Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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".

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.)

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.

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

I had a good experience with triplebyte itself, but their promise to not have to tech interview failed me. Literally every single company put me through several tech interview rounds, as if they didn't trust triplebytes assessment.

Anyways I wound up getting a job not-through triplebyte, and was competent enough that I was promoted to senior dev within a year.

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!

I'm very excited to see this. I hired several people through Triplebyte as CTO back in 2017-2019. It was a great service. :)

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.

I've been thinking about how we assess software engineering skills, and I'm curious about others' thoughts on using open source contributions as a primary metric.

My hypothesis is that real-world collaboration and communication skills, as demonstrated through open source work, are more indicative of a developer's capabilities than typical coding quizzes. (I tried OtherBranch's sample coding problem mentioned at their post, https://www.otherbranch.com/practice-coding-problem, and got this opinion.) With the rise of AI tools, I believe the ability to effectively use these to enhance one's contributions is becoming increasingly valuable.

For those who hire or work with other developers:

1. How much weight do you give to a candidate's open source contributions?

2. Do you find that strong open source contributors tend to be better collaborators?

3. How do you balance assessing technical skills vs. communication/collaboration abilities?

I'm working on a platform to facilitate this new assessment with personalized LLM support. So I'd love to hear your experiences and thoughts!

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."

How is this different than https://interviewing.io/ ?

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).

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.

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?

Do you hire only software engineers? This page doesn't mention it but it seems like you do based on your sign up page.

https://www.otherbranch.com/for-engineers

(I am asking because I am more of a data science / research person.)

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..

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.

Glad to see you back. Signed up, and unlike when I was using TB in the early days, my resume should hopefully be the kind of thing companies are looking for.

Thanks John Krazam!

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