Tell HN: Triplebyte is, yet again, making user profiles public without consent

I totally forgot about Triplebyte. Are they even relevant still? I remember back when it seemed like their ads were appearing everywhere and was a bit worried they were going to be the new way of hiring engineering talent. Seems like there's been nothing but crickets chirping for the last few years.

Why? My experience with them was pretty bad. I took their assessment for web development, I think I even did an assignment, and got put on a video call with someone from Triplebyte. He never cracked a smile. Suddenly I got asked a bunch of CS questions that really were not very relevant to web development, some of which were entirely inappropriate like sorting a binary search tree. I even told the guy that I thought I was getting those questions wrong and he just scowled and said "well you just don't know when you're going to use this stuff." "My point exactly," I thought.

Ultimately I got rejected.

The whole idea that you can boil down a candidate to some coding challenges and a video quiz is bad. I do like the idea of streamlining the hiring process for developers, but there's more to it than knowing a bunch of stuff, because that can be gamed. And quizzing me on irrelevant material was a bad move. A firm like Triplebyte won't be as good at interviewing a candidate as the employer itself, and may even keep perfectly qualified candidates out of view from all employers affiliated with them.

To be fair, I think a shared interview system would be great. Then companies don’t have to devote time and effort into their own interview process, which turns out to be Leetcode and full of false positives / negatives anyways.

But it needs to be:

- In-depth. Not just a single exam or interview. You need to really know the employee’s strengths and weaknesses

- Detailed. You can’t just give someone pass / fail or a single score. Not only is it mean, but you end up getting misaligned candidates anyways, because some people are really bad at some aspects of software but good at others. In fact maybe the process should ditch scores entirely and just show the recruiters the actual employee interviews, and what he/she has and has not accomplished.

- Changing over time. Not a short period of time. But like, if I take the assessment, 6 months later I can take a smaller assessment and it will update my scores and log my progress.

Triplebyte is not 1 or 2. Idk but I think it’s 3 and you can retake the quiz. But then it’s only telling employees if you’re basically competent for some arbitrary statistic, which doesn’t even tell if you’re basically competent at the company.

I think it would be nice if i could take one thorough interview instead of several less-thorough company-specific interviews, but that’s not Triplebyte.

My impression is that they are still around, but they failed to deliver the "recruiting revolution" and I think the reasons are:

- The screening had a lot of false negatives. "I got rejected by Triplebyte, but got a FAANG offer" is quite common.

- Most companies used Triplebyte not as an interview replacement, but as an additional screening process, which means that as a candidate, you don't have any real incentive to use them.

The only real use case I heard recently about Triplebyte is to send candidate who normally you wouldn't even screen, so if they pass Triplebyte process, you know that you should consider the candidate, but if they fail is fine because you would have passed them anyways

"Most companies used Triplebyte not as an interview replacement, but as an additional screening process, which means that as a candidate, you don't have any real incentive to use them."

I used them many years ago, this was my impression. When I got to company "on sites" they were just full-blown interview loops. I could have just applied to the companies directly.

Pretty much how I felt with my experience. Aced the quiz, completed about 95% of the project, then got anxious with a very open-ended presentation I had to make up on the spot, and the interviewer was very not pleased with anything I did. Got rejected and was sent a long list of complaints about me and my work. Don't think I would have survived to meet the "founders" they had anyway.

It's worth noting that Triplebyte has completely pivoted since they did candidate pass/fail assessments.

I started using them about a year ago (first passively looking, then actively looking)

I really enjoyed the ability to be assessed on something besides Leetcode style questions.

I didn't take a job through their platform (though I did get one really strong offer), but even still, found the assessments incredibly useful, since they give you a percentile distribution of your performance for each topic-specific test.

After taking their assessments, when interviewers asked me how I am at, say, Python, I could tell them I have a hard time assessing my capabilities. "But hey, I took this standardized test that says I'm in the 85th percentile, not sure how good of a metric it is" (and not mentioning that I think I'm OK at best, at Python)

It's the only way I've found to get a measure of your talents compared to the rest of the field (even if it might not be reliable/useful)

A lot of the companies that interview through Triplebyte also skip LC mediums because they have a different signal about your potential suitability as a candidate.

I question the ability to boil down engineering talent into something that can be represented as a "percentile distribution"

Way too much of engineering is non-quantifiable. Putting a number to someone's skills is bound to be reductive at best.

Sure, I'm with you, but that doesn't change the fact that enough prospective employers ask you to rate your skills with X, Y, and Z on a scale of 1 to 10.

Like honestly I might think I'm a 3 at X, but if some test that thousands of other people took tells me I'm in the 90th percentile of X users, that information is still useful to me.

AFAIK their promise of "we use machine learning to..." never panned out even remotely. All the processes ended up being mostly manual, with all the tradeoffs that entails.

With the money they raised, after spending so much on marketing, I assume they downsized, lost some talent, and pivoted mostly to a sales-driven recruiting business for their top clients.

> "The whole idea that you can boil down a candidate to some coding challenges and a video quiz is bad."

yes, there are too many variables between the candidate, job, company, and work environment to determine long-term fit via a test, especially for "creative" jobs. the more regimented the job (e.g., fast food cook), the lower the variability, but it's still significant. plus, such tests only evaluate technical skills, not the more important non-technical ones (like punctuality, integrity, steadfastness, etc.--note that these are a function of the involved parties and the relationship between them, not just the candidate).

but also, the underlying problem of hiring is not one of trying to get the best fit, but of trying to avoid the pain of firing. that's the thing that needs to be reframed/solved, but that's a much harder and a much less technical problem (alternatively put, technical tests are marginal at best).

Wow, that sounds pretty bad. When I went through they did 4 different interviews (a little bit fuzzy; many years ago) but it did:

1) Create an incremental game (start simple, see how far you can get) 2) Live debugging (can run tests, they fail, you need to figure out why and fix it) 3) Flash rounds (Do you know what Big O is? Can you explain linked lists?) 4) ... I forget

I thought it was one of the widest range of actual skills and their final assessment I agreed with. Stayed away from algorithms-y questions (which I hate)

Hi everyone - I'm the head of product here at Triplebyte. We did not make any intentional change to how profile visibility functions and (to the best of my knowledge) the issue referred to in OP's support response (and mentioned in the second half of OP's post) was fixed last year. (See my comment at the top of OP's link [4] for more from then.)

We'll have a more complete answer shortly.

EDIT: This does not appear to be a widespread issue. Continuing to investigate.

I went through their process, passed in their top cohort (or so they told me, probably it was to massage my ego). And then they dropped that public profile bomb the first time around.

I’d say I cost them a lot of money when I deleted my account, but they actually cost it themselves.

They could have asked me if I wanted a fancy jacket, because that ended up immediately getting recycled.

Anyways, I ended up getting a job that I love the old fashioned way - through a friend.

Great concept, shit company.

Edit: Triplebyte employees reading this: you massively betrayed my trust. Had you asked me, and let me review on my own time, I might have even been proud to have a verified skill set badge page I could link to. Instead, I will probably look directly for your competitors on my next job search. You had a great idea, too bad that you seem to be irresponsible.

Eliminating the same boring foo bar baz coding test is a great concept.

Being able to skip an hour or two out of a full interview across many companies is a great concept.

Having a 3rd party verified that allows you to be quickly matched with potential employers is a great concept.

Execution may be difficult, or impossible even. But that’s not an issue, when said company insists on shooting itself in the foot constantly.

I've come to believe that there is a Murphy's law equivalent for tech recruiting. "If you can be abused as a technical candidate, you will be." It's just going to happen eventually that recruiters, either individual recruiters or recruitment firms/companies as a whole, will abuse your rights to just about everything or treat you with disrespect at some point or another. Developers are just commodities for these guys now.

I wish there was some common ground with me and recruitment companies where we both get what we need ... but that doesn't seem to be the case. Their motivation / goals seems to have nothing to do with me.

IDK when it recently started but I've been getting direct messages from various recruiters to an email that I only make public on certain open source packages. As a result I remove all instances of email and just mark every recruiter that I never reached out to as spam.

It's just so disrespectful, as you said.

What is disrespectful? Their job? I think it only becomes disrespectful when they keep nagging after you have told them off or something. Otherwise, they are just doing their job, seeking out good candidates. It's not like all of them are conniving to swamp you, they act individually and what you eventually hate is the sum of those individual parts.

Someone can have a job that's inherently disrespectful. See e.g. generic phone spam callers. I'm sure the live humans there are struggling to feed their families and get by, so I don't really hold it against them. But I don't feel any qualms about blocking them and complaining about the lame companies that generate revenue by employing them.

Except they aren't seeking out good candidates. The vast majority are spamming every email they can scrape, buy, or steal.

They're no different from any other spammer who trawls through repos and forums scooping up email addresses.

Whether it's dick pills or job opportunities, it's spam.

It's disrespectful because I never consented to giving their company my email, nor have I consented to their services. This type of reasoning is why a vast majority of people never answer their phone, because there is a very large chance it'll be a phone call from a spammer/scammer.

I have no issues when I purposely choose to work with a recruiter, but invading aspects of my life when they never got permission to IS disrespectful.

It is disrespectful if they are webscraping email addresses and cold-emailing people who never signed up for their recruitment "service".

Not just technical candidates — I saw garbage like this when I was a lawyer, also.

To recruiters it's just a numbers game. No different than sales in any other industry.

I was impressed by your resume and think you'd be perfect for <irrelevant job>.

Next...

I wish this company succeeded with its mission, but it turned into a variant of Hackerrank I feel. I hate leetcode/hackerrank type interviews. On the hiring side of things where the company I work for screens candidates this way; it sucks. I would have loved to see a test of more practical programming experience.

Candidates spend their time on stupid coding questions all day instead of actually coding something useful or that they can learn from. I have a relative doing exactly this. No idea how to build a simple RESTful API, yet spends all his time on Hackerrank posting on linkedIn how he's in the top 'X' percent.

When they get hired and put on a "real world" project they are absolutely lost :(.

I also tried Triplebyte after seeing ads on Reddit. Passed a few tests and nothing really ever came of it other than an email.

Whether they are malicious or not, I cannot say. But anecdotally, are they a time-waster? Absolutely.

I took their generalist test and scored perfect. It was actually not so hard, but it tested some language things (a couple/few languages), some Unix things, SQL, etc. It was right up my alley.

After completing the 30? min test, I got an email saying they were enthusiastic about me and would like to continue the process.

I think the process was to become an interviewer; I forget now.

Time passed... weeks, and then months. I emailed them and got nothing back.

Then I checked Glassdoor (YMMV). There were a lot of negative stories about internal politics, gender issues, leadership problems, "insane" bad manager stories, etc. I don't know how Glassdoor works, but perhaps it was all lies; or perhaps it was very true; perhaps it has been erased (pay to play).

Nonetheless, I parked them in the corner of my mind behind Toptal.

I had a silly interview sequence with Toptal. Aced first interview. Was told "that's a record for solving that".. so, got to do a live, not take-home test for the second interview. Was clearly within 3 minutes of finishing up the last bits on the test suite on the solution for a 2 hour long test when the buzzer rang. Nope, no grace -- you clearly haven't proved yourself. You have to do the take-home ( A 4 day window for a take-home test ... which means, you need put in 40 hours!) I told them "no thanks".

> Then I checked Glassdoor (YMMV). There were a lot of negative stories about internal politics, gender issues, leadership problems, "insane" bad manager stories, etc. I don't know how Glassdoor works, but perhaps it was all lies; or perhaps it was very true; perhaps it has been erased (pay to play).

Are we looking at the same Triplebyte? Their reviews on Glassdoor are pretty good

edit: There are some nasty ones further back, the latest being Feb 2020

Glassdoor isn't really trustworthy: companies can pay it to nuke bad reviews.

I've come to a personal conclusion that hiring is an unsolvable "problem". When the problem and the product essentially distill to people - many individuals - it unravels. People are unique. There is never a broad, one-size-fits-all solution. Companies are just collections of people. There are way too many variables to ever reach the level of consistency that a product/solution needs to provide in order to retain customers and grow into a large, sustainable business.

Triplebyte has given me my favorite interview to date. I love the concept, I had some interesting chats with Uber and Apple, but didn't end up going anywhere (they wanted me for positions I wasn't interested in -- currently at a different FAANG).

The repeated fails on execution is pretty disheartening.

Free publicity. I would love to hear some ideas for fixing this or maybe some inside stories but in my mind this kind of behavior has close to zero negative consequences for the company, even if it gets loud.

Ok, I"m deleting my profile. Thank you for the heads up. Well done Ammon Bartram. Great company practices.

Oh man, not again. My initial experience with triplebyte was quite good, when they did a high touch testing and interview process. It worked pretty well (at least for me) but I guess it was too expensive for them to keep doing. Later there was a glitch where they hosed me rather badly, but I could treat that as a one-off.

What is it with this repeatedly opening up profiles though? I thought the saying was that it was ok to make mistakes, but.... make new ones.

Thanks op for the news.

Can anyone recommend alternatives for the future? It's clear they're untrustworthy so I'm hesitant to even consider them again even though I passed years ago (2019 I think).

FWIW, my profile is still set to non-visible, so it's not a universal change.

Good to know. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I can believe that at some point they fixed it so that setting your profile to invisible took effect permanently, but they never went back and retroactively applied that change to people who had previously opted out (or never opted in). Or if they did, they must have somehow skipped my account.

I responded to them with a link to this thread in case they wanted to publicly comment or correct anything, but I'm not holding my breath.

We intended to make that change retroactive. I'm looking into it with our engineering team as we speak.

Good, hopefully they’ll find the image I left for them in my avatar the last time they did this.

Triplebyte had a great model in the beginning which was focused on getting people who had skills without formal certifications jobs.

That did not make enough money so the founders pivoted like 5 times to try other things and each time they made Triplebyte more and more anti candidate.

Keep on going Ammon, we all know where these companies end.

Tickling the fear of the day is a great way to get media attention.

The obvious way is wagging your fist at all those bad guys doing bad stuff.

But doing bad stuff is actually a pretty good way too. If you can manage the backlash. Works great.

I mean, it worked here. Right? The last time I thought about triplebyte was the last time they did something bad.

Kids do it all the time to their parents. Very hard to ignore.

Something to think about.

Good point. A lot of candidates wont care. Like all the crazy stuff Uber did probably didn’t bother most drivers or riders. And each bad publicity is still publicity.