That said, I think a hiring process that puts engineers in control (no ghosting, get data on when a recruiter looks at your application, search ranking by whether companies lie to candidates) is something that should exist. I want to try to build it!

However, I dropped out completely because TripleByte wouldn't let me see companies without entering in a desired comp number. My recruiter at triplebyte said I could just put in "$1 or $1,000,000" to get past it, but that just feels like the same kind of corporate HR bullshit that people have complained about for years. Just Google "recruiter won't proceed without desired salary" and you'll understand how many folks dislike that question.

The experience made me feel that Triplebyte wasn't interested in putting me in control of the process at all if they have such a user hostile requirement and require me to work around it by putting in fake numbers. I understand that many people will have no problem providing this info, but I prefer to see what companies offer me because it tells me how they value me and the position they're hiring for.

Almost all recruiters have been fine with that, but a couple haven't. To such people I wish a good day and go my own way. There are plenty of other recruiters in the sea.

I used to be much more relaxed about this, but if you get burned doing a few rounds of interviews and it was a waste you wise up pretty quickly - teams do not like time wasted.

I've also found that folks who can't / won't talk money - usually not great hires for a bunch of reasons.

We're happy to talk through the different positions, levels, progressions and comp ranges for them all. But you have to have a clue about what type of comp would work for you (early on in initial call or two) or it's just not worth continuing forward.

You say "I've also found that folks who can't / won't talk money - usually not great hires for a bunch of reasons."

The same goes in my experience for companies which insist on talking salary before the job offer. It's a red flag.

"you have to have a clue about what type of comp would work for you (early on in initial call or two) or it's just not worth continuing forward"

Of course I have a clue, but I'm not going to put myself at a disadvantage in the negotiation by revealing it before I've been given a firm job offer and heard a number from the company first.

Also, in my experience recruiters are the ones who push hardest to hear salary expectations up front. They know it'll give them a leg up in negotiations, and some of them are even paid specifically to get that number (as one recruiter was brazen enough to reveal to me).

That’s because it benefits you as an employer.

I’ve been on the hiring side and I know there’s a budget. If someone is too high you want to push them out right away.

My flatmate in Singapore about 6 years ago was looking for a new job. Her salary was about 2200/m and she said the recruiter kept asking about salary.

I told her not to discuss it. She doesn’t /need/ a new job. If the company really values her then they will give her an offer. They have a budget. They offered her around 4600/m.

If she told them she was on 2200 it’s guaranteed they would have given her only a small bump.

Companies should never ask for salary info. Because it’s only used to get cheap labour.

Your clients know their budgets. Why not just be upfront about that to the candidates. Tell us your budget or reasonable expected range your client can pay. Then if (when) we find that it's well below what some other hungry companies are paying, we can save you and us time by passing.

If you know your client is paying low, then just be open about it. Something like, "Ok, this client is a bit below market (and tell the upper limit they will pay), but they have these good things to offer." If the client has no good things to offer, and the pay is low, then you're still likely to not seal the deal with a candidate no matter what. So just cut the game and get to the point.

If you're happy to provide a range, great, if I'm still there doesn't that generally indicate that the range is in line with my expectations?

I guess your comment kind of makes sense, I can see how corporate might interpret 'this person looks out for themselves' as a potentially bad hire.

This makes me think that all jobs position should have rather narrow target ranges which are stated up-front. Then you can discuss if you are too high level/low level for that job and range.

In this case, obviously a job seeker does have many possible employers to apply to.

So no, AFAICS you are wrong and the original thesis of "the company holds the advantage" is correct.

___

[1]: Consider the connotations of those words.

That time would not be "wasted" if the company had done due diligence on what the position and candidate were "worth" and revealed their target (or target range) to the candidate.

The real reason, I'm sure, is that companies think they hold the upper hand in the negotiation. And a lot of time with a lot of candidates that's true. It's clearly _not_ true for the class of candidate who's realistically got a $300k+ target. You are totally not going to successfully headhunt anyone in the top 1% or 5% of FAANG engineers if you try to dick them around with recruiting power imbalance power plays. _They_ don't need your bullshit. They will totally walk away from whatever time you've "wasted" so far trying to recruit them. You need them _way_ more than they need you.

(And I'm pretty sure that generalises a lot further down the experience/renumeration food chain than most devs realise. Fresh grads or devs with only a few years of experience might need to play the stupid recruiter games, but most companies trying to fill a mid level or senior role need the right candidates way more than those candidates need any one specific job. You can and should be able and willing to walk away from any potential job offer over stupid games like this...)

1 - I get real-world interview practice, and that always helps me in future interviews. Many companies ask the same or similar questions, and the more I'll be ready for them being asked again. In addition, when I'm surprised by a question I'll research it thoroughly when I get home and won't be surprised by that question again.

2 - I get a bit of an inside peek in to how the companies I interview at work. That's a privilege not afforded to many outsiders, and how some of these companies (some of which are world class) can and has helped me at other companies.

3 - A company might bring me in to interview for one position, but after the interview might determine I'm better suited for another. If I didn't interview with them they'd never know.

4 - As I interview with people I get a chance to make a good impression on them, so even if they don't wind up hiring me for that position they might want me when a different position opens up (whether at that company or another company the people I interviewed with moved to).

5 - By letting companies make the first offer I myself get a good salary survey of the minimum what all the companies I interview with are willing to pay for someone with my qualifications in that position. Of course I try to do my own research ahead of time, but getting salary numbers without getting a job offer is not always possible or reliable.

6 - If I blurt out a number first I'll it may put me at a disadvantage in the negotiation, as they'll just start the negotiation from what I say even if they would have been happy to have paid way more.

I hear this a lot, but how much interview practice do you really need? After the third or fourth set of interviews, they start to really blur together for me.

None of your points are false, but if you're casting a wide net and taking every interview without any idea if the company can even afford you, that's a lot of hours spent. The last time I looked for a job, I interviewed at only four companies and spent an average of probably 5-6 hours on each, and it was exhausting. I can't imagine making a habit out of it while also working full-time.

But, in my case, doing many interviews helped me understand what negative signals I am emitting during interviews [according to the interviewers]. There's nothing like an outsider's perspective, even if you disagree with it.

---

Example: in one of my last interviews I was told that I am too "cocky" and "over-confident" because when I was given real-time modifications to a homework assignment (that I completed before) I was smiling and saying "oh, that's easy!" and proceeded to make the changes live in my editor -- while sharing screen.

This feedback left a very WTF feeling in me. Dude, I am (a) enthusiastic about the task and (b) have enough experience to show you, in real time, that I can modify the code right there and then to suit the new requirements, and (c) chatting with the interviewing team while doing it... and all you can gleam from that is that I am overconfident and cocky? Seriously, get a grip.

For the record, I strongly disagree with their take. But it gave me a very interesting perspective -- namely to scan for the more introverted / likely-insecure people in the interviewing dev team and try and act a little more modestly to not rub them the wrong way.

It's a fact of life that most people suck at interviewing -- as I hope that I demonstrated here. One of the guys in that team simply dislikes certain kinds of people and he lets this go against his better professional judgement about my abilities. Not cool, right? Especially when you also take into account that the CTO who also attended all interviews agreed that my tech acumen is top-notch and they seriously couldn't catch me with my pants down no matter what they did.

So again, this helps me gather experience and culture and makes me more adaptive in the future.

Does it hurt your ego? Absolutely. Does it shake your preconceived notions? Much more than one would think beforehand. Is it exhausting? Hell yes, sometimes after an interview I didn't want to do another one for a week.

But, is it also very valuable to help you improve your interviewing and negotiation skills? Yes!

That's why I did lot of interviews the last time around. And I'd do it again.

The nice thing about the explosion of remote work due to COVID is that engineering salaries are beginning to normalize across the US, and there is now a lot more salary data available online, so it's easier than ever to see what you're "worth" on the market on average. This at least gives you an anchor when having these conversations, so you're not going in blind, and gives you a lot more leverage if they low-ball you.

[0]: Yes, I'm aware of the drawbacks of self-reported data, but it's still broadly useful in aggregate.

[1]: I'm making up numbers, but something like $120k - $200k, with the lower number being the minimum you'd realistically take. Usually recruiters are honest up front if they can't even afford your absolute minimum, but it still leaves you with a lot of negotiation room once the offer comes in.

Why even give an upper limit? It's not like you'd refuse $400k if it was offered to you, would you?

Most companies will naturally start negotiation near the lower end of your range, even if they would have started way higher had you let them make the offer first. I really don't see an upside to this strategy.

Because if you just give one number, even if that's your absolute minimum, the entire salary conversation is going to be anchored around that one number, and you're going to have a harder time asking for 50+% more than that. If you give a broad range, it's easier to justify countering with something closer to the top of that range.

> It's not like you'd refuse $400k if it was offered to you, would you?

Of course not, but nobody has ever offered me that. :) In all seriousness, yes, you run the risk of your range coming in below what the company would be willing to pay, but in my experience (and those of friends and acquaintances), outside of FAANG, I have found that to be extremely rare if your range is wide enough. The companies that pay super well are generally big, and thus well-known to pay that much, and I wouldn't give them any salary numbers at all because I'll have a pretty good idea of what they'll pay me with a bit of research prior to interviewing.

Of course, anecdote != data, so YMMV and all that. This is just my experience interviewing at mostly smaller companies.

Luckily levels.fyi has fairly accurate data for those same companies.

Agreed though in practice that just moves the pre-interview conversation from a comp discussion to a leveling discussion.

It seems to be terrible waste of time going through interview process to learn that they won't even come close to what you want. I would not do that to myself.

at senior levels especially, you should know what you want. comp bands are informed by huge data troves now and any edge you may have gotten before is gone due to the fixed and tight bands. just state your requirements and insist on “turnabout is fair play” ie they need to tell you the band. do this during the prescreen and save everyone’s time. if you kill it in the interview you still easily can negotiate to top of band.

If your desired comp number actually is $1M/year, will that just flag you as a joke to Triplebyte companies? With post-pandemic stock price increases a lot of engineers at FAANGs are making more than that now.

For any reasonable definition of "a lot", no they absolutely are not. A lot of people with 2+ years of experience who've either been promoted once and received a strong annual review, or switched jobs as a mid-level industry hire are making in the 200s and 300s, a few pushing into the 400s. Much more than that and you're looking at the top 1% (or less) of engineers at the top companies. Not a lot.

Source: was a mid level engineer at a FAANG until I left late last year, knew seniors and principals and their comp. Nobody was making $1M/year.

Nobody that makes 2x what their coworkers do at the same job/level casually discloses their comp at the water cooler.

A) your company is engaged in disturbing monopolism; B) your company is engaged in disturbing labor exploitation and arbitrage; or C) your company is engaged in disturbing environmental destruction.

Would love to be proven wrong. Am I?

Edit: option D) is that American cardiologists are not as exclusive and skilled a labor force as I would prefer to believe ;)

Also, staff level is a tiny slice of the engineers at FAANG. So still not “a lot” even if your stock appreciation numbers were correct.

They’re all doing well, but even Amazon hasn’t doubled their stock since prepandemic.

There are definitely more people making 1m/yr at FAANGs than their were last year, but I agree with others that it’s not “a lot.”

AMZN in May 2019 = $1775, today = $3496, 96% appreciation.

AAPL in May 2019 = $43.77, today = $130.87, 198% appreciation.

GOOG in May 2019 = $1103, today = $2508, 127% appreciation.

That's all over the last 2 years. Market low was apparently Dec 2018, before the Fed started cutting interest rates, so the numbers are a bit bigger since then. They were pretty steady through 2017-2019, so anyone who got grants or refreshers during those time periods has benefitted from that appreciation.

It's incredible how mileages vary. I recently had to strike companies off my list which demanded to know my last salary.

I offered them my salary expectations, but they would absolutely not accept that, and preferred to take the fact that I would not tell them the exact salary at my last position as a reason to decline to immediately stop the interview (with half an hour left in the call).

This wasn't a one-off either, I would say about 5% of companies (biased sample) try and get away with shit like this.

(This was German-speaking Europe)

In which case the correct answer is "Das geht Sie überhaupt nichts an."

I don't think this part is off. Why I never went to Triplebyte and will not go, I think doing tests is dumb and don't wanna do it. Like original commenter said, you can't change model that quickly.

There is a large pool of people who think that they are programmers, but are not. This is exactly what the infamous fizzbuzz test was intended to weed out. I personally know a top notch recruiter who credits her success due to learning early in her career how to filter most of the junk out. For example a "Perl programmer" who listed Microsoft Word as a skill was probably not worth looking at. (Note, this is an example from 20 years ago. But the principle remains.)

If you create an engineer focused site and DON'T find a way to segment engineers by ability, you'll find that your negotiating power is based on the average of your candidate pool. Which means that you'll discover why traditional recruiters kowtow to companies and not the other way around.

The problem is we're all spending weeks and weeks on weeding out fakers. We've moved to a quick pop quiz right after we get an apply. This takes out 85% of the candidates (it makes me sad when I look at how simple the stuff is that weeds them out...). Two interviews are more than enough to land on a hire after that.

Our company is a conversational recruiting software company (you apply, we say hi, and screen candidates in real time and then hook the candidates up with an interview). We started doing the screening in our chat flow and it works really well for us.

& maybe I'm wrong but I thought the entire value proposition of TB was that their pre screening and testing process made the whole process much less noisy for your hiring managers. If you still end up needing technical interviews and aren't guaranteed that all the candidates you get have gone through some technical screening, what's the point?

> Going forward, our assessments are a purely optional means by which engineers can show their skills to employers (who overwhelmingly tell us that they trust our scoring), rather than a requirement for entry.

I think the idea is that an employer can still filter out the unfizzbuzzables, but has the option to ignore that for candidates whose stellar track record is a stronger signal.

I'm a little bit skeptical, because i think there are lots of people with apparently strong CVs who are still weak when you actually put them to the test. But maybe not at the very top end; i am really thinking about people with experience in various investment banks, which is perhaps less of a signal than Apple then Netflix or something.

The trick here is you need to figure out a business model where you don't take money from employers, because once you do its just the long slide to becoming a shittier LinkedIn.

Colorado now requires job postings to include something more or less like a "reasonable salary range". It hasn't been perfect, for example there are some companies who now just restrict their online job postings to say "except Colorado" instead of adding a salary.

But as someone living in Colorado it's been nice to know the salary range up-front more often and to have confidence that I can ask them for a salary range without getting the question turned back on me: "Well, what are you looking for?"

(c) An employer, upon reasonable request, shall provide the pay scale for a position to an applicant applying for employment.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

So it seems it’s not enforced.

If you have a janitor in CO, every job is an improvement and potential promotion. Having to first go to that janitor for every position is going to wear out FAST. Posting for the CTO position? Go to janitor first. Posting for CEO position - same thing - that's what is going to drive folks away.

The biggest strength for me is that I can ask them and they have to tell me. When I was job searching before I'd ask the recruiter and then they'd always ask me what my target is. Not showing your cards is like negotiation 101. Plus it's made fielding messages and emails easier. If they provide a range, I can just easily say "This position sounds interesting but unfortunately the salary range isn't what I'm looking for currently."

You're right that a lot of positions aren't great about this, I've literally seen "Pay starting at $0.01" or ranges literally $30k to +$200k. But I've seen it as a benefit in the negotiation process and it's just been easier to field recruiters.

> total comp

This law only covers salary as far as I know, so equity and such aren't included. Total comp is different.

It's not perfect, but I feel like it's wildly helpful for a ton of people. It helps transparency for a lot of positions and I feel like it rewards honest companies. If equity and bonuses are a big part I think it reduces the overhead for talking about salary to clear the way to talk more about equity and bonuses.

It's also in the early stages and CO is the only state with a law that requires disclosure up-front to my knowledge (someone mentioned CA has a law, but they only have to answer if asked). It feels like a fantastic first-step to me.

Unfortunately it looks like companies can just state wide ranges (which don't help applicants understand the market any better) and they can also omit other compensation elements beyond the base salary component (stocks, cash bonuses). That makes the disclosed information not very useful.

I personally like this proposal and am probably going to at least draft a hypothetical spec of it and see how it fleshes out. Thanks for the suggestion!

Pretty obvious value-add for job searchers. Not to mention that having access to this data would enable tons of other product features. Shows that most services/sites don't care that much about the applicant experience.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27256776

As CEO, you:

* Grossly expanded profiles without user permission.

* Laid off tons of staff right before the COVID lockdowns. (What has been your personal returns since April 1, 2020 by the way?)

* You have been privy to discrimination happening in client company on-sites yet did nothing to the client companies.

You’re a CFO, an investor. You’re not a CEO, and you certainly do not have my trust as a developer.

Sure, having metrics on how often a company ships code, etc. would be helpful, but frankly I have about 10 companies on my list that I'd work for, and I doubt any of them would give you this data.

What I'd really like is not having to practice leet code problems for 3 months before I interview. The older I get, the less motivated I am to do this. I've worked in senior engineering roles at big tech (FANG) with 3+ years tenure. I don't think I managed to not be able to do my job and fooled people for that long.

I've interviewed people I KNOW could do the job, but they didn't get the optimal solution, or were nervous, or N things in the loop, and we ended up not hiring them. There must be some incentive to create a system that lowers these false negatives.

I simply do not care about things like, “what does malloc return”. I do not care what people know about bloom filters in Postgres. The 99.99% of web developers don’t have to know these things. I do not care if you can implement Tic-Tac-Toe.

It’s poor interviewing, which is the entire product they’ve been offering.

I’m generally quite pro immigration but when BigTech goes to DC and bellyaches about how they need higher quotas because they can’t find enough workers it really sticks in my craw.

Reminds me a bit of the classic example of chutzpah—-the boy who killed his parents, then threw himself on the mercy of the courts, asking for leniency because he was an orphan.

This is a space that unions fill well compared to for-profit recruiting agencies. The organizations give engineers control and leverage in hiring, and can help them up-negotiate. They also allow employers to hire from pools of skilled talent.

Whereas with recruiting agencies, the customers are employers, not the candidates. Incentives are not aligned to give candidates control.

People at the recruiting agency usually get paid a commission as a percentage of the first year of the hiree’s salary (not taken from your paycheck, but just in general). Which means, it is in their interest to get you as high of a comp as possible. Which also means that I dont have to bs around with the recruiter about my salary expectations or anything like that. I give them the upper range of what i want, they tell me either “sounds good” or “they are easily willing to pay more, so why not try $X instead” or “they cannot pay that much, but there is this other company that we work with that can offer you as much.”

And if you work with one recruiter consistently, it gets even easier, because now that the recruiter knows my total comp expectations, she pre-filters opportunities for me and only contacts me if there is a position she is aware of that pays at least as much as I want or more.

Of course there are downsides too, for example, the limited choice of companies that the recruiting agency is working with at any given time, so i still have to find some opportunities and interview with those companies on my own. But as a supplementary option, working with a good recruiting agency has been quite nice for me.

P.S. The type of a recruiting agency i am talking about is the one that is focused on a specific sector (in my case, fintech/quant), so it might be a completely different story for a “generic software dev” recruiting agency.

Beware: this is not universally true. What you typically see is that it leads to closing as many candidates as possible. A recruiter can make more by closing 2 candidates at 80% of max comp than 1 candidate at 100% in the same time.

This is a well known behavior in real estate sales, which have a similar commission structure.

I am saying that because I’ve been working with her for at least 3 years now, and I am yet to take a single offer from the companies she set me up with (either due to them getting cold feet last second or simply due to me not passing some of those interviews or me declining due to some red flags with the companies). If it was all just about high volume for her, it would have been in her interest to drop involvement with me after the 3rd unsuccessful attempt to set me up with a fintech company.

Even worse, real estate pays both sides so realtors are heavily incentivized to get their buyers to purchase from their own sellers so they can get both sides of the commission. Instead of paying them 3% to act on your behalf and do a bunch of leg work they get double and now they can do less work and aren't strictly working for your benefit.

Working on commission just leads to wanting to make a deal happen. Even ignoring the time aspect of it, if a recruiter has much better odds of making a placement at 80% max comp compared to 100% max comp, the 80% is still objectively better. Why risk not closing the deal when the expected return is negative?

Collective bargaining is inherently about eliminating competition between workers. That is, it creates a labour monopoly to balance out a labour monopsony. That might (might!) be a good thing for autoworkers. It would be an unmitigated disaster for software engineers, and the tech sector in general.

People who write code are unbelievably productive compared to just about any other job function, and software engineers (who we'll define as people who write code for tech companies) are even more so. Part of eliminating competition between workers is making sure that nobody works harder than anyone else. That would be devastating to the productivity of software engineers, which would make them less valuable to tech companies. That would lead to a decline in salaries, and general stagnation of tech.

Another aspect of preventing competition is seniority. One of the archetypes of the tech world is the wunderkind—the brilliant kid fresh out of school that rockets to the top. A union would tell that kid, "sorry, you'll have to pay your dues as a junior engineer for 5 more years, then you'll be eligible for promotion. In the meantime, we'll give that job to cwp, he's got the required seniority."

Just think how this would affect tech companies. Sorry, you can't pay more to attract the best. If you're really careful about interviewing, you might be able to find some people with both skill and seniority, but it'll be tough because smart, ambitious people have all gone to Wall St or whatever industry has the best opportunities.

A yet every movie star in the US is in the same union as B-movie and infomercial actors.

> Another aspect of preventing competition is seniority.

Weird, considering pro-athlete unions regularly help kids out of college quickly become multi-millionaires.

> One of the archetypes of the tech world is the wunderkind—the brilliant kid fresh out of school that rockets to the top.

Weird, considering unions have been at the forefront of education, apprenticeships and training that helps kids out of school rocket to the top, the same apprenticeships and training that companies refuse to fund themselves.

> Sorry, you can't pay more to attract the best

Weird, considering SAG-AFTRA regularly helps movie stars up-negotiate multi-million dollar contracts.

But the transparency you need to extract is mainly financial, that’s the big asymmetry. I think people care more about money than they say they do, and less about release cadence or test coverage or whatever than they say they do.

So triplebyte should be called “get me a raise.com”. I tell you what I’m making, smash all your tests, and you find me somebody who wants to offer me e.g $50k more or $100k more, and that WILL be the offer I get. And if the company reneges on that offer then it’s flagged to warn others, and if they do well by their employees they are rewarded as well.

That said, the idea of "we will offer X to anyone with Y quiz scores" as a showing a company can make is pretty cool, and is definitely in a "company makes public conditional guarantees" space that we're interested in exploring.

Does this guy have a patreon?

I am looking forward to progress toward a hiring process that puts engineers in control, such as by allowing them to accurately record their current role in their profile.

In 2015, candidates with the same schooling scored about 20 percentage points lower than 2020, the last candidates I used the test for. The number of questions doubled, and then the test got much easier, by eliminating more challenging programming questions and replacing them with questions with giveaway context. By comparison, according to my data, about N=43, until about 2018 being a senior versus a junior in college CS programs is worth about 10 percentage points on the test; going to Harvard instead of Berkeley is also worth about 10 percentage points. In 2020, the last tests had no predictive features.

I stopped using the test, because it became too easy and too noisy to be informative.

I recognize some of the coded language in the blog post. There are definitely more lucrative opportunities in recruiting for DEI. I don't know if it will last. If you're still jittery about the public-profile-by-default thing, which by the way, was totally irrelevant and overblown IMO, this may not be a pivot for you.

One thing I see in the data is that at MIT, women and men performed the same, controlling for seniority. This wasn't true at the 3 other universities that produced enough data to measure.

That said, what really is the best way to hire candidates? I'm not convinced having binders full of engineers is special, there are almost always more candidates than jobs, at least 5:1, in every non-credentialed industry vertical. Anyone who has worked at a jobs (or indeed any matching platform, like the Common App or Tinder) knows that.

Then there's this long thing about asymmetries or whatever, warble garble about missing information... It has never, not once been my experience that someone seeking a subordinate role at a typical private company with preferences like "pair programming" or whatever have ever been better than someone with no preferences at all.

Maybe it helps to engage in the vanity of whatever trendy workplace trend is hot for whatever vertical. But like, if you're being intellectually honest, if you thought pair programming was important, you'd pair program at TripleByte, but you don't, you know in your heart of hearts none of that shit matters, so why are you putting stuff like that into your search system?

Indeed and ZipRecruiter are ad arb companies. They don't care. Private universities lead, not lag, DEI at giant companies, so it's hard to see how to compete against them in that core business. It will still come down to a real defensible opinion.

Do you have more valuable inventory than ZipRecruiter for DEI candidates? Who knows. What an uninteresting question. Apple also hires people who just make shit up on their resumes, I know two - though they weren't engineers.

If this were true for "qualified" candidates, there wouldn't be a labor shortage, right? ;-)

They told me the actual number of qualified candidates was usually just a handful or less.

I doubt this is true in SV, but I don't live in SV.

That's interesting to me. Most reputable rankings put Berkeley at #2 or #3, and Harvard is usually around #7 or #8 (and US News puts them at #16!). I wonder what the cause of that discrepancy is.

From what I can tell, anyone who is a Harvard student can declare the CS major if they pass the pre-reqs. At Berkeley, passing the pre-reqs doesn't get you into the major -- you still have to apply for a limited number of spots, which generally means having a 3.8 GPA or better in your pre-reqs. So effectively both programs have the same acceptance rate.

Berkeley EECS is sub-7%.

Most clinical doctors have social skills and crystalized intelligence from domain expertise, but aren't typically mistakable for particle physicists.

People don't necessarily require the proper sheepskins to possess fluid, crystallized, and/or other domains of intelligence AND the skills, personality, and experience relevant to excelling at a particular STEM role.

Pedigree is mostly used for social filtering and business leadership board packing, but if someone wanted to create an elite monoculture of staff, lacking in cognitive and personality diversity, by all means, go right ahead.

PS. I. Don't even get me started about a car full of CS IITians talking about the JEE and high-placers who seem normal on the way to snow country for snowboarding and gambling.

PS. II. I bombed an Apple interview for a mid-career role by being too intelligent and too maverick compared to the group of compliant, I hate to say, yuppies. It was an interview panel of about 9 people and they were just speechless. The other time I bombed an interview for being too smart was about 10 years before that when I was 20 at the old Borders bookstore in Palo Alto. Moral of the story: it's important to play dumb where appropriate because most people are relative-intelligence insecure.

PS. III. Sorry, reader, for the rambling and discontinuous thoughts. Absurd endocrine values of unknown etiology currently... doctor appointments pending. ):

Are you sure they were speechless due to your high intelligence and maverick qualities?

That sounds awfully specific.

how do I reply to recruiter contacts? applied to a job, received a request for interview from company. Nowhere to reply on the platform? How do I get in contact with them?

Should there not be a reply button right there with recruiter's message?

p.s. I already emailed support but, my past experience tells me they won't reply.

To be clear, I'm only addressing the comment about how people thinking highly of them are gullible. I had a great experience, twice, within a few months, and that included going through a time of huge uncertainty.

That being said, I was not happy to see each of the changes they've made over the last year or so, and this does not strike me a good direction for engineers. I suppose I have to agree that they are not doing this from a position of market leadership. Perhaps they were providing asymmetric value to engineers, and at the end of the day the engineers are not the ones paying for the service.

This is a very good insight. Unless candidates pay more than companies, the incentives are off.

> We got jobs for over 1000 engineers

Given how many years Triplebyte has been running, "over 1000" seems surprisingly low. I wish them luck with their pivot.

For sure. That's very likely why they're making this pivot. Exclusivity was their goal, but it just turned out to not be a very profitable goal for them, it seems. I was basically just saying it seemed to be a "theory" issue rather than an "implementation/execution" issue.

dev)

> I forgot how to implement the zig operation in a splay tree.

employee at Triplebyte)

> To put some hard numbers to this: further down this thread, there's a post about how "any engineer" could answer a question the poster thinks is too easy. I looked up the question in our back end and, in fact, barely a third of people who take our quiz get it right (the correct answer isn't even the most common one!).

So there 1000 job matches and at most (("hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform" / 3) - 1000) who were incentivized to answer these contrived problems, did so correctly and still couldn't be matched.

So even among the large pool of engineers who have gone thru the process, met some arbitrary threshold of engineer-ness, there's still a huge mismatch between corporate/prospective employee expectations, that I'm not sure will be able to be overcome quickly even with these new initiatives, but it's interesting that they are being pursed now (not surprisingly after the shift in working environment after massive government restrictions on freedom uber alles).

Yeah, different companies want different things and are ok with different things. My best experiences have been with companies that have taken less than 2 weeks to hire me with no testing whatsoever: just a couple of calls. Other companies want and only select for the contrived coding tests and programming jeopardy, and that's fine, but I want nothing to do with them at all.

I would be interested in using triplebyte if they explored something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27545446

Maybe even allowing 3rd parties to bet on specific hiring decisions (in addition to what is described in the link) could add another layer of incentivized feedback loops to the process (esp if the people making the hire/fire before 3 months are made known) and add another layer of market driven signals for them to pay attentions to. Maybe make it more expensive to chase certain types that are in higher demand, and less expensive to chase others types that are in low demand (not the salary to the employee, just the payment for filtering). Maybe less expensive for shorter refund windows, and more expensive for longer refund windows.

$25k*10k = $25M / 10 years = $2.5M / year. That is peanuts compared to how many people they employ. Plus the ads they run...

One. The problem domain they are in is on its way out, and they've decided to defect instead of being the ones left holding the bag.

Two. They hate what they do for a living.

The first company to stop making buggy whips probably did not do it because they weren't selling any. The fact that they ceded market share to their top competitors probably sunk the barb in deeper for them: Yeah people are buying cars but our sales numbers are still going up so why should we change?

In tech we see companies all the time end up being complicit in the destruction of their own industry by reducing its relevance in some manner or other, and by exiting early they have more options of destination. If I jump to the same industry as a competitor a year later I just look like a copycat. While some copycats copy other people, only better, they are the exception to the rule. Most churn out uninspiring derivative work, and if they can't at least do it cheaper then they end up on the scrapheap of history.

At that point, you can either keep going with what you're doing (and run into an inevitable wall later on) or you can foresee the future problems and pivot before they become unmanageable (which is what we did). Relatively few startups find their final model from minute one.

Funny but whenever I think of Triplebyte, all I remember is seeing their ads everywhere. I am personally a fan of Indeed and they do a good job sending leads and applicants other than good old Linkedin.

When I was fresh out of university, I had trouble finding a job. I had worked part-time at a small company through the last few semesters, but that company blew up just before I graduated. Every interviewer I ever met with was impressed because I really knew my stuff, but had trouble getting in the door due to an unimpressive CV and awkward mannerisms.

I did very well at Triplebyte, scoring in their top bucket and getting top marks in several of the sub-categories. Those metrics are relative to all engineers, which would put me even higher amongst recent graduates. I also did very well on every software project I worked on and scored top marks on several other objective tests, like the Major Field Test.

I was exactly the sort of candidate their system should have been able to help. I never even got an email out of it, let alone an interview.

Waste of time.

Fortunately, most of the dirt thrown at recruiting teams is wrong in the first place. I don't know any hiring managers who make lowball offers that have a low chance of acceptance - the costs of the process, the risks of hiring someone who starts mad at you, and the value of winning someone who is actually worth hiring, are all way more important than some incremental cash saved.

Well, presumably the idea is that engineers, especially high quality ones, will be drawn to the recruiting platform that has more pro-engineer policies. And so if you avoid using it, you lose access to that subset of engineers.

It's still a chicken and egg problem, though, because engineers have little incentive to join until there's enough companies.

However, I think that even if they build an attractive, differentiated experience, the advantage is unstable. The problem is that "traditionally strong" applicants (those who already have positive ROI from existing processes) are disadvantaged by being exclusive to one platform. So, from a hiring perspective, TripleByte's differentiation in terms of unique resumes is going to be from people who are harder to assess.

I'm actually fine with that as a value case - we've had great success hiring from bootcamps. "We help you reach strong nontraditional applicants" is a great value proposition. But it's not the same as a position of power to dictate the hiring process. Maybe a better pitch would be: we run a process that helps great non-traditional talent and great non-traditional companies find each other.

And as a HM, I was never interesting in using them, and we continue to use our own internal recruiters or local recruiters who know the market.

Having worked at a startup that was trying to disrupt the hiring/recruiting market back in 2010. I'm curious to how effective they were....if at all.

Edit: update, maybe I'm super skeptical because of all their cheesy ads that were all over Reddit for so long?

On related matters. I know several companies that have pivoted out of the "hiring/recruiting" space because apparently that space is not easy to scale/automate.

I guess they didn’t hit product-market fit with candidates. Two sided markets are tough.

That's worthwhile.

It’s possible that they just couldn’t code with someone watching but the effect was the same.

Note that I didn’t have control over the interview process, so I couldn’t switch to a take home or something else.

The resumes seemed like they had relevant experience. That’s why I pushed them forward to the tech screen.

My experience is different. I've been through the TB process three times, back in 2017 where they flew me to SF from Asia for Flexport, Mixpanel and two smaller startups, and then again this year where I went to the final stage with FB production engineering and TB itself. And in between as well i created yet another profile on the system after shelving prior ones for a fresh start. I have a non traditional background, (ie, an "outsider" developer, chem degree and self taught hobbyist programmer since young), i take my craft seriously, have a bunch of popular open source products and a successful low touch indie business. But i don't consider future success guaranteed so i like to keep talking to companies to find that great opportunity for me. I know my tech skills in some areas are not the best so i like to stay in the loop, stay up to date and relevant and stay in touch with what companies are looking for. By far the best hiring process experiences I've had have all been through the TB platform. And my "open rate" for applications and inbound interest on TB is way higher than any other methods I've tried (SO jobs, WWR, HN). The quality of companies, hiring process and level of interest I've received via TB has been epic and, at least in the past, even the TB support staff are super helpful going so far as to provide personalized feedback on profile improvements and resumes. I'm not an expert at getting hired but i couldn't have asked for anything more from them. They were fantastic. I only have great and wonderful memories of the time i spent in hiring processes of companies i "met" via TB. So this is my experience of it, and this is despite the fact that i have never ever received an offer from any company I have met on TB, including from TB itself. I don't blame them. I just consider my own skills are not at the right level, and the fit is not right for the companies I've met, while i work to improve myself and my skills. That's all. It's a simple and beautiful experience I've had with them. Soooo different to hiring through other platforms (where funnily enough i have recieved offers). I've met and talked to ammon and many other TB team members and they have all been cool, friendly, passionate people. From what I'm reading of this pivot, they're being vulnerable and open to learning, and using what they've learned so far to create something even better. I'm not gullible, I'm not saying they will succeed. But they're trying. And they're earnest and sincere. What more can you ask for? This has been my deep experience with them. I think the most vocal critics are talking merely theoretically without any experience of TB nor deep nor accurate understanding of who they are, what they do and what they stand for. To them i say, give it a try. Investigate before contempt! ;P ;) xx

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