Harj

To improve the quality of your idea conversations be picky about who you discuss ideas with.

I’ve now mostly figured out the right balance for me to do this in real life. Where I struggle is with conversations online. I think one reason HN has such a high quality of conversations, compared with other forums, is most people here are motivated by finding the truth behind ideas. Twitter, for example, is at the opposite end. It feels like a firehose of conflicting motives coming at me at once. The only solution I’ve found there is to stay logged out most of the time. reply

To improve the quality of your idea conversations be picky about who you discuss ideas with.

I’ve now mostly figured out the right balance for me to do this in real life. Where I struggle is with conversations online. I think one reason HN has such a high quality of conversations, compared with other forums, is most people here are motivated by finding the truth behind ideas. Twitter, for example, is at the opposite end. It feels like a firehose of conflicting motives coming at me at once. The only solution I’ve found there is to stay logged out most of the time.

In what ways does it seems the motivations and goals have changed? I’m particularly interested in this as I just rejoined YC as a partner after running a startup for five years. I first joined as a partner 10 years ago.

I've been founding and investing in startups for over a decade now, so I know that founder transitions are inevitable as a company grows. This is one of the instances where having "startup experience" helped me a lot with thinking through the different options and picking the right one. I'd be happy to talk with anyone who is thinking through their role as a founder.

Marissa described possibly the most thorough and analytical job search process I've heard from anyone, when she was talking about how she joined Google. I really liked her reflection on this in hindsight on how being overly analytical is dangerous and it's something I try to remind myself of when I'm in danger of overthinking a decision:

"I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up with. They look at things as if there’s a right answer and a wrong answer when, the truth is, there’s often just good choices, and maybe a great choice in there."

Sure, you can't diversify in parallel but you can in series.

Rather than treating predicting startup success as an intractable problem, I think anyone considering joining a startup should act like a startup investor making a bet on how much the value of equity in that startup will grow over time. Startup investors do this for a living and that's essentially what you are too. You're investing your time and they are investing money.

Working with Paul is one of the things I miss most about working at YC. Besides being interesting to talk to about pretty much any topic, I remember analyzing the data on how accurate YC partners were at reviewing applications to YC and Paul being top despite spending the least amount of time reading each one.

Yep, this.

In addition to already seeing an increasing number of engineers from both Seattle and Los Angeles applying to Triplebyte, two other trends drove our decision to open up in these two locations.

First we've seen a continual drop in the number of Seattle based engineers who are willing to relocate to the Bay Area. It's dropped by over half since the start of the year and it's the first sustained drop we've seen since starting Triplebyte in 2015.

Second, we've seen an increasing number of Bay Area engineers interested in moving to Los Angeles even as the average software engineer salaries in the Bay Area continue to grow.

As someone who moved halfway across the world and left family/friends to move to the Bay Area, it makes me sad to see how it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to move here. I believe this is the biggest threat to Silicon Valley's dominance as the center of the technology industry.

I agree hearing what sounds like a pre-prepared, generic spiel about the company isn't very effective. That's why I suggest hiring managers/recruiters ask the candidate what they're looking for first and then talk about how the company fits into that (or not).

Being able to tailor the pitch on the fly like that is what we've seen be the difference between average and great recruiters.

I used to write rejection emails for companies at the end of YC interview days. It always sucked, especially when it was borderline decision (which it often was) but PG made doing these well an important part of internal YC culture. We couldn't leave until they were finished and each one was reviewed by another partner before sending.

In hindsight I'm glad we did this. In the years since I've had multiple people tell me the rejection was a positive turning point and the only honest feedback they'd received.

The latter.

The 5,000 a month number is total engineers who completed the coding quiz. Only a small % of those move forward to our interview.

What was always most interesting to us about starting a recruiting company was seeing what would happen if you treated hiring as a data problem. Partly we've raised more funding for the same reason any startup does, so we can grow faster to get more customers = more revenue = more success, etc. But we're also driven by how the larger the scale we operate at, the faster we can run experiments to answer questions about the best way to evaluate technical skills. More rigorous and data focused approaches to hiring benefit everyone.

Interviewing and evaluating engineers is an area a lot of people feel passionately about and have strong opinions on. We're continually looking for ways to improve our process, if you've any thoughts or feedback please ping me - harj at triplebyte.

Triplebyte doesn't work as a common app to all YC companies like Work at a Startup. Specific things that we do differently are:

- A background blind technical skills evaluation is our application process in lieu of submitting your resume.

- We don't introduce you to all the companies we work with, only the ones where our data predicts you have a high chance of receiving an offer.

- Companies expedite their own hiring process for Triplebyte candidates skipping technical phone screens/coding challenges.

- Each engineer gets a Talent Manager who offers them career advice, interview and negotiation help and general support throughout the job search process.

- Work with non-YC companies e.g. Apple, Asana and Coursera.

I'd say that Work at a Startup is a good way to get in front of a lot of startups at once and run a breadth first job search. Triplebyte is a good way to run a targeted job search optimizing your offer to interview ratio.

Yes 100%, we do not reach out to any companies, or share any information with them, until you've marked them as a company you want to speak with.

The number one request since we launched has been expanding to more locations and top of the list has been New York. We're working on expanding to more locations through the rest of the year.

We'll also be opening up for remote engineers and companies. If you're a company hiring remote engineers, I'd love to hear from you - harj at triplebyte.

The goal of our process is to identify which areas of strengths and weakness an engineer has. We do have a section where we ask algorithm and data structure questions to test academic/textbook CS knowledge but we also have sections testing very different skills e.g. practical web programming, debugging and low level systems.

We've helped many engineers who didn't perform well in the algorithm/data structure section still find jobs at great companies because we work with many companyies who don't care about those skills (as evidenced by not evaluating it during their interview). This is one of the main ways we can help engineers have a better job search process, if textbook CS knowledge is not your strength we won't match you with companies who evaluate that during their interview.

We're certainly not the only way to join a YC company, or any company, and nor would we claim to be. The specific reasons why you'd consider using Triplebyte are:

(1) Companies are unlikely to reply if you contact them directly because your resume isn't impressive. Our entire screening process is background blind and we've built up enough credibility with companies for them to interview you if you do well on our process, when they otherwise would have rejected you based on your background.

(2) Finding new company options that are are doing interesting work but you haven't heard about. We spend a lot of time finding and partnering with early stage startups that haven't become well known yet.

(3) Saving time in your job search by identifying which companies are looking for your specific set of skills. We have a lot of data about what the companies we work with are looking for and can reduce the number of interviews you do where it becomes clear early on that you're just not the type of engineer they're looking for (e.g. they ask you complex algorithm questions on a whiteboard when your strengths are building and scaling web applications).

We're focused on doing these things well and our process certainly isn't perfect. There will be times where we match you with a company and you weren't a fit or when we don't match you with a company and you might have been a fit. Achieving 100% accuracy in something as complicated as hiring is likely impossible but we believe our approach is still a lot better than the status quo of recruiters reading resumes and making gut calls on who gets through to an interview.

I remember when we launched Triplebyte expecting the hard part to be convincing "good" engineers to go through the process but so long as we did that, every company would want to hire them. That turned out to be our mistaken assumption that every startup has before they launch.

Ammon talks here about how little consensus there is amongst companies on what a "good" engineer is. As he says, "we’re more often in the situation of sort of broadening people’s vision of what a skilled engineer can be".

This concerned us at first as it seemed like an intractable problem to work on improving the hiring process when no one can agree on what a good candidate even means. It actually turned out to be a huge opportunity as we realized the value was in what we're doing is matching candidates to companies rather than trying to define what the universal definition of a "good engineer" is.

I'm sorry you had a negative experience and we're working hard to make sure it doesn't happen for anyone again.

We started the company to help those people for whom manually submitting their resume to companies isn't an option. We don't use resumes as part of our screening process because we're looking to find skilled engineers without elite resume credentials. For them, submitting their resumes directly results in either silence or rejection.

We've been able to find many of these engineers jobs at companies they'd never imagined they'd be able to work at. We just had a self taught engineer working as a pizza delivery person in Cincinnati, hired by Instacart - his onsite interview was the first time he'd met another engineer in person. We helped a recent high school graduate, who didn't attend college, get hired by Apple - his dream company.

I'm the founder so I'm obviously incentivized to highlight these success stories and I don't claim that we've built a perfect process for everyone yet. We're working on a hard problem, judging the skill of other human beings in a fair way and vouching for them to companies that have maintained the same hiring process for decades and are resistant to change. Our approach is not perfect but it has had life changing outcomes for many people and we're doing our best to increase the % of all Triplebyte applicants that's true for.

I'm his co-founder and this comment is unnecessarily personal. Ammon has done over 900 technical interviews (https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/5y95x6/i...) and there's one negative reference to him specifically on this thread.

You personally may not enjoy skipping the technical phone screens but that doesn't make it suboptimal for most people. If that were true, we'd see no demand for applying through Triplebyte versus applying to companies directly. Empirically, that doesn't seem to be the case, most candidates prefer to not repeat phone screens across multiple companies when job searching.

Yep signing up more companies to work with is how we can improve the likelihood we'll find enough matches that are both a technical skills fit and interest fit for every candidate. That's what we're working towards.

Previous work and achievements definitely carry valuable signal - we don't disagree with that. And relying on them makes sense for companies where the time of hiring managers is constrained and you need a quick way to identify the (likely) best people within a population.

Relying solely on those signals though acts to the detriment of skilled people whose best work hasn't been done at prestigious, name brand companies.

Our approach to removing credentials from our screening process is to prevent ourselves being biased by them and forcing ourselves to build a process that can find strong engineers who don't look good on paper. This is a win for the companies we work with as it expands the pool of talent they can hire from.

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.

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.

It's been interesting working with larger companies through Triplebyte. When we started, we were mostly working with smaller startups making early engineering hires. The challenge for these them is letting engineers know the company exists and why it's interesting.

Bigger companies like Facebook don't need to let engineers know they exist, a huge number of engineers have already applied to them at some point. What they've realized is the way to hire more is to find the good ones that are sitting in the resume review stage of the hiring process, not getting looked at because they don't have stand out credentials.

One thing that's struck out to me in a surprising way about the average startup hiring process compared to larger companies is speed. We've found the larger companies are actually faster to move on the first step of booking a call to speak with our candidates. This completely reverses when it gets to bringing someone onsite and making offers though. Bigger companies take longer to do both and this is where startups have a hiring advantage.

We've starting on-boarding more companies outside of YC. We're working with some larger companies (Facebook, Apple) and also curating a list of exciting earlier stage startups too.