[marme]

the draw they have for engineering talent side is that you do preliminary interview with them and then move straight to on sites with companies they recommend you to. It means you can have 10 on sites without having to do 10 phone screens

[canistr]

This sounds like it's optimizing for the wrong component of the interview process. I've never had issues with spending time on phone screens because they are one of the main ways in which I screen companies I'm interested in.

It's the technical interviewing portion that's a pain to have to re-do over and over again. Especially if it involves travelling across the country to do. Engineers are ultimately looking at company and engineering culture to choose between.

The other thing is that for some engineers, they might perform well in one on-site versus another for many reasons such as the questions asked, interviewer rating, or something as trivial as mood. Seems like Triplebyte giving people one-chance makes this difficult.

Ultimately, I feel the main crux of hiring/interviews/finding the right talent is training. If the industry is over-fitting on people who can pass whiteboarding, then why aren't there more startups focused on this aspect? Not just passing interviews (e.g. outco.io), but actually focused on training systems design and algorithms. Universities don't do that in undergrad or grad school.

[pmiller2]

I very much agree with all of this. To me, the main draw of Triplebyte was "no whiteboarding." I suck at whiteboarding, so I went through the project track. And, yes, there was no whiteboarding, but what do they replace it with? Live coding. Yeah, like that's going to go any better. I'd have been better off at the whiteboard where I could at least fudge the syntax a little.

[nsm]

(Disclaimer: Applied and at current job through Triplebyte)

Seconded. I don't use LinkedIn or recruiters. When I was looking, I was applying manually to several companies, and setting up phone screens and so on was very exhausting and timing things was complicated. Triplebyte allowed me to combine the primary stages for a couple of companies and helped a lot with prep.

[pmiller2]

My overall feeling is mixed. Given the time commitment, if all you get to bypass is the initial phone screen of ~1 hour, that means you need to go on 4-7 on-sites to break even. On the other hand, some of those on-sites might be from companies that wouldn't have even phone screened you. It's really hard to say whether it's worth it or not from the candidate side, IMO.

[dsk139]

Hopefully someone good at matching doesn't need to send you to 10 on-sites to find you a good fit. That sounds exhausting and unproductive.

[Harj]

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.

[ryandrake]

Wow. Do you actually find that less than 10 on-sites is sufficient to obtain at least one offer? A >10% success rate seems very high to me, even with the vetting you provide. Admittedly I have only anecdotal data.