
Harj Taggar Is Building a New Technical Hiring Pipeline with TripleByte - bvrlt
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/07/triplebyte/
======
Harj
Founder here. We wrote some more here about our thinking behind what we want
to do: [http://blog.triplebyte.com/announcing-
triplebyte](http://blog.triplebyte.com/announcing-triplebyte)

Our plan is to continually experiment with new ways to measure technical
ability, that aren't as adversarial as most standard practices today. We'd
love to hear any ideas for more experiments we could run.

~~~
xnull6guest
Something I've been thinking about for a long time - I'll add this here
because you and others at HN are more likely to be able to act on it than I
am.

It seems to me that hiring teams of programmers that are known to work well
together and have proven track records is a smart idea. The reason is that
hiring individual programmers, who may or may not get along with one another,
and whose individual hire decisions may or may not cover the breadth needed or
may result in redundancies - is an inefficient and strange practice.

What if you needed an IT department and could hire groups of programmers who
have, collectively, proven track records of managing IT well? Need a website
done? Yeah, you could hire a designer, a backend server woman, a database guy,
a CMS guru - and hope they all get along well and work together.

Or we could imagine hiring a team of people who manage themselves to get the
result you're asking for.

Dunno. Zany idea.

~~~
dkasper
That's basically the idea behind a lot of talent acquisitions.

~~~
hkmurakami
Also the idea behind hiring a VP of Engineering (at a startup) who'll bring in
his previous team(s).

------
mildbow
Just doing a shotgun application to a bunch of startups seems like a
hilariously bad idea. But maybe I'm biased because I'm currently recovering
from burnout from working at a startup that I joined for the wrong reasons.

There is only __one __reason to join a startup as an employee: you really
really really believe in the mission and you reallyx3+ believe that the team
can execute. Anything else and you aren 't doing the team or yourself any
favours.

So, what are you really applying for?

 _So you can have a "worked at a YC startup" on your resume:_

Just go work for google or facebook or amazon: you'll actually learn a tonne
more about engineering/product dev at any of those places and they are a much
better brandname for the rest of your career. Think you wont get into those
companies? Spend a month preparing for the rigamarole that is a technical
interview and you'll be fine.

 _So you can get investor contact:_

Just apply to YC/techstars/500startups. Or email investors directly. Any of
those options work better. You aren't getting any meaningful investor contact
by being an employee.

 _So you can learn how a startup works to start your own:_

Anyone who tells you this is deluded or conning you. There ain't nothing to it
but to do it. The only way to learn how to do your startup is to do it.
Nothing else comes close. Anything else is an excuse.

~~~
derefr
> There is only one reason to join a startup as an employee: you really really
> really believe in the mission and you reallyx3 believe that the team can
> execute.

...what if you really need the money (and never finished college, so no
bigcorps are interested)?

~~~
mildbow
What do you mean "bigcorps aren't interested" ?

Are you applying through the blackhole that is an online resume upload? Don't
do that.

Find someone in your network who works at one of these places and get them to
forward your resume.

Oh yeah, if you really need the money, maybe an early stage startup isn't the
best idea :P

~~~
AwesomeGriffin
> Find someone in your network who works at one of these places and get them
> to forward your resume.

People who haven't been to college aren't likely to have those kinds of
connections. If they do, they're not going to be desperate for work.

> Oh yeah, if you really need the money, maybe an early stage startup isn't
> the best idea :P

If you really need the money you'll work for the next paycheck no matter who's
paying it, even if it's just for the next month or two.

~~~
htormey
"People who haven't been to college aren't likely to have those kinds of
connections. If they do, they're not going to be desperate for work."

It's really not that hard to meet and develop a relationship with someone who
works at FB/Apple/Google/Etc. Especially if you live in the Bay area and go to
meetups/network a little.

~~~
vonmoltke
I would drop the "especially". Outside of a precious few areas, networking
opportunities are hard to come by outside of the few companies that have
offices in your area. Even then, more likely than not those companies have HR
policies that require applicants to go through the black hole regardless of
where they came from.

The whole world is not the Bay Area. Most of us do not have it so easy as to
be able to walk into random meetups and leave with three potential contacts at
decent tech companies.

~~~
htormey
I have been living in the Bay area for the last 8 years but originally I grew
up and went to university in Ireland. Hardly the center of the tech universe
at the time.

I made a lot of contacts by organizing local meetups, travelling to different
conferences in other parts of Europe and fostering relationships online.

I now work as a software engineer at Facebook, prior to that I worked at
Apple. Effective networking takes a lot of work and can be achieved even if
you are living in a remote area.

------
Harj
Triplebyte founder here, we're managing the application process for this. We
wrote some more here about how we're running our process:
[http://blog.triplebyte.com/announcing-
triplebyte](http://blog.triplebyte.com/announcing-triplebyte)

If you have any feedback or thoughts, we'd love to hear them.

~~~
tejasm
How do current YC companies fill-in non-technical positions? Are there plans
in near-future to cover these positions too?

~~~
Harj
That's something we could definitely expand to in the future. For now we're
focusing on programmers both because that's the biggest need and it's likely a
big challenge just becoming experts at that.

------
jzila
My favorite part of this is that it reduces the n*m engineers-to-employers
search problem to an n+m problem (to an extent).

Right now, engineers search through many companies to find a job, and
companies search through many engineers to fill a position. The traditional
way this is done is an interview gauntlet, whose primary purpose is to verify
technical ability. Since that's something that should only be done once per
engineer, TripleByte seems to be providing that intermediary service. Then a
much shorter set of interviews can be used to check fit, thus saving each
candidate and company an incredible amount of time.

hired.com is another company trying to do something like this, albeit using a
slightly different methodology.

edit: I accidentally a word.

------
parennoob
As a engineer who is not a startup founder, my initial reaction is that of
"Don't use these guys if you are a jobseeker!" Detailed data on how you did in
a specific set of tests (which may have nothing to do with what you do on the
job) will be benchmarked not only during your initial application, _but also
throughout your job at the company, and at future companies that use
TripleByte_.

> "But this is a horizontal technical HR layer that spreads across many
> companies, instead of being contained inside one enormous corporation."

Perhaps being pessimistic, but I have no wish for a the future where I go from
a company that is using TripleByte to another one that is also doing the same,
and being told "We know your TripleByte score on your last job was 315, we
won't give you $X unless you raise that to 400 in your first year". I also
don't understand how this won't create a collusion of sorts amongst companies
who all use TripleByte (since TripleByte knows exactly how much they pay you).

[Please feel free to correct me if I have missed out on some fundamental
different in the way the company works. I have enormous respect for the
founder (Harj) personally, but this seems like a bad idea for the majority of
the workforce. ]

~~~
Harj
Thanks for the thoughts! We have no desire to create something akin to a
credit score that could be used against people. What we're trying to do is
build a process that makes it easy for applicants to show their strengths,
that's the kind of information we want to share with employers vs a numerical
score. Our focus is entirely on helping discover talented people who might be
overlooked by current processes.

------
7Figures2Commas
> We don't care where you went to school or which companies you've worked at.
> We only care if you can code.

Filtering candidates by pedigree is one of the biggest mistakes companies
make, particularly in Silicon Valley, but filtering by coding ability (as
measured primarily by online tests) is just as naive.

There are tons of people who can code themselves out of a maze but struggle to
ship code that solves real problems and creates real value.

A lot of startups would do better with mediocre engineers who can see the big
picture than superb engineers who can't see beyond their monitor.

From [https://triplebyte.com/manifesto](https://triplebyte.com/manifesto):

> Companies should not have to make recruiting a core competency.

This is incredibly flawed, especially for startups. Recruiting is a two-way
street. If an early-stage startup can't effectively sell itself to candidates,
chances are it won't be able to sell itself to customers, partners, etc.

------
wasd
> As for their revenue model, TripleByte takes a 25 percent cut of an
> engineer’s first-year salary, which is a fairly typical model for recruiting
> agencies.

Hey Harj,

Do you think that by charging a flat % of the first year salary that
TripleByte might be adding downward pressure on the potential salary for an
engineer?

~~~
Harj
I think the upwards pressure from companies not being able to hire enough good
engineers is likely a much stronger force. That being said, we're not tied to
the % model. We plan to experiment with both our selection process and pricing
to figure out what works best.

~~~
cehrnrooth
One cool innovation I've seen is converting from a % upfront model to a %
recurring model (Ex. instead of 25% upfront convert to 2% over 12 months).

It benefits start-ups because they don't have a large cash outlay at once and
aligns the incentives of the firm to find great candidates that will stick. It
also creates a more predictable revenue stream in the form of monthly
recurring revenue.

~~~
Harj
We think that's a great idea and something we're looking at too, especially
for startups with less funding.

------
lukasm
To save most of you the hassle. It's Visa and US work permit only.

~~~
ammon
Founder here. Yeah, sorry about that. We totally intend to work with people
without visas (it's actually where the idea started). We're just doing a
phased launch. Talking to lots of people on the phone is hard to scale. We'll
be removing the restriction as soon as we can.

EDIT People without visas are free to register now. They just can't book phone
calls. We'll let everyone who registers know when they can book a call.

~~~
jnotarstefano
Uhm, something weird happened. I tried booking without a visa to see the
error, but it let my booking through (I then cancelled my reservation).

------
_lex
I gotta say, this is a great move for founders + companies: Commoditizing your
components will lead to downward price pressure on engineering wages. Also,
it's superficially great for employees too: apply to a common app and get
prequalified for N companies rather than 1. But I doubt any of those companies
will ACTUALLY change their hiring funnels, which means that this is just an
extra, gratuitous step in the process. Perhaps there will be the benefit of
being introduced to many hiring funnels at once, but that could have been
achieved by an "are you hiring" email, or by checking out those companies'
hiring websites.

~~~
smil
Harj is not really interested in creating a service that "measures" a person's
ability or "predicting" their future performance, because that's impossible to
do.

What they're really doing is creating a cargo cult tool that gives the
illusion of being "objective" and using "data", so that they can sell the
serivce based on this appearance, and later get bought out by LinkedIn or
something.

Perhaps they're doing a startup themselves because they had problems finding
jobs due to hiring practices such as these.

------
egusa
It's great to see earlier YC Partners going back into the program again, it
really speaks to how strong YC is. Best of luck Harj!

------
Peroni
_If TripleByte’s software was even trained on a sufficient volume of data,
Taggar imagines it could even make the hiring decision if technical ability is
the sole criteria._

When is technical ability ever the sole criteria? Granted it would be
incredibly useful to know up front if a candidate is technically strong enough
but you still need to establish if a candidate would work well with your team.
Technical ability is worthless if the candidate has a horrible attitude.

That being said, the idea of accumulating significant data over a significant
period of time and actually defining what makes a successful engineer is
intriguing.

~~~
ammon
Hey, founder here. Yes, we totally agree that things other than technical
ability matter. Some of these things (productivity, ability to work on a team,
communication ability) we think we can evaluate. Others (company culture) we
can't. As you say, however, getting better at identifying good engineers
(outside of any company's specific requirements) is valuable.

------
danielrakh
I'd love if there could be more information about what YC companies are
participating in hiring through this process. Or have I missed that info
somewhere?

------
mavdi
Here, I spotted your problem for you: "move to the Bay Area"

~~~
kwi
Hey, founder here. No worries then, there are plenty of YC startups outside
the Bay Area :)

~~~
mavdi
I meant the fact that one should move at all. You guys are locking yourself
out of a huge market of potentially great developers because you don't
consider remote work.

~~~
dasmoth
Y Combinator does seem to be generally anti-remote, at least for early stage
startups:

    
    
            http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire
    

Agree it's a shame.

------
lawl
Heh, the HR at my old company sent me too many bullshit candidates. We had
already tried a solution where you'd solve multiple problems and then get
assigned a score, but it sucked, every single one of them was an algorithm
question.

I hacked out a quick page (that'd inform you it'll log everything, but gave
you the problem to solve only after you accepted), that litterally asked you
to solve fizzbuzz in any language you like. But it logged timestamped
keystrokes to the server and if the tab lost focus.

Of course I wrote a small player that would replay the logs so you could watch
the candidate come up with the solution and watch them writing it :)

I just had too many candidates googling questions in a phone interview, so we
changed our process.

They'd take the online fizzbuzz test, and then we'll invite them for an onsite
interview if they pass, in my opinion it worked surprisingly well.

Too bad I can't try out how these guys are doing it.

~~~
JoshTriplett
With that approach, anyone who immediately switches to a programmer's editor
to write the code and pastes it in when done (either manually or via something
like It's All Text) will look identical to a candidate who searched for the
answer and pasted it in. The former is a property you'd want to select _for_ ,
while the latter is one you'd want to select _against_.

~~~
lawl
Yes. That's why i had a big fat warning telling them to not to this before
they started the process :)

The page before they started basically told them everything we'd do. My line
of thought was that anyone being able to bypass it is worth interviewing
anyways.

I explicitiy told them that we'd log EVERYTHING and asked them to directly
write the browser in the JS IDE (well, syntax highlight but no autocomplete)
that'll come up, and that they shouldn't switch tabs or windows.

I still think this is fair, for litterally fizzbuzz, nothing similar or
anything, just fizzbuzz.

I didn't care about (small) syntax/logic errors or anything (because you'd
never run the code), but you wouldn't believe the amount of people unaware of
the modulo operator.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Ah. If you're upfront about it, that's somewhat more reasonable. Though I'd
still rather see more approaches that are tools-agnostic, and better
approximations of real work.

~~~
lawl
Fair enough, I slightly amended my post, but I think asking for fizzbuzz with
generic syntax highlighting is fair enough. As I think it's simple enough to
write tool agnostic, because I'd expect you to be able to write it in _any
language you like_ , ignoring fatal syntax errors.

It's really just fizzbuzz, not an approximation of real life world, we had on
site interviews for that (Switzerland is quite small, not sure how that'd
apply to the US).

------
vonmoltke
TripleByte, like many other people and companies, refers to "software
engineers" as if they are a monolithic group. Is this another case where there
is an implicit "web and mobile" attached to "engineer", or is the process
really flexible enough for engineers of all skillsets?

------
tyke
Congrats on the launch. This feels a little bit "code monkey" to me. We don't
care who you are, or what you're like, as long as you can write code. Do you
plan to account for the "soft skills"? I'd expect YC companies to hire for
more than raw engineering abilities.

~~~
Harj
We definitely recognize there's more to a person than just engineering ability
:) For now that's what we're focusing on because it's more quantifiable and we
think companies are better placed to assess soft skills, since those are
usually more specific to them.

------
soham
In 2007, researchers published a seminal paper which shows that the more
meritocratic you think your company is, the more biased you
are:([http://www.socialjudgments.com/docs/Uhlmann%20and%20Cohen%20...](http://www.socialjudgments.com/docs/Uhlmann%20and%20Cohen%202007.pdf)).

While that is also human to do, and company cultures obviously develop flavors
over time, when it comes to technical hiring, we sorely need an effort to
first prove and then to reduce biases, based on data. This is a great effort.

At [http://InterviewKickstart.com](http://InterviewKickstart.com), we're
trying to do this indirectly in a small way. The better you are at solving
problems, the less the biases affect you.

~~~
peachepe
Can I get an invite?

~~~
soham
Please send me an email soham@interviewki... Thanks!

------
ipince
While it seems time-saving, I don't think putting all your eggs in one basket
is a good idea when it comes to interviewing. If you bomb the interview (it
can happen to great engineers), then you've effectively shut yourself out of
every YC company? I'd much rather interview 5 times and be 99% sure I'll get
one, than go all or nothing and potentially get screwed.

------
nedwin
Really dig that the first pass doesn't eliminate those who studied at schools
other than Stanford.

------
m3talridl3y
> Triple byte. > Not word aligned. > My hardcore c programmer in me is
> freaking out.

------
lovelearner
I liked the site, but I disliked being forced to answer questions about
languages you don't know the internals of. Even very basic questions about
(what is x) and (what will the program return) are more complicated than they
seem under the hood.

------
philippnagel
Can one get access to ones results? (Even though I have no visa anyways)

------
tsmtsm
How are you planning on not having companies using the referred candidates
from your platform and hiring them outside of TripleByte?

------
nphyte
Is the fizzbuzz diff for diff positions(frontend,backend,mobile,security) or?

~~~
ammon
No, it's not. We think that understanding basic code should apply to everyone.
That said, we're not trusting the fizzbuzz for now. We're going to talk to the
first several hundred people who apply, then look for correlations

------
izqui
Such a bummer it is only for people having a US Visa already.

------
ia
i'm in the market for a remote position. is that something that would work
here? or is this only for locals or those able to move to the bay area?

~~~
lukasm
Checkout my repo [https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-
job](https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job)

~~~
ia
i will, thanks!

------
aantix
Nauseating.

You're an engineer. You can create millions of dollars of worth for a company.

Do yourself a favor; learn to market yourself. Learn to create opportunities
for yourself.

Want to work at a YC company? Write them directly.

Want to actually make money today, instead of hoping for some grand exit five
years down the line? Demonstrate your value (in money), show that you can
code, pitch your services to prospective companies and charge a premium.

Please stop joining recruiting companies where you're shoved down a "pipeline"
or somewhere where you're considered a "resource" or some outfit that has the
name "staffing" in their company name.

You're better than that.

~~~
danudey
Well first, that's an extremely elitist point of view. Your argument seems to
be 'If you're not a rock-em sock-em networking people-person, you don't
deserve a job'.

Secondly, this is about helping YC companies hire. Doing the hard, complex
work of filtering out for quality candidates, rather than spending weeks of
your time interviewing instead of actually improving their product.

Thirdly, not all engineers are battle-hardened 10x SV rockstar ninjas. Some
people have programming experience but haven't gotten into the SV echo chamber
yet, some people are new to the industry, some people are from other
countries, etc. Sure, you ideally want to build yourself up and make a name
for yourself, contribute to projects, create some value, but when you're
starting out that's basically a load of bullshit as far as useful advice goes,
unless you're suggesting people just don't take a job until they've spent a
few years self-promoting.

~~~
aantix
>'If you're not a rock-em sock-em networking people-person, you don't deserve
a job'

Writing a direct email to a YC Founder vs relying on someone else is far from
a "rock-em sock-em neworking people-person". That's basic self-advocacy.

This company takes 25% of your first years salary. Regardless of whether the
engineer or the company pays for it, it's less money on the table for you.

YC Combinator companies are well known. If you want to work for one, write
them directly. Ask for what you want. Advocate for yourself.

You've probably worked very hard to get where you're at, whether it's your
schooling or a long, hard fought career. Don't let someone else represent your
accomplishments or your compensation needs.

------
MichaelCrawford
"no resumes, just show us you can code."

My resume has 27 years of showing other employers that I can code. I worked
hard to build that resume.

The problem I have these days, being 51 years old and quite public about the
fact that I am mentally ill, is that no one believes that I can code.

~~~
ammon
I see the problem. Experience is certainly valuable. But a resume also shows
age and status. We're working to eliminate age discrimination (and other
biases). That's part of why we do blind phone interviews.

~~~
seiji
> But a resume also shows age and status.

...and accomplishments, leadership, responsibility (assuming no grossly
fabricated lies).

> That's part of why we do blind phone interviews.

Phone calls still reveal a lot. Gender, age, native language, .... Only 100%
text based communication is (reasonably) age+genderless.

~~~
mrkurt
Actually, a resume just shows you can craft a resume. It's not a good way to
show leadership skills, or demonstrate experience, etc.

We've been much more respectful of people (which is good for us) since we
stopped looking at resumes.

~~~
seiji
> Actually, a resume just shows you can craft a resume.

It also conveys communication skills. What good is a programmer who can write
code but can't write a document describing their own work history?

The world isn't programmers. What if you want a non-programmer role? Leads,
organizers, directors? Do CEO candidates sit down and write a binary search
tree? (of course not, being installed as a CEO means you are one of a
privileged class who are given roles, not one who "tries out" for things.)

~~~
mrkurt
If you wanted a programmer who could communicate well, why on earth would you
want them to communicate work history? A well written resume _can_ show good
communication skills, but not necessarily the special flavor you need.

CEOs and other execs aren't screened with resumes. For better or worse, it's
all about their networking skills, perception of previous history, etc.

------
mallyvai
Founder of [http://OfferLetter.io](http://OfferLetter.io) here - Harj, love
what you're doing with a common YC app, and the spirit of the hiring
manifesto.

I'm curious about your approach to making sure the candidate experience is
really top-notch since it's still your platform, and how deep you plan on
going - even good startups may put forth exploding offers, lowball candidates,
forget candidates due to high-pressure sales tactics, etc. This doesn't leave
a great taste in engineers' mouths.

Pure top-of-funnel filtering is important, but seems oversaturated. The
candidate experience and matchmaking process seem like the real
differentiators. What do you feel is the best way to address these?

