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Harjon Visualizing a Job Search Or: How to Find a Job as a Software Engineer

We're aiming to expand to both remote roles and companies based outside of the Bay Area early next year. We've seen a lot of demand for this since we launched, we've been careful about expanding because our focus has been on getting the details of our technical interviewing process correct.

Harjon Visualizing a Job Search Or: How to Find a Job as a Software Engineer

We save you the time of repeated technical phone screens across companies. Companies will do a pitch call with our candidates as the first step, where they pitch themselves to you and after that you decide if you'd like to move forward with them.

Harjon Visualizing a Job Search Or: How to Find a Job as a Software Engineer

We wish we could work with you :(

In the meantime, we're working on making companies more aware of the H1-B transfer options (http://blog.triplebyte.com/gaming-the-h-1b-system-for-good) and the recent OPT visa STEM extenstion (https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/students-and-exc...).

Harjon Visualizing a Job Search Or: How to Find a Job as a Software Engineer

They key thing is to minimize the amount of time a candidate is waiting back to hear from you on the next step. We see a strong correlation between the companies who have the highest closing rates on candidates (70% or more) and how responsive they are in every interaction. The best companies will respond to a candidate on next steps within 24 hours at every step of the process.

Harjon Visualizing a Job Search Or: How to Find a Job as a Software Engineer

This is the first time I've seen a data visualization of the job search process for a software engineer and it's amazing to see the variability in responsiveness between companies.

This is actually the most surprising thing I've seen since we started Triplebyte. Originally I'd assumed that every company complaining about how difficult it is to hire engineers, would be moving every candidate through their process as quickly as possible. In practice we learnt to stop working with companies who were too dysfunctional to get back to candidates promptly - even if it's just to let them know they needed a few more days to make a decision.

We'll also often see dysfunctional companies switch to the extreme opposite end of the responsiveness spectrum once they've made an offer and start pushing candidates to make a decision immediately. Better to have been responsiveness throughout the process. I suspect companies still underestimate how much that makes a candidate more positively inclined towards them once they're at the decision making stage.

Harjon State of Starfighter

We agree, that's why our technical interviews are done blind without knowing anything about the credentials of a candidate.

Harjon State of Starfighter

Getting a phone interview by contacting a company is easy if you have the right resume credentials. If not, you need someone to vouch for you to even get in the door. That's what we're doing for engineers who are strong but lack these credentials and the connections to be referred.

We find that engineers who apply to us even if they have those resume credentials are doing so for two reasons:

(1) People only have bandwidth to talk with a few companies. We have enough data across companies to filter out the ones you won't be a technical fit for. This saves the wasted time of failed onsites, which as you say is the bane of existence for programmers.

(2) Finding companies you wouldn't have otherwise heard about or realized were an interesting option for you. We can especially help here with engineers interested in joining smaller companies that haven't had breakout success yet.

Traditional recruiters only help with getting you an introduction to an arbitrary company (usually whichever responded first to an email blast). We strongly believe that a recruiting service which does intelligent matching provides a lot of value for both candidates and companies (we wrote more about that here: http://blog.triplebyte.com/triplebyte-engineer-genome-projec...).

Harjon State of Starfighter

That said, I hope they can start offering more value over time.

We currently do help with thinking through offer details. We've been building up a database of what offer ranges are and help people use these to value their offers (equity ranges in particular are opaque and tough to unpack). We do also get candidates ready for interviews by providing detailed feedback on how they did on our process (for many people this is the first personal interviewing feedback they've heard).

Longer term there are many more things we'd like to help with as we keep gathering more data. The one I'm most excited about is using data from how our engineers perform at companies over time to improve our screening process and make predictions about success at a company post joining, not just on the interview process.

Harjon Triplebyte Engineer Genome Project

We've worked with enough engineers to be confident they're finding value and advantages to using Triplebyte. The feedback has included finding interesting companies (especially earlier stage ones) they'd not known about, skipping technical phone screens (even if you know you'll pass, they still suck), getting feedback on the Triplebyte technical interview, having interview scheduling handled by us, getting a high offer rate and help thinking through offers.

Assuming you can get companies to engage with you (i.e. you already have the right resume credentials) you could invest the time in achieving these same goals yourself as you're saying. For people who don't want to make that time investment, we can save time in a way that other recruiters can't by filtering companies using data about your technical skills and skipping those phone screens. The companies we work with don't trust other recruiters to do this screening correctly.

Our interview also doesn't require taking a day off work, it takes 2.5 hours and is done remotely via Google Hangouts.

Harjon Triplebyte Engineer Genome Project

This is something we're able to do too by encouraging people to reapply and tracking how much they've improved between technical interviews. It makes sense for companies to do this too but they don't, mostly because it's never any single person's area of focus.

Harjon Triplebyte Engineer Genome Project

That's under the "Long Term" section of our product roadmap.

Harjon Triplebyte Engineer Genome Project

Finding the right company to join is hard, you have to find which companies are doing interesting things that match your interests and then narrow down to the ones where you'll be both a technical and cultural fit. Failed interviews are a big time suck and we see that most people only have the stamina to interview with a few companies and they'll often accept one of the first offers they get, rather than optimizing for the companies they're most excited about. We have the data to match you with companies you'll be a strong technical fit, which saves you wasting time speaking to companies who don't value your particular engineering skills. The end result is a more efficient job search process, giving you more options by speaking with less companies.

We do also reduce the total amount of time engineers have to spend in technical interviews. Triplebyte candidates skip the technical phone screens, usually an hour per company at least. If you're speaking with at least 3 companies (which everyone working with us is), you've already saved time as our technical interview is 2.5 hours.

Happy to talk more about this, harj AT triplebyte.

Harjon Triplebyte Engineer Genome Project

When we started Triplebyte, we'd thought there would be pretty much a straight line from being a bad to great programmer and we'd just have to figure out where to put the cut off when deciding whether to work with an engineer. The biggest surprise has been just how much disagreement there is amongst companies on what a "great engineer" actually means.

That's when we realized we were actually working on a mapping problem and the first step was figuring out a universal set of criteria that all companies care about. Then if we could assign the right weight for each attribute to specific companies, we could route engineers only to companies they'll be a strong technical fit for.

It'd be great to get thoughts on the criteria we chose and experiences from engineers who have done a lot of technical interviewing,

Harjon Manifesto: Things we believe about hiring

I apologize for that. Writing personalized rejection emails for interviewees that gives clear feedback is something we're committed to and we apologize we didn't meet that goal here.

I don't know the specifics of your interview but we do often make a decision to not move forward even when we reach a working solution. That could be for a wide range of reasons (design choices are one example, or seeing engineers we move forward with covering more ground beyond an initial working solution might be another).

We know we'll inevitably get false negatives in our process, if you've any other feedback I'd be grateful to hear it. harj AT triplebyte DOT com.

Harjon How to Pass a Programming Interview

Usually the only way to circumvent the technical phone screens at a company are if you're coming in through a strong referral. That's great if you already have a strong network, not so much if you either don't have personal connections or a resume with the credentials recruiters are trained to look for.

Just focusing on interviewing time, if you're talking to 3 or more companies that's approximately 3 hours of technical phone screens (usually repeating similar problems). With Triplebyte, you interview for 2.5 hours and save 3 (or more as you talk with more companies).

Harjon How to Pass a Programming Interview

If you apply to Triplebyte you don't go through the full interview process at the companies we introduce you to. You skip the technical phone screens (most companies do 1 or 2 hour long phone screens before bringing candidates onsite) and go straight to on-sites.

Where we can really save time is focusing on the matching process of candidates to companies. Interviewing is tiring and we find candidates often stop talking to companies they were initially excited about because they're exhausted from interviewing (usually after 4 on sites) and just want to accept an offer

We wrote before about how much hiring preferences vary across YC companies (http://blog.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies-want). By using data we get from the Triplebyte interview, we can send you to the companies where you've the strongest likelihood of passing the technical onsite. The result is getting the best set of offers to choose from, rather than picking from what's available before interview burnout sets in.

Harjon Fixing the Inequity of Startup Equity

Sure that works early on but we wanted to get momentum behind a solution that would work for any size/stage of company.

Harjon Fixing the Inequity of Startup Equity

It's ten years from the date the options are granted, which is how long the options themselves last for.

Harjon Fixing the Inequity of Startup Equity

Sorry about that, fixed. Here's the link: https://data.triplebyte.com/extending-stock-option-exercise-...

Harjon Fixing the Inequity of Startup Equity

We're excited to make 10 years the new standard option exercise window for startup employees. Each of us have personally experienced someone close to us dealing with the stress of trying to exercise their options within 90 days and it sucks.

We'd like to see more companies making this change, we'll be keeping the public list of YC companies who have either implemented or pledged to implement an extended window, updated here: https://triplebyte.com/ycombinator-startups/extended-options

Harjon Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days

Absolutely, we keep in touch with companies post hiring and are gathering that data too. It won't be meaningful for a while though, interview performance gives us a tangible starting point.

Harjon Gaming the H-1B system for good

This is why we think there's an opportunity for us (Triplebyte). Smaller companies have to focus their recruiting on pools with a high expected ROI (top technology companies/schools/etc). We're specializing in identifying talent without using any of the the usual signals (we do our technical interviews without looking at resumes). We can focus on pools of talent that other companies might not consider because they expect the majority of candidates wouldn't be a good fit.

Also in this particular case, I fundamentally believe there are a number of talented engineers working at these outsourcing companies because it was their only option and they're too afraid to move.

Harjon Gaming the H-1B system for good

We do indeed refer lawyers to companies, in particular ones who have filed a number of these petitions for YC startups in the past so we know they're good.

Harjon Gaming the H-1B system for good

We do full technical interviews with applicants and at this point, we have a pretty solid dataset on how to calibrate them and would be confident any engineers we're working with have the skills startups are looking for.

Our goal isn't to directly hurt the outsourcing companies, it's to help talented engineers find work they enjoy and not be held back by visa fears. Even doing that for a few people would be worthwhile.

Harjon Gaming the H-1B system for good

They wouldn't be transferred to us or spend any time unemployed. Once someone goes through our process, we become their advocate and find them startups they'd be a good match for. They don't have to leave their employer until they've found one willing to hire them, at which point they can begin the transfer process.

Harjon Thank you, Y Combinator

Working with Garry at YC was one of the highlights of my career. He simply cares more about other people than anyone I've ever met, which makes him both a dream colleague and friend.

Harjon Take-home interviews

Triplebyte co-founder here. We understand how frustrating it'd be to spend time on a project and then have no one read it, we won't be doing that. In our process, you schedule a time to talk with us about the code you've written. We'll go through it together and provide feedback.

We're not replacing talking to another person part of the interview, we're just trying to remove the awkwardness of having someone watch you code (for those programmers who want it).

Harjon Take-home interviews

That's definitely something we've started addressing as we optimize the process of matching programmers with the right startups. We're starting to gather data on how the YC companies run their hiring processes (seeing the degree of variance has been fascinating) and we can use that to avoid exactly this happening.

Harjon YC startups that are hiring

Hey, one of the Triplebyte founders here. We do using coding problems but we try hard to mitigate the issues you bring up. We give candidates a selection of problems to choose from and we'll often explain how to solve a problem if it seems they're getting stuck. We're less interested in sudden flashes of insight and more looking to see if someone can write code and implement ideas they talk about.

We know it's still not perfect though and our goal is to keep experimenting to find what works best and be open about the results. As we mentioned in our last blog post, we're planning to offer take home tests as an option for our next experiment.

Harjon What happens when you stop relying on resumes

That's definitely true. Do you have a particular set of questions you ask during project interviews? If so, which ones tend to be the most revealing?