Comment by the_jeremy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_jeremy | Hacker News Reader

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

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