hiring process. Karat expressed no intention on offering solutions to replace what Triplebyte did best. Karat do not care about the inconvenience of their customers. Karat provides less than two weeks notice to paying customers that they are cancelling service.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
I was interviewed by Karat for an SRE position and I found it a joke. Questions like "a web server goes down but the site stays up, why?" - me: "well, define 'down', also is there a caching layer in front?". "No, what happened is that there was a load balancer and two web servers and only one went down". ffs
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
Using Karat services tells a lot more about the company than the candidate.<p>I guess it could be generalized that these companies are more likely to value philosophies that are similar to a few of these abhorrent practices-<p>1. Flawed concepts of "Meritocracy" based hiring/promotions<p>2. Stack ranking<p>3. RIF's based on some extremely shortsighted metrics like quarterly revenue numbers<p>4. PIP style performance improvements<p>5. More MBA types managing engineering teams<p>...<p>The only place I see Karat style services fit is to eliminate 'noise' candidates from DDOS'ing the entry level hire pipeline.
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 :)
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 :/
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.<p>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.<p>The honest comments in this thread from Triplebyte folks is refreshing too and I really hope for the best for them.
Will Karat be around after the AI revolution?<p>I wouldn't be surprised if an OpenAI + Zoom solution makes Karat obsolete.<p>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.
So what is happening to TripleByte? The website says "While Triplebyte is saying goodbye…the mission to transform technical hiring continues at Karat". So it seems like Karat is just squashing a competitor to their own business model, and doesn't intend to integrate triplebyte's features into Karat.
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.
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!
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.<p>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.
Triplebyte is extremely hostile to disabled people who are experts in their field.<p>After aceing their Linux kernel screening test in 2019, their model of “we will call you, you cannot contact us” have made it nearly impossible to work out physical scheduling for an interpreter to sit alongside the conversation.<p>After all, one does not need a voice to do professional “bit arrangements”. We all have IM, texting, email, and fancy transcribing machines.<p>There are many forms of vocal disabilities.
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?<p>[0]: <a href="https://triplebyte.com/blog/rethinking-triplebyte" rel="nofollow">https://triplebyte.com/blog/rethinking-triplebyte</a>, discussed here <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27541676" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27541676</a>
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.<p>Three weeks later I got an email from Triplebyte saying they were "pausing your process".
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.