[jchiu1106]

Without passing the minimum bar, how does Triplebyte distinguish itself from other 1000 platforms where people post resumes?

Also, dissing those who have passed the bar as "engineers who like tests" is disrespectful. When they first launched, passing the bar makes you (in their words) a highly qualified engineer, and now passing the bar means nothing except that you only "like tests"...lol

Fundamentally, I think this invalidates Triplebyte's business model. Companies don't really care if someone passes your tests. They still put you through LC type interviews onsite. They simply save a phone screen.

[DanielDe]

I worked at Triplebyte several years ago (but way before any of these changes were being discussed - this blog post is the first I'm hearing of them). I'm an engineer, but I spent a lot of time with the account management team talking to companies. And the biggest thing I remember is how much those companies pushed back on our "rules". They were all eager to talk to the top .1% of candidates, but otherwise just seemed to want an unfiltered firehose of resumes.

So while in theory I like the idea of this meritocratic minimum bar granting special privileges (I liked it enough to join Triplebyte!), in practice we seemed to be fighting an uphill battle with all but a few candidates each month.

On the other hand, I have wasted a lot of time in conversations with recruiters only to be let down at the end by mismatched expectations. I'm interested to see if this new approach can make a meaningful difference in that problem.

[rachofsunshine]

> Without passing the minimum bar, how does Triplebyte distinguish itself from other 1000 platforms where people post resumes?

We still have the quiz, and we still show performance on it prominently on your profile (provided you've chosen to share those scores). In fact, we've put a lot of energy into improving the trust companies place in our quizzes over the past year precisely because we think that skills data is important.

> Also, dissing those who have passed the bar as "engineers who like tests" is disrespectful. When they first launched, passing the bar makes you (in their words) a highly qualified engineer, and now passing the bar means nothing except that you only "like tests"...lol

Heh, yeah, that's fair, at least to a point.

Our quizzes are predictive. We know this from a lot of objective data, it's what you'd expect subjectively, and companies do tell us that they trust and value that data. That does not mean that our tests have no bias towards certain personality types. Different people respond differently to testing, and that does have a differential effect, not because our tests are bad but because testing is inherently somewhat artificial.

I actually taught test prep before joining Triplebyte years ago, so I've been this first-hand: it was not uncommon for a student who'd been doing well in practice sessions to crumple under the pressure of the real thing. That doesn't mean the test is bad, it just means that some people fare better on tests than others for reasons other than just their raw ability. When we say "likes tests", that's more what we mean: not that that's the only reason someone does well on a test, but that people who perform well in isolated, pressured environments do better relative to their skills than others.

[ALittleLight]

An alternate explanation is that you want more users and the quiz is one of the top things excluding people from the top of your funnel.

[rachofsunshine]

Well, yeah - weren't we pretty upfront about the fact that we were only serving a relatively small number of people? That's not the same thing as "we were only taking good engineers and now we take a new cohort of just bad engineers", though.

[itsdrewmiller]

I love standardized tests and I got a little bit of that dopamine hit from the triplebyte test, too.

[erik_seaberg]

> crumple under the pressure of the real thing

I think that goes to another ability. If we need a candidate to gracefully handle a 3 AM production outage, we should expect them to handle an interview.

[TulliusCicero]

That sounds relevant for an SRE/DevOps position, but less relevant for many SWE's. If I'm an Android dev, "oncall" just doesn't have much meaning.