So, I'm personally pretty unhappy with this change, because part of what made triplebyte valuable (and gave y'all the hundreds-of-thousands-engineer userbase) was the _path to competence-signalling_ which avoided credentials that your platform gave, given the quiz -- companies knew that someone being on triplebyte was a strong signal, and engineers had a path to signalling competence that was one-to-many. Eliminating that signal for goals that...seemingly don't require it (why does this new job platform require eliminating the assessment?) seems unwise, IMO
> part of what made triplebyte valuable (and gave y'all the hundreds-of-thousands-engineer userbase) was the _path to competence-signalling_ which avoided credentials that your platform gave, given the quiz -- companies knew that someone being on triplebyte was a strong signal, and engineers had a path to signalling competence that was one-to-many.
On the other hand, when I applied to TripleByte, their feedback to me was "we think your skills are fine, but we want somebody who can perform well in an interview". Which is exactly the opposite of the value you're attributing to them here.
Quoting them, for reference:
> We really appreciate you taking the time to work on the take home project. We're aware this requires a substantial time commitment and we are really grateful that you invested the time in completing it. We thought you wrote a great, very full featured regular expression matcher. It was especially impressive how much you dug into the academics behind regular languages.
> However we made the decision because we felt that while going through the project together during the interview, we didn't see the fluency of programming when adding to it that we had hoped for. While we specifically designed the take home project track to help overcome the difficulties of coding under time pressure with someone watching, we do still need to see a certain level of programming during the interview.
This is a perfect example of why we're making these changes (and the problem that came from us being a gatekeeper). There are lots of different ways to show skill. We don't want to be in the position of deciding who "deserves" a job.
In the case of people who needed us to vouch that they deserved a job, yeah. But:
- In borderline cases, we didn't want to risk our credibility and companies didn't want to skip tech screens. So competent-but-not-amazing engineers got shut out.
- Our quiz is not perfect, so engineers who didn't fit what we were quizzing got shut out.
- Not everyone needs us to vouch for them. Companies (reasonably) trust that someone with a degree from a top school and years of prestigious experiences can probably do fizzbuzz, and demanding that they prove it was a barrier to them using Triplebyte.
We think it's better to have more granular ability for companies and engineers to decide what mattes to them. A prestigious company can say "we'll only talk to people who took the quiz and got a top score" (and that score is us saying "this person deserves a job"). One that desperately needs the headcount can talk to the borderline cases or decide they don't want to put the extra barrier of a quiz in the way.
Like most markets, we think the hiring market on our platform works best when it's able to respond to local conditions.
The difference is in the bar for forcing companies to set aside parts of their screening process. To get them to do that - as we needed to under our old model, because we didn't have a notion of "recommended but without the requirement to skip tech screens" - we needed to be making very strong recommendations.
I'm a little bemused at the notion of evaluating someone "strong tech skills, but can't pass an interview" and determining that the appropriate recommendation is "talk to this guy, but -- unlike with most of our candidates -- don't skip the tech screens". The recommendation seems like the opposite of the diagnosis.
How does the new ability to make that recommendation address the original problem?
Because getting some leads with less certainty is better than getting no leads with higher certainty in a tight market? Wasn't this addressed in the post?
I'd say that main value was that we opened doors for people (got them opportunities they would not have been considered for without us). I don't think what we need to be gatekeepers to do this. Yes, not everyone can succeed (get a job at at top company). But we can help everyone show their skills in the way that's best for them. We can fight ghosting and lying and create a less hostile process. We're keeping our quiz (so that people who do well on tests can get opportunities that way), and also creating a job search process for people who do not want to do a quiz (the majority of engineers). The idea is that they will show their skills other ways (past experience, side projects, open source work). By us not being a gatekeeper we open these other paths.
I feel the exact same way. I went through the interview process with a handful of good startups through Triplebyte (and got offers from almost all of them) and even though I ended up taking a job with a company outside of TB, I still walked away extremely impressed and confident that I'd use the platform again in my next search. I loved that I was pre-qualified and didn't have to intensely prove my technical chops at every on site. With this change, I don't see the benefits for me to use TB over a competing job board or just applying to companies directly. With these changes, I don't plan on using TB for my next job search.
Edit: just saw the comment that TB is keeping the quiz. Would consider using the platform in the future as long as that pre-qualification track is available and that this new direction is just a superset on the existing TB features.
this seems like it's just diluting the signaling value of being on the platform? (and seems like it'll quickly create an upper and underclass of quiztakers vs nonquiztakers)
There's some risk of that. But I think that we can make it work. Basically, the model I have is that there are many different ways that an engineer can signal competency to a company and get a job. One way is doing well on our quizzes. But another way is having impressive experience at a good company, or a lot of open source contributions. Any one engineer might be really good, but look bad on one of these metrics (someone who gets stressed and does poorly on tests, or someone who has mostly worked for the government and does not have side projects). This happens a lot. When we ONLY ranked engineers by our assessments, we just missed people. The goal now is to let people show skill in any of these ways.
Well, I hope you're right and will keep an eye out (and will regardless be Fasttrack-ing in 6 months when I'm looking for FTE work, so I'll see firsthand :p)
