I interviewed and was rejected from Triplebyte. It was pretty miserable. Compared to real recruiters, I feel more comfortable talking to recruiters since they care about my background and won't ask me to program an hour's worth of code on the spot or ask me several questions about redis and webscale technologies. They're kind of just filtering through candidates looking for people who they think could work at Google instead of looking for hard-working people.

With that said, do you accept new candidates for the NYC area?

> They're kind of just filtering through candidates looking for people who they think could work at Google instead of looking for hard-working people.

Perhaps just responding to their customers (employers) desires. It seems companies these days, companies that are not Google, are looking for Google-caliber people even if they just need someone who knows how to code and is hard working.

Shoot me an email. Happy to chat.

I'm not sure exactly how your process works, from that description there's three ways we differ:

(1) We don't submit resumes to companies. We give them a profile of the candidate which describes their technical skills and their work history but without any mention of specific schools or companies. For a company to move forward with a Triplebyte candidate, they have to trust in our screening process more than credentials.

(2) Companies agree to not do any technical phone screens or coding challenges with our candidates. Instead they do an initial pitch call and then move to an onsite if there's candidate interest. This saves engineers a lot of time spent in repetitive phone screens.

(3) The metric we optimize for is our onsite success rate i.e. how often does a Triplebyte candidate onsite interview result in an offer. Since our candidates don't go through the regular technical phone screens, any improvement we can make on the industry standard of a 20 - 25% onsite success rate saves the company engineering time spent doing those phone screens. Currently we're averaging 2x that rate across all our companies.

> The metric we optimize for is our onsite success rate i.e. how often does a Triplebyte candidate onsite interview result in an offer. Since our candidates don't go through the regular technical phone screens, any improvement we can make on the industry standard of a 20 - 25% onsite success rate saves the company engineering time spent doing those phone screens. Currently we're averaging 2x that rate across all our companies.

I can see where that's valuable to the companies. What value are you trying to provide to candidates? I already know how to apply to companies, pass the phone screen, and wash out of the interview. If I knew how to pass the interview, I'd still know how to apply and pass the phone screen. What is Triplebyte supposed to help with?

If you are someone who behind the veil of ignorance can pass phone screens, then you will wash out 75% of the time through normal interviews. Your typical time cost is 4x offsite process + 4x onsite process to generate one interview. If you use triplebyte, assuming their interview is equivalent to a full interview cycle, your time cost is 1x offsite process + 3x onsite process - one for them, and two onsites with companies since your success rate is doubled. If you want to get more than one offer, the time savings increase further (and faster).

My success rate isn't doubled. Per Harj, they filter for people who will pass onsite interviews. My success rate at interviews is the same whether I go through Triplebyte or not.

> If you are someone who behind the veil of ignorance can pass phone screens, then you will wash out 75% of the time through normal interviews.

Veil of ignorance, huh? I'll run down the ways I've successfully gotten a job:

- Amazon (CreateSpace), by winning a contest they hosted. Multiple times. There was also an interview for this, though not of a problem-solving nature.

- eBay (Milo), by passing their online hiring challenge. There was no in-person interview for this; rather, they had me come in and work for a day.

- NCC Group, by passing their two challenges. There were in-person interviews for this too, largely consisting of them asking me if I knew how to do things and me saying "no". (I was told afterward that the reason my interviews had gone so oddly was that I had never provided them with a resume.)

Triplebyte themselves told me that I was exceptionally strong in "academic CS" -- the first time around. When they asked me to reinterview for their benefit, they highlighted it as a weak point.

My rate of success in applying to companies that rely on an interview instead of a project or other objective demonstration is 0%, not 25%. But I feel safe in saying that my interviewing problem doesn't lie in the fact that phone screens are hiding my basic incompetence from innocent companies.

One of the things they do is data-mining so they can match up candidates with companies where they're likely to perform well onsite (since different companies emphasize different things, Triplebyte can look through data on how their previous candidates have faired and find which companies will value your personal strengths): http://blog.triplebyte.com/triplebyte-engineer-genome-projec...

Harj- thanks for the thoughtful reply. Do you disclose numbers about what % of candidates that get offers choose to take them? I feel like that's pretty important for companies when considering time they save.

the draw they have for engineering talent side is that you do preliminary interview with them and then move straight to on sites with companies they recommend you to. It means you can have 10 on sites without having to do 10 phone screens

This sounds like it's optimizing for the wrong component of the interview process. I've never had issues with spending time on phone screens because they are one of the main ways in which I screen companies I'm interested in.

It's the technical interviewing portion that's a pain to have to re-do over and over again. Especially if it involves travelling across the country to do. Engineers are ultimately looking at company and engineering culture to choose between.

The other thing is that for some engineers, they might perform well in one on-site versus another for many reasons such as the questions asked, interviewer rating, or something as trivial as mood. Seems like Triplebyte giving people one-chance makes this difficult.

Ultimately, I feel the main crux of hiring/interviews/finding the right talent is training. If the industry is over-fitting on people who can pass whiteboarding, then why aren't there more startups focused on this aspect? Not just passing interviews (e.g. outco.io), but actually focused on training systems design and algorithms. Universities don't do that in undergrad or grad school.

I very much agree with all of this. To me, the main draw of Triplebyte was "no whiteboarding." I suck at whiteboarding, so I went through the project track. And, yes, there was no whiteboarding, but what do they replace it with? Live coding. Yeah, like that's going to go any better. I'd have been better off at the whiteboard where I could at least fudge the syntax a little.

(Disclaimer: Applied and at current job through Triplebyte)

Seconded. I don't use LinkedIn or recruiters. When I was looking, I was applying manually to several companies, and setting up phone screens and so on was very exhausting and timing things was complicated. Triplebyte allowed me to combine the primary stages for a couple of companies and helped a lot with prep.

My overall feeling is mixed. Given the time commitment, if all you get to bypass is the initial phone screen of ~1 hour, that means you need to go on 4-7 on-sites to break even. On the other hand, some of those on-sites might be from companies that wouldn't have even phone screened you. It's really hard to say whether it's worth it or not from the candidate side, IMO.

Hopefully someone good at matching doesn't need to send you to 10 on-sites to find you a good fit. That sounds exhausting and unproductive.

We've never had a candidate do 10 on-sites nor would we encourage someone to. That'd indeed be incredibly exhausting. We encourage them to be broad with the number of companies they do an initial pitch call with, then be selective about who they move forward with to an on-site.

Wow. Do you actually find that less than 10 on-sites is sufficient to obtain at least one offer? A >10% success rate seems very high to me, even with the vetting you provide. Admittedly I have only anecdotal data.

They are indeed reducing bias, and finding value where others aren't, such as in candidates with non-traditional backgrounds.

When I interviewed with TripleByte I had just come out of a 3-month bootcamp, and spent the prior 3 yrs as a teacher. Most companies did not look twice at my resume and it was very tough to break in. TripleByte didn't look at all and judged on ability instead of credentials. I haven't seen that from other recruiting / sourcing organizations and give them a lot of credit for it.