There exist many engineers in the world who either a) cannot cold email $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and be guaranteed of an interview, b) do not believe they can cold email $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and be guaranteed of an interview, or c) are not comfortable executing on the process of emailing $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and getting an interview. Those are three subtly different problems. We are a partial way to address them, and other problems besides.
a) A very talented engineer might not have a resume/background/etc which pings the radar very hard at a software company. If you do, great, more power to you. Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone without a great educational pedigree whose last couple of jobs look something like "IT at insurance company. Responsibilities: rebooting printers." or "Network administrator: CISCO routers, light systems administration." That person might also be able to black-box cryptosystems, find RCEs in Rails given a day of effort, or program trading algorithms, but the company won't find that out because they likely won't even be offered a phone screen.
b) You know how impostor syndrome is a thing? Oh boy, do a lot of very talented engineers have it. If you can program, many desirable companies like e.g. Stripe would love to make your acquaintance. If they don't offer you a job they will not feel like talking to you was a waste of time. There are a lot of people who do not get this and benefit from being told some variant of "I understand that you feel like you've still got lots to learn. I've got lots to learn! And I've been doing this for 12 years! But I see from your demonstrable performance that you're actually good at this. The folks at Stripe trust my judgment about this -- if I'm making a mistake about this, well, that's on me and not on you. Why don't you have a call with $PERSON there? I predict that they are super-inviting wonderful people who will want to geek out with you about tech stuff; if a job offer happens after that, wonderful. But I can almost guarantee you that no job offer happens without you talking to them."
c) Many engineers are afraid of selling themselves, for personal reasons/cultural reasons/etc which our community unfortunately frequently amplifies. Even if you tell them "All you need to do to get a job is a) meet a hiring manager, b) convince them you're not an axe murderer, c) get a coffee date and do your thing, d) say yes to the job offer", they're not willing to take the clearly valuable first step of sending an unsolicited email. I am totally willing to send a (very) solicited email on one's behalf, if I feel like a candidate and a client could have a productive conversation together. I'm also pretty good about writing that email.
Also: for the right kind of person, the challenges are fun, in the same way that chess or poker or Starcraft or sudoku are fun. Except with more REST API.
And, it seems to me, the traits involved in doing those things are also not what a lot of companies intend to be looking for in hiring developers, so its in companies interests to find a way to adapt hiring so as not to implicitly bias it in that direction (if they were hiring people for sales position, that bias might be exactly what they want...)
I would suspect that the specific subset of communication skills tested implicitly in a system biased toward people's drive and ability to successfully cold-email potential employers is generally neither the same subset of communication skills that are important in actual work of technical staff in most development teams nor a subset which serves as a good proxy for those.
But I could be wrong.
There are other places - a surprising number of them - where effective internal marketing and sales skills are needed. Those are probably the communication skills that patio11's clients are lacking.
Part of the idea is that there are some great devs out there who don't have the resume to "just email the company and get a phone screen".
I think if you look at their history with MicroCorruption (https://microcorruption.com/login) you'll see that this isn't just a recruiting tool - it's supposed to be more of an interesting programming challenge, something you'd want to spend time on whether there was a hiring company at the end or not.
Long term, I hope that after StarFighter gets more history and credibility with companies, they actually will reduce or remove technical parts of the onsite interview in lieu of StockFighter results.
I spent time with MicroCorruption, and I plan to spend some time on StockFighter, and I'm not looking for a job.
Because of this, I have had opportunities open to me that people would kill for and received an offer or interview almost every time.
My personal opinion is that these things do have their place, but they will likely find that only a few types of people will give this the time of day:
1. People who are bored
2. People who need a shortcut to a job interview
3. People who are diamonds in the rough
Out of these, only one type of person (3) will be greatly valued.
On the other hand, I don't have a CS degree and currently work as a mechanical engineer, so the resume screen is relatively harder for me.
If you go into this eyes open you can control it. Put your best foot forward.
We find that engineers who apply to us even if they have those resume credentials are doing so for two reasons:
(1) People only have bandwidth to talk with a few companies. We have enough data across companies to filter out the ones you won't be a technical fit for. This saves the wasted time of failed onsites, which as you say is the bane of existence for programmers.
(2) Finding companies you wouldn't have otherwise heard about or realized were an interesting option for you. We can especially help here with engineers interested in joining smaller companies that haven't had breakout success yet.
Traditional recruiters only help with getting you an introduction to an arbitrary company (usually whichever responded first to an email blast). We strongly believe that a recruiting service which does intelligent matching provides a lot of value for both candidates and companies (we wrote more about that here: http://blog.triplebyte.com/triplebyte-engineer-genome-projec...).
That's the problem. Resumes shouldn't matter. The capability to solve programs through an understanding of software-- which is often acquired without going through a resume-building path-- is what matters.
You can totally list projects you've worked on, or some other stuff which isn't "MS in Comp Sci at Stanford"
I feel kind of the same way about resumes for hiring as you, but they're pretty good entry filters: if you can't be bothered to write 300 words (or, you know, reuse one with a slightly different intro), why should the company bother talking to you?
I think this is all part of the "avoiding false positives" mindset that comes with recruiting. Since recruiting people is really expensive!
On the other hand, corporations are definitely all about risk-reduction.
They may also be able to help you find companies you hadn't heard of that would be a good fit for you. Eg if you didn't know company x is hiring type y devs then the relationship could prove beneficial there as well.
That said, I hope they can start offering more value over time. For example, if TripleByte could not only tell you where you will succeed during interviews, but also help you understand how offers are likely to vary that would be valuable. Eg "company A would likely offer someone at your level $130-150k salary and y options, while company B typically offers more generous options, but a salary range of $90-110k". If your min salary is $120k, then this helps you prioritize where you interview based on what is important to you.
EDIT Editing to add that regardless, I don't think you are their target developer. Anyone who can get an interview with these companies is likely going to do just that, while people who cannot for whatever reason (new grad, no flashy names on resume, etc) are more likely to benefit from using a service like TripleByte or Starfighter where if they do well they almost guarantee they get to interview instead of sending out a resume and never hearing back.
We currently do help with thinking through offer details. We've been building up a database of what offer ranges are and help people use these to value their offers (equity ranges in particular are opaque and tough to unpack). We do also get candidates ready for interviews by providing detailed feedback on how they did on our process (for many people this is the first personal interviewing feedback they've heard).
Longer term there are many more things we'd like to help with as we keep gathering more data. The one I'm most excited about is using data from how our engineers perform at companies over time to improve our screening process and make predictions about success at a company post joining, not just on the interview process.
Obviously, making this work requires both convincing hiring managers that it can replace at least some of the annoying technical parts of the hiring process, and developing engaging games that can engage, collectively, a sufficient pool of engineering talent. Sounds like the concern is that, to date, they may have focused too much on the latter and not enough on the former, but while that's a challenge, I don't think it has to be an insurmountable one.
The thing to consider though is that it would be crazy to take a job without going in to meet your potential future coworkers. It's also a quicker and less unpleasant process (and more of a two way street) to try and make sure it's a good cultural match. Thus, solving a bunch of the problems with technical interviews shouldn't actually eliminate onsites, it should rather make them more effective and less awful.