Triplebyte acquired by Karat | Hacker News Reader

Triplebyte acquired by Karat

karat.com

122 pointsforbiddenvoid116 comments

I had a friend get a job through triplebyte and generally had a positive opinion of them. I also had a generally positive opinion since I had wasted time phone screening candidates. Every phone screen a company does is at least $100 of wasted time. The value proposition of outsourcing phone screening for fizzbuzz is clear. The value proposition of doing one phone screen for N companies is also clear.

Then they started abusing trust and implementing dark patterns: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27255742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037

I was honestly thinking about using them myself until it became clear that they had no ethics. Once trust is lost...

I got my foot in the door in tech through triplebyte after a couple months of job applications. I had a very small number of triplebyte company "matches", but I got a good review on my triplebyte front end interview and ended up landing a good job at a growing startup... only for the company to lay off the entire office 3 months later after the initial Covid outbreak (but the production experience taught me a lot and helped me get my next role).

I had less success when I came back 2-3 years later and tried to get another role through them, but I'll always be thankful for the initial foot in. At at time when many places didn't want to consider me at all for having no professional experience, triplebyte was willing to give me the chance to interview and judge me on my answers instead. Even just the interview process was a good learning experience and I could research any topics I didn't know afterwards.

I like to riff off one of the questions from my triplebyte interview when I now interview candidates- the "used car" architecture question. Makes for a great open ended technical discussion.

What is the used car architecture question?

It was a question from Triplebyte's old FastTrack interviews, back when we did a more active high-touch placement model. The gist of the question was "you're setting up a site that sells used cars, and you have information like make, model, milage, etc. for each car that you want to search by, how do you go about setting up your architecture?" Good candidates would ask about things like scale, or note that this system probably doesn't need to be ultra-reliable, or ask about the kind of constraints they can assume on the car data. Things that showed they understood the relevant tradeoffs and could apply them to the specifics of the situation.

Once they gave a basic architecture, we'd make some tweaks like scaling or adding other complications and ask how they'd modify that architecture to fit.

Yeah, our experience with Triplebyte really fluctuated a ton over the years. Made some hires pre-vetted by them who were real badasses and contributed a lot, but then there were periods when they sent us numerous candidates who could barely squeeze out a line of code and clearly must have gamed their process somehow. Feels like they were searching for some sustainable growth model and never managed it.

There's a difference between a mistake and no ethics.

I did a coding bootcamp in 2014, and couldn’t get a job afterwards. I spent the next three years trying to break into tech. I had tried starting a startup, failed at that, interviewed at a handful of companies, failed those too. At one point, I was literally begging startups to let me work for them for free. Nothing.

I finally managed to get into Triplebyte’s program. I did a phone interview with them, failed it, then came back a few months later and passed it. They flew me out to California where I interviewed at five companies. No offers at four of the five. It was the very last company that I interviewed at where I got a job. Had I not gotten that job, I would probably be trying to sell insurance right now or something.

I’ve been at Google for a year now, so it ended up working out pretty well in the end.

Kudos. It's great to hear grit and perseverance working out in the end.

Love that story!

I remember when Triplebyte had a blog post and/or job ad every other day on Hacker News, and a bazillion physical ads in San Francisco.

It's surprising how quickly after the public-profile-incident (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037 ) they fell off the radar.

That incident was obviously pretty damaging to us from a PR perspective, but it isn't really what killed us. It's not like no one ever used TB after that, even though it did reasonable damage to our brand (and for what it's worth, that kind of blowup really is damaging - we got asked about it during basically every one of the acquisition conversations we did at the end, so please don't think that PR backlash never matters! it absolutely does!).

We were simply never able to make the marketplace version of Triplebyte work after moving away from the transactional model we had in the early days. We tried some new tactics near the end that seemed to be bearing fruit, and I think in a world where tech hadn't crashed in mid to late 2022 we would have had a reasonable shot. But sometimes you find product-market fit right around the time the market goes sour. C'est la vie.

The reason we fell off the radar is that we'd been spending a lot of money on ads and stopped at around the time of that backlash (due to a change in business, not due to the backlash itself). Turns out you can boost your profile quite a bit when you're pouring a lot of your cash into ad campaigns! (Also, the physical ads wouldn't have made much sense since that pivot also coincided with all of us sitting in our tiny Bay Area apartments for the next year, lol.)

I got my big break through triplebyte but once you switched from the “personal” site that connected me to companies I was actually a good match for and moved towards being just a jobs site I’ve had zero luck so I got my last job via workatastartup (which is also going downhill.)

It’s a shame because I know there’s people like me stuck in a dead end job somewhere despite being a senior level engineer (I was working construction!) and these people will have nowhere like triplebyte to help show the industry their skills.

Yeah. You weren't alone. My favorite was some guy who'd been packing boxes for Amazon for like ten years and couldn't get anyone to give him the time of day, who ended up getting a like 200k a year job at one of the bigger SV companies. That kind of story was something I couldn't shut up about during my first couple years at TB, and it was definitely something lost when we changed models. (We made that change for a reason - discussed elsewhere in this thread - but it was still sad to see that model go.)

The issue of "talent but no experience" is a glaring inefficiency, but it's the kind of inefficiency that (so far, at least) it's been very hard to make a business out of. (And to be clear, this isn't just employers being evil, a lot of their behavior is rational and it's not like candidates never lie or cheat either.)

I have some thoughts on this that I'll probably be batting around with my new bosses a bit once we're settled in with Karat's teams. Since Karat focuses more on screening than on trying to be a marketplace, it's a more natural fit for their (our, I guess I should say now) existing business anyway. Hopefully we can make it work.

TripleByte once told me it was aiming to becoming “the hiring division for Google, Apple and all of big tech”

As a mere jobseeker in the pipeline, I wasn’t sure if the representative understood the reality of recruiting. To me, the ambition sounded ignorant; companies do not want to outsource and centralize their hiring in a third-party that is also hiring for their competitors.

This wasn't as much of a barrier as you'd expect. Yes, recruiters mostly didn't like the idea of framing a recruiting process as "you're getting people X other company didn't hire" (even though, frankly, that's most candidates you get anyway and hiring processes are not that strongly correlated), but that interpretation usually didn't come up in the first place.

The biggest single barrier we faced for early TB was pricing (we were charging 20% of first year's salary) and the demand that companies skip candidates straight to onsites (which we were promising them at the time).

Later on, our biggest barrier was differentiating ourselves from Linkedin and the like: companies saw Linkedin as the primary sourcing tool, and because they were hiring non-engineers there, it was one they usually wouldn't get rid of. So we were always the secondary tool, which meant (a) we tended to get the roles they couldn't hire for elsewhere, which selected for the hardest roles, (b) we had to justify ourselves in a way linkedin didn't, and (c) we were the first to be cut when the economics turned against us.

I was in early TB and had a good experience at first that later went sour. You may have explained a little of what happened. Oh well.

Thought you were onto something back when pilot helping mega-enterprises with talent.

You were the only way to get well-assessed devs in the door despite non-technical hiring managers and an HR department asserting any assessment was discriminatory.

Government can't buy open source since lack of support fails due diligence, so wash OSS through vendors offering enterprise support. Similarly, talent can't be hired well directly, so wash great talent assessment for enterprises while they stay compliant, it should be a gold mine.

Most every enterprise in America needed (needs) that, and any of them running a Transformation had someone that would have been a sponsor.

(Btw, looking for folks interested in setting up a new kind of systematic person-role matching, and while still somewhat marketplace-like, profit could be on the order of $500K per match. Know anyone interested in trying that?)

> We tried some new tactics near the end that seemed to be bearing fruit, and I think in a world where tech hadn't crashed in mid to late 2022 we would have had a reasonable shot.

Is this referring to Magnet? I thought that was neat product idea.

Yeah. (For those unfamiliar with it, Magnet was basically an attempt to automate sourcing. The way it worked was that companies would complete a questionnaire about what they wanted, we would message candidates on their behalf, and they would review only candidates who indicated interest. We applied some throttling and quality thresholds to try to make this a good experience, because taking control of the messaging let us actually do that.)

Magnet grew out of four main observations:

* Our users got much better results when we helped them search rather than leaving it to them.

* What company users fundamentally wanted was to - as our head of finance put it during a discussion last January that ended up leading to the creation of Magnet - "swipe a credit card and get candidates".

* The most interest we'd seen on the candidate side was when we could tell them what companies really wanted, and bringing that in-house meant we could show that information very accurately and without incentive for companies to be dishonest, and

* We had a fundamental lack of activity problem. We talked often about how nice it would be if we had Linkedin's spam problem, because we had lots of ideas for how to solve that problem if we actually had it, which we didn't.

So we built Magnet, which ended up increasing activity on platform by a factor of like five and made companies way happier. We scaled it up over time, and right as we really turned it up in June, the market fell out from under us. And it's a testament to just how well it worked, at least on paper, that our number of connections between candidates and companies actually grew through much of fall 2022 despite the collapse in hiring.

That's not to say Magnet didn't have problems. It did. It had issues with fraudulent profiles (there turned out to be quite a few of these - a lot of job sites are dealing with this problem at the moment in the remote-work world), and we were definitely hitting a point of diminishing returns as we scaled it to some extent. But given how quickly it was built, and how bad the market was, the fact that it took off at all suggests that there was probably something there.

This is model-adjacent to what we're looking for someone to help try again, but with a return per match that makes it easier to make a company out of.

Might be a little elitist but it always seems like these sites go for the broadest applicable market rather than sticking to their lanes of catering to at the very least experienced engineers.

TripleByte felt like a premium product that cared about both sides of the transaction but when I came back to it years later, maybe I had changed but the site just felt... bad, like that it was just a job mill. It didn't feel premium, it felt like a hokey recruiter site with a Silicon Valley skin.

It doesn't help that companies also treat(ed) it like a job mill. I would have companies reach out, tell me my resume looked great and fit all the criteria then would turn me down for lack of experience when I responded.

They start elitist, people love them for it but that's a niche market as the top "1%" is, well, only 1%. So to justify valuation/please VC/increase revenue, they have to increase the pool of candidates which basically destroy the value-prop of their service.

(TB's head of product for the last ~year and a half here - I wasn't involved in the decision to pivot away from the old model, but I'm retroactively aware of its reasoning.)

This is essentially correct.

Our original model worked, more or less, for a small pool of candidates. But acquiring those candidates was extremely expensive in ways that scaled poorly as Triplebyte grew. Basically, we were dependent on ads for growth (anyone who used Reddit at the time probably saw a lot of our ads, shout out to /r/againsttriplebytemike), and the marginal cost of ad conversions grows as you try to scale how many people you're bringing in.

Slightly less cynically: if your business can't exist without VC funding, but can't justify the expectations of that funding, you never really had a business to begin with. You borrowed one temporarily. This is normal for startups, and VCs know that they won't always (or even usually) succeed, but you can't sit on your break-even-ish business when that's not what VCs were funding you to do.

For what it's worth, early TB's efforts (and for that matter, late TB's efforts, both before my tenure and during it) were sincere, it's just that that sincerity is predicated on actually being able to make a working business out of it.

(The engineer formerly known as "Triplebyte Mike" here. Hi Chel!)

Harj recently described Triplebyte's user acquisition trajectory publicly in a video from Y Combinator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s from timestamps 7:53 to 9:33. But yes, ads worked for a while, until they didn't.

I got my current job through TripleByte, so thanks for that! I feel like the niche exists for how Triplebyte was set up, but maybe it is not a VC-scale “unicorn” type of business.

I had the same experience. In 2017 it was amazing and I felt like I'd discovered an incredible career-boosting hack. I told all my friends about it. By 2020 it felt exactly the same as every other low-grade career mill.

To be fair, none of my friends that I referred to TripleByte actually passed their (2017) screening process. So it was a site that was very useful to a very small subset of engineers. I'm sure there's a viable business in that premium market, but probably not a unicorn scalable tech company.

I had a weird experience with Triplebyte. First I take their intake test and then I’m ghosted for a year or two. I email them and I got unghosted somehow. They said it was some kind of glitch but it didn’t really appeal to me…

They completely destroyed the value of their brand with that. It was crazy. I really liked the concept of Triplebyte, even though I never found a job through them. I would get requests from reputable companies occassionally. After that incident, I never got anything again. I would have considered using Triplebyte from the employer side prior to that, but not after. What a disgrace.

But has anyone learned the lesson? I'm sure the founders will go their merry way to another plum position and continue thriving on VC Twitter.

In the past 10 year being unethical wasn't considered immoral by a lot of such startups. I remember the intern incident at Repl.it or how AirBnB destroyed the rental market in certain geographies or the whole Uber incidents.

6 years ago, I did Triplebyte as a candidate, got 6 interviews at good companies and 4 fantastic offers (including one from them, directly!). I ended up accepting an offer for a company that had a life-changing exit for me, and it wouldn't have happened without Triplebyte. So I have a lot of love for them. It was sad to see them stumble with the weird public profile stuff, but I wish only the best for them. I hope this was a good outcome for the folks that I talked to all those years ago.

Nearly same journey for me. I can’t thank them enough for organizing everything (including the flights, hotel, and scheduling) and putting me in front of several great companies as someone who at the time did not live anywhere near the bay or have easy access to the SF startup scene. It felt like a really premium experience, and one that I’ll forever be grateful for.

These kinds of stories were really motivating for all of us who worked here at the time, and they definitely soften the blow of the final result, at least for me (and I think for Ammon as well).

To give a different perspective, I applied to Triplebyte when they announced their project track for people who don't do well in interviews. They told me I had done a great job on the project, but that they couldn't move me forward because they needed candidates who could do well in interviews.

(What was the project track for??)

They recommended practicing on interviewing.io, a site with closed membership that kept me waitlisted for over a year (and only then let me in because I complained about the situation on HN, not because I'd actually waited long enough to get off the waitlist).

So as far as I could see, Triplebyte advertised one thing, delivered the opposite at every opportunity (I'm also still bitter that the site with the tagline "No resumes, just show us you can code" opened its interviews with "So, where have you worked in the past, and what did you do there?"), and didn't even pretend to be interested enough to give you advice that was, theoretically, possible to follow.

Same here. Triplebyte quite literally changed the trajectory of my life. I wasn't really aware of how things have changed over the past 6+ years as mentioned in the other comments, but I'm sad to read them. I wish the whole team well, regardless. <3

I'm not surprised Triplebyte isn't standing on its own.

I set up identical profiles and passed all the relevant quizzes at Triplebyte, Hired, and LinkedIn (all 3 offer timed, multiple choice question tests with limited retries), but only LinkedIn was able to match me with opportunities willing to pay what I was asking. Triplebyte and Hired both let you set a floor salary, but have no ability to set a floor total compensation, which meant it was effectively worthless for determining if a company was competitive for me.

In Oct-Dec '22, I got ~400 LinkedIn recruiter messages (3% with high enough total comp), ~20 triplebyte messages (0 with competitive comp) and ~10 hired messages (0 competitive). None of these recruiters were connections beforehand on any platform, so it's just representative of the total number of recruiters on each platform. (In case anyone is interested, I also cold-applied ~20 places, and none of those resulted in me making it past the hiring manager stage, if that. I ended up with 2 offers, both from random LinkedIn recruiter outreach.)

LinkedIn cold messages get a lot of (well deserved) flak but they can be very useful for moving to the next step in your career if you're willing to sort through the cruft. Of those ~dozen messages with competitive TC, I'm sure half probably had projects you wouldn't be interested in or were with companies/industries you didn't want to associate with. Some percentage of the remainder would choose not to move forward on their end for one reason or another. So out of 400+ messages you're likely down to 2-3 offers at the end of the process, and likely at different points in time.

Especially as the hiring markets starts (continues?) to contract at the middle and lower ends, being willing to give these types of outreach a chance is going to become a differentiator.

Curious... I've been using LinkedIn for a job search and am unfamiliar with the questions to which you refer. How can I find and pass this test?

https://www.linkedin.com/skill-assessments/hub/quizzes/

They're very basic tests in comparison to Triplebyte though.

Even if that's true it's sort of irrelevant if your requirements make Triplebyte's matching garbage.

Yeah I agree. It's just a shame LinkedIn's tests aren't as good as Triplebyte's.

I just retook the Linux LinkedIn test and what a bunch of garbage it was. Lots of memorising commands (e.g. nm-connection-edit) and obscure Bash nonsense.

And it only says whether you're in the top 30% or not, which apparently I am despite the fact that I guessed half of the answers. I just guessed the least intuitive option every time heh.

> obscure Bash nonsense

Tell me more. Having trouble thinking of something that wouldn't change how I'd percieve a senior dev's skillset.

* What is the difference between `=` and `==` in `if [ $FOO == ...`?

* What is evaluated first, file globs or variable expansion?

Both are things that you might need to look up once in a lifetime. If you're getting to the point that are memorising rules like these, then you're writing too much Bash and should switch to a more robust language.

Thank you. Just passed 7 of them. Will see if it helps.

Triplebyte made more sense as an internal tool for YC itself, from an efficiency perspective it makes sense to have a company like Triplebyte for vetting general programming skills and saving candidates and companies time by having a somewhat standardized level so neither party is wasting their time.

Their biggest issue was probably corporate politics, no HR org wants to hand over a huge chunk of their power and purpose within a company. Their business model also didn't fit a VC startup model, no real room for exponential revenue growth

Years ago, I took a Triplebyte test and at the end of it learned critical (and accurate) insights on my strengths and weaknesses. I realized if I can screen my candidates in this same way, they will be incredibly valuable employees.

After confirming the skill-ranking capabilities with our first hires, we integrated Triplebyte into our hiring process to save developers hours of wasted time on pointless coding exercises that are thrown away after each interview only to start over again with the next company. This was an advantage for us, we had a better signal to noise ratio on candidates and we found more talent willing to take a triplebyte test than our own in-house tests. Further, the triplebyte tests were maintained and refined over the years to an accuracy I believe is going to be very difficult to replace.

Yesterday, Karat announced a shutdown of Triplebyte with less than 2 weeks notice. They don't care to offer a solution to any of Triplebyte's customers. In their words they "only purchased a technology that Triplebyte made available to other companies" i.e. "we don't want anyone else using this".

The Karat website uses floaty words like "interview cloud" and emphasizes live-coding interviews as part of some legacy product that would put us back into the stone ages when it comes to our current hiring process. Karat expressed no intention on offering solutions to replace what Triplebyte did best. Karat do not care about the inconvenience of their customers. Karat provides less than two weeks notice to paying customers that they are cancelling service.

(I'm in email contact with this person, but the public TLDR here is that Karat isn't just buying this to shut it down and hasn't, at least as far as I can tell, done anything wrong in this process. The shortness of notice isn't their doing, at least.)

I've had incredible success in gauging candidates skill-level using TripleByte Screen. Everyone I've hired has taken the test. It's not a pass/fail response but it is fairly indicative of someone who has worked full-time in their tested language/skill.

If the tests go away, I don't know what I will do to help gauge candidate skill without traditional and wasteful live / take-home / repo-based tests.

As an evaluation tool, TripleByte was great. As a user of Magnet (the recruitment marketplace), it was not so great. We signed up during the hiring frenzy of 2020 and the good candidates we tried to get were all getting offers from much more established brands. We didn't see any success there, but TripleByte Screen is an excellent product I hope remains available.

I was interviewed by Karat for an SRE position and I found it a joke. Questions like "a web server goes down but the site stays up, why?" - me: "well, define 'down', also is there a caching layer in front?". "No, what happened is that there was a load balancer and two web servers and only one went down". ffs

I worked with Karat as an interviewer for a few years at the most senior level and loved the experience (back then they were still Karat.io!). Pleased to see this success for them; it seems like a partnership made in heaven.

I briefly worked as an interviewer -- it wasn't for me, but I like and appreciate everything they're doing to make things fair across candidates and removing subjectivity where possible. Of all the bad ways we interview SWEs, Karat is one of the better ones, IMO.

The way I saw it, it removes a lot of stress and pressure for the candidate, and puts some of it onto the interviewer.

I demoed Karat as a customer and I think they're just awful. They pretended that the interview process was customizable, so we sent them what we wanted. Then to demo it I signed myself up as a candidate.

Literally all of our feedback was completely ignored. They didn't touch on any of the topics they said they would, and even though we explicitly told them it wasn't an algorithms heavy position that was their entire focus. On the plus side I did pass the interview, but we ultimately decided that using Karat would have had a real negative impact on our hiring.

I commented below. I work at Karat in engineering and have had a good experience so far. I'll make sure someone hears about this. I'm not aware of exactly how customizable our interviews are but it should be consistent with what is advertised or that needs to change.

+1, we had a similar experience using it to hire engineers. It felt like our feedback went into a black hole and they did not change their process.

We had a few months of really painful full interview loops with candidates not appropriate for the positions.

From your comments it seems you're at Google. Isn't Google mostly algorithm/leetcode problems? I thought Karat was mostly that as well. Wouldn't Karat be a good screen for that sort of thing so as not to waste Google Engineer time?

I don't get this. Karat provides their customers with full, detailed text writeups of every single interview, as well as full recordings both of the interview video call and the code timeline. Why didn't you just review that material?

I absolutely did review the interview, that was the whole point. I just wasn't willing to risk sending a potential candidate through a pipeline I myself hadn't gone through. I'm happy I caught the problems in advance myself, rather than subjecting someone I potentially wanted to hire to a useless interview.

I do want to stress the useless part here too- even with the notes of how the interview went I wouldn't be able to make a decision on things, since they didn't hit the points that were actually relevant to the role.

Good on you for not subjecting someone to that.

In summary, the beginning of a brand new business relationship, you demoed a single, first version of your custom purchase, you understood that it needed tuning, and then proceeded to immediately cut them without providing further direction.

(EDIT: Note that I previously contracted with Karat and feel loyalty to them, but have no formal association or stake in them, nor do I represent them.)

Well, witnessing this behavior has certainly turned me off from considering Karat in the future. I often appreciate how on Hackernews, you can voice a criticism for an online service and someone from that service will show up, take accountability, and help out and/or take feedback - happened to me with the CEO of DuckDuckGo a while ago, a product I really like but had an issue with.

What a contrast this is.

He seems to be a (former) independent contractor rather than an employee/representative, so I think this is more just misguided fanboyism rather than intentional astroturfing/reputation laundering.

Karat is probably the best/fairest you can do for purely algorithmic interviews, but I'm not sure they're even able to do anything else (the parent commenter's experience suggests not).

I would also consider it more of an exam than an interview - the process is very standardized and sterile, and obviously since it's being outsourced there is no way for the candidate to ask any questions about the company.

(disclaimer as well: went into the interviewer onboarding with them as a contractor but dropped out as I wasn't comfortable proctoring tests that I myself wasn't an expert at).

Hello I work at Karat in engineering (have had a great experience so far). I will make sure someone hears about this. I know there is some degree of customization in the format/content of interviews but sounds like it wasn't to the degree it was advertised which is unfortunate.

You should probably disclose that you are a Senior Interviewer at Karat

To be clear, we gave a ton of feedback and direction before the demo. All of that was completely ignored. If it was a problem of just tweaking things or making changes then I would have done that, but the fact is that they completely ignored all of the input we had already given.

I'm curious why you're so intense about this- do you have some sort of stake in karet?

They worked for Karat, according to their comment history. So yes.

I'm seeing now that I should have disclosed this again at the beginning of this thread with my first reply, because now it's coming across as a deception, which was truly not the intent as shown my by earlier comments. Apologies folks

I contracted with Karat previously, but don't have any present relationship with them or their executives.

Communication is hard, and not everyone has time or energy to bridge the gap, which is fair! It's just a bummer to hear that this has somehow lead to words like "awful", "real negative impact", "useless". That feels very intense to me, and I have probably responded in an intense way as well. There was no harm intended

I hope all of these interview assessment companies go out of business. They don't produce quality candidates, and they're dehumanizing for the folks that have to use them.

I’ve only been interviewed through Karat once, but it was a positive experience. It was a coding screen round. The interviewer was personable and fun to talk to, which made the whole process more pleasant. He was skilled at listening and asking the right questions to gauge where I was at throughout the conversation. He also transitioned smoothly into follow-up questions, and I got the impression overall that there was a wide range of skill levels he could evaluate (ie. the result was not just pass/fail, there was a high ceiling).

Given the usual nature of coding screens - intentionally generic and standardized, so a company can use the same screening process for different teams - it made a lot of sense to me that a task like that could be outsourced. Since you are usually not developing a relationship with the interviewer at that point, there’s no real reason they need to be and employee of the company you are interviewing for. A couple of times I’ve had coding screens where the interviewer didn’t seem to be paying attention. Since some engineers get forced to do these screens, they might not be focused on giving a good candidate experience.

> a company can use the same screening process for different teams - it made a lot of sense to me that a task like that could be outsourced

It actually makes a lot of sense to do it this way on both ends.

You know the interviewer is going to be a good interviewer who knows what they are doing & how to judge you. The interviewer can be completely independent from the decision without having bias or judgement attached to where the candidate ends up.

I've certainly had interviews where I knew I was doomed from the second I walked in the door because the interviewer was in a bad mood, they didn't enunciate clearly, just a bad vibe, whatever. That sucks as a candidate. This situation would make a fairly demeaning process slightly better if done well.

Speaking as an hiring manager: Interviewing and finding the right talent is hard and there will always be people swayed by these salesmen selling a quick solution to tired companies.

The lucrative cottage industry of interview assessments won't be going down so soon as long as there are perverse incentives and gatekeeping in place.

How so? I had a positive (applicant) experience with TB. It saved me time by providing a unified phone screen for several companies.

This is not the feedback I've received, and I conducted like nearly 1000 interviews with Karat. On average we actually heard from people that Karat was their best experience by far, and that we made them feel like we were treating them as worthy individuals.

Even people who got declined usually still left feeling quite positive, because we would turn the obviously-failed interview into, basically, a free hour coaching / teaching session for them to succeed next time.

My experience was the same as tedvim above - it was utterly dehumanizing and there's no way I want that either for myself or for the people I hire. The interviewers were smug little shits who didn't take feedback to ask questions relevant to the position.

Further - you guys lurk all over HN commenting like this every time there's an interview thread. It's submarining and it's gross.

The rules at Karat may be that giving any kind of help pretty much automatically disqualifies the candidate, so technically they're better off giving you no help at all in the hopes you make as much progress on your own rather than ruining your interview by giving you help prematurely.

Yep pretty much this. I was a contract interviewer with Karat for a few years and taught people how to conduct interviews. There's a graded scale of assistance, anything more than gentle prompting to re-read your code or the error output starts counting against you. If I have to point out a block of code or even a line, then that's getting to the point that most clients will pass you over when they review your interview, so the rules are we don't give that stuff proactively.

I used the "may" word as I wasn't sure it's something we are meant to be disclosing, but now that the cat is out of the bag you are indeed 100% correct and this matches my experience.

One thing I didn't appreciate with these rules from a candidate perspective (and encouraged my decision not to continue my onboarding with Karat), there seems to be no way to learn from the process. I actually bombed my practice interview (and knew it would happen even before the interview) but the interviewer was very reluctant (due to the above rules) to actually solve the problem with me, where as a conventional non-Karat failed interview would at least give me the solution in the end and I'd at least learn something.

Presumably it depends on the interviewer. And tbf it seems like warent is the only person here defending them.

Still I don't know if I would trust hiring to unknown potentially awful interviewers.

Their people pop up in every hiring thread on HN, it isn't just warent and it isn't the first time.

"not trying to sell me a product" indeed.

There is nothing to gain from giving negative feedback. If Karat succeeds in becoming the gatekeeper for interviews it would be a really bad idea to get on their bad side.

Agreed, as I progress through my career I'm starting to value companies that are willing to actually speak to me instead of using these middleware services to find out if I'm even qualified. It's a complete time waste for me (and them) to pass these assessments and realize the culture of the team is something I want nothing to be a part of.

This is a very honest assessment. If a 3rd party service like Karat has more trust with an employer than their own employees in terms of what is needed for that specific employee's role within their own company then that is a sign of poor management and practices.

Using Karat services tells a lot more about the company than the candidate.

I guess it could be generalized that these companies are more likely to value philosophies that are similar to a few of these abhorrent practices-

1. Flawed concepts of "Meritocracy" based hiring/promotions

2. Stack ranking

3. RIF's based on some extremely shortsighted metrics like quarterly revenue numbers

4. PIP style performance improvements

5. More MBA types managing engineering teams

...

The only place I see Karat style services fit is to eliminate 'noise' candidates from DDOS'ing the entry level hire pipeline.

I used Triplebyte in 2018 and had a great experience with it. I enjoyed the interview process, I found my talent manager tremendously helpful as a new grad, everything about it was great. I was a kid from the midwest who went to a relatively no-name school and it opened a lot of doors for me. A few years later and all the candidates I've interviewed for that came through the Triplebyte pipeline were spectacular. Sad to see the turn it took. At least I've got the jacket :)

I used Triplebyte from both sides, as a candidate as well as a hiring manager. I hired some great people from them, but over the past couple years watched as their standards slid, pricing models changed, and sales practices went from friendly to cutthroat :/

Curious, what would have been a better model?

I went through Triplebyte's process as a candidate ca. 2019. I got a lot of positive feedback from it, and while they didn't have a company in their portfolio at the time that was a perfect match for my skills, the process (and its results) gave me the confidence to pursue roles that I would not have otherwise. I just recently got a role with a really wonderful organization and Triplebyte deserves some of the credit for that, just for building a process that made talented shlubs feel hireable.

When they made some missteps and got (deservedly) bad press for it, and then struggled after, I felt bad for them in the way I'd feel about a friend that screwed up.

The honest comments in this thread from Triplebyte folks is refreshing too and I really hope for the best for them.

Will Karat be around after the AI revolution?

I wouldn't be surprised if an OpenAI + Zoom solution makes Karat obsolete.

I, for one, won't shed any tears. I've wasted too much time conducting interviews. I'd like to have more time to focus on work.

So what is happening to TripleByte? The website says "While Triplebyte is saying goodbye…the mission to transform technical hiring continues at Karat". So it seems like Karat is just squashing a competitor to their own business model, and doesn't intend to integrate triplebyte's features into Karat.

Karat embodies everything wrong with the tech industry, and Triplebyte wasn't much better. I've interviewed - and hired - hundreds of people in my career. This robotic approach with a focus on either standardized test type material and/or the leetcode interviews where how we interview doesn't match the work itself - it's just all so broken. I don't know the fix, but I know this isn't it.

I agree but I feel Karat is good/helpful IF we're all still stuck in the leetcode/algorithm world because at least it's friendly/consistent.

I had a couple of interviews with Ammon in their very early stages. You know how sometimes you meet someone and from the first moments you realise he is an awesome person? That’s the feeling I got with him. He definitely knew what he was doing. Wish him the best!

It's unfortunate that their reputation took such a massive hit with the public profile debacle. The folks I talked to / worked with at Triplebyte were all great people with their hearts in the right place. It's just an incredibly tough market to be in.

I think the problem was that what they were trying to do couldn't scale. As I said I interviewed in the early stages with Ammon and it was a great experience. He knew what he was asking and he knew how to evaluate your skills. But how can you have a hundred Ammons interviewing and assessing people? It just doesn't scale.

Interviewers actually did scale reasonably well, which is part of why Karat (which stayed focused on that part) was in a position to buy our stuff to begin with.

What didn't scale was the ability to get high-quality candidates in the door in the first place.

I was a big fan of Triplebyte until I went on an interview that they arranged for me that turned out to be a complete waste of time. I told the company beforehand that I didn't know Ruby, had never written a line of Ruby, and they said that it didn't matter, they wanted me to come in anyway. What is the first thing they ask me to do? Write some Ruby code, of course. I'll spare you the gory details of what happened after that, but it was a train wreck.

If you're going to try to build a business on the basis of eliminating the bullshit from interviewing (which is a terrific thing to try to do) you have to make sure your client companies are on board.

I hate it when they don't mention the price. We want to know how big the bag was!

Triplebyte is extremely hostile to disabled people who are experts in their field.

After aceing their Linux kernel screening test in 2019, their model of “we will call you, you cannot contact us” have made it nearly impossible to work out physical scheduling for an interpreter to sit alongside the conversation.

After all, one does not need a voice to do professional “bit arrangements”. We all have IM, texting, email, and fancy transcribing machines.

There are many forms of vocal disabilities.

I'm guessing the pivot [0] to being more engineer-focused rather than employer-focused didn't end up working out, and they decided to sell the company and move on?

[0]: https://triplebyte.com/blog/rethinking-triplebyte, discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27541676

You're essentially correct that that effort didn't work.

That pivot was motivated, more or less, by the fact that we'd never found a good way to attract candidates that wasn't "dump tons of money into ads". (Even in the early days, when our branding was good, most of our candidate acquisition was from ads; only maybe 25% was word-of-mouth.) It just didn't work: senior engineers simply didn't find the things we could offer them compelling enough.

Fundamentally, if you're a hiring market paid by companies, you're selling access to talent. And finding cost-efficient ways to get that talent is a core problem of your business. We tried a few approaches to that, but none really took off. (The most successful was our Screen tool, but the problem with that was that companies mostly wanted to screen candidates they saw as low-value - juniors and international candidates, mostly - and were terrified of screening high-value senior candidates. The product worked well, but didn't get the candidates that would let us stand out, basically.)

During 2022, we pivoted back to a focus on companies, and actually saw quite a bit of success with our last few efforts in a way that, with more runway, we might have converted into some really good candidate experiences. Unfortunately, this coincided with a collapse in tech that both tanked companies' desire to hire and tightened their belts as they braced for a hostile fundraising environment, and we couldn't overcome that environment even with a product that did seem to have reasonable fit.

> It just didn't work: senior engineers simply didn't find the things we could offer them compelling enough.

I wonder if you would would have had better luck targeting engineers on the cusp, or people with significant experience who didn't have the confidence to identify as senior.

That was my situation when I started using Triplebyte, and the assessments did wonders for my confidence.

I did however end up taking a counter-offer from my company that promoted me to lead.

However, I raved about Triplebyte to everyone I knew (similarly unconfident engineers considering a job change), and would have loved to continue doing so, as well as using it on my next job search.

I'm really sad to hear you couldn't make it work, it was excellent from the candidate side of things.

If I want to burn all my data there before Karat “anonymizes it for analytics purposes” on 2023-03-31, so they don’t get it, is there a method for doing so?

At this point you'd need to talk to Karat about that, as they now own all of that data. I would imagine that they have (but don't have any special knowledge of) some sort of compliance around that, given various privacy laws, but you'd need to speak to Karat's support at this point (TB's support does not really exist at this stage).

I went thru Triplebyte in 2019, did well enough on the initial quiz to skip the technical screen, but then they matched me with a bunch of little tiny startups -- including one on in a different hemisphere! -- doing uninspiring work. I talked with two, one of which ended up ghosting, and ended up declining a flyout to the other.

Three weeks later I got an email from Triplebyte saying they were "pausing your process".

Huh, really? I thought it sounded interesting years ago and checked them out. I then read that it was for jobs/people in San Francisco only, and my reaction was, as the kids say, "lmao". Never thought about them again. Had no idea they moved on to allowing places that were potentially elsewhere and even in different hemispheres.

In fairness I could be mis-remembering the details, but it was something about making apps for Africa; I thought they were based somewhere there but it's been a couple years.

We had a couple startups in Nigeria. Was never a major hub for us, but we always had a handful of folks in Lagos.

Triplebyte was always responsive to news on HN and seemed to actually try to work with the community. I'm glad they found an exit.

I've used Triplebyte the past few months. It hasn't been a good experience to put it lightly. The idea for it sounded nice 4 or 5 years ago, but they've just pivoted in a poor direction.

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