Triplebyte was already a joke, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Their whole “Fast Track” program claiming to allow you to skip technical interviews is a total fraud of a marketing ploy.
They make you take a 2 hour live coding interview with a Triplebyte engineer, with the promise that if you pass, you won’t need to do any more technical interviews with companies through Triplebyte, only “final-round personality-style on-sites”.
The reality is that any company who contacts you is STILL going to run you thru their entire interviewing process. The extra 2 hour interview with Triplebyte is literally pointless - and any company you try to discuss this “policy” with will be caught confused and off guard.
It’s no surprise to me that a company that blatantly lies about their offering would do some crap like this.
Shame on Triplebyte for their fraudulent and dishonest nature.
"They make you take a 2 hour live coding interview with a Triplebyte engineer, with the promise that if you pass, you won’t need to do any more technical interviews with companies through Triplebyte, only “final-round personality-style on-sites”."
I was never given the impression that there would be no more technical interviews after the Triplebyte one. They were always crystal clear with me that there would be 2 steps for each company: a 30 minute non-technical "pitch call", and a final all-day onsite. They never implied the onsite was non-technical, and I never took it to be.
I think the value proposition is that you skip almost all of the back and forth footsie before the onsite. In my experience it was worth it. There were some companies I interviewed with, not through Triplebyte, where I had 7 or 8 calls before they would bring me onsite. I get it, they want to make sure they're sure before they pay for a hotel and a flight, but it is a big hassle.
Thanks for sharing! They told me there would be a 30m pitch call followed by an all day of on-sites that were explicitly not whiteboarding sessions or technical assessments. Also, I still did have several back and forth calls with companies I was connected with - it wasn’t just the one half-hour call and then on-sites.
Here’s the exact email from TripleByte upon passing the quiz:
“ Here's how it works:
1. We'll show your profile to companies that are likely a good fit.
2. The companies will request interviews with you.
3. You'll be able to review the requests, and accept the ones you're interested in.
After you accept an interview request, the next step is an introductory phone call where you and the company get to know one another. The companies that work with us all agree to skip technical screening, and take you right to the final interview (saving you time).
To get started, complete your profile so that we can find the right companies and roles for you. After you complete your profile, you'll also gain access to our exclusive Triplebyte Alum Slack community, which can help support you throughout your career.”
> The companies that work with us all agree to skip technical screening, and take you right to the final interview (saving you time).
Define technical screening? To me this means that I’m already technically screened. They also have changed their copy. The copy on their landing site around FastTrack used to be much more explicit around skipping all technical assessments.
Most companies define their process as something like Phone Screen (recruiter) -> Technical Screen (engineer via phone or take-home project) -> On-Site (mix of culture + tech). Triplebyte helps you skip those first two steps.
I agree that the terminology could be more clear, but it seems like they borrowed existing lingo from recruiters here.
I haven't tried Triplebyte, but my reaction is that obviously I'd want to skip the on-site tech part and not the others, so I could probably be tripped up by my expectations even if the actual way it worked was mostly disclosed.
This email is sufficiently ambiguous that it would definitely mislead at least some of their users. Given how shady and scummy the rest of the company's practices seem to be, it's hard to believe this ambiguity isn't by design.
Now that I read what you quoted it does sound ambiguous. It doesn't explicitly say that the final interview is non-technical, but "skip technical screening" could be interpreted as implying that.
I guess they aren’t straight lying about how many interviews you’ll have, but to me riding that line of ambiguity with no course of action or any metric around what a technical screening actually is presented to the interviewee, it’s just as dishonest of an approach in my opinion.
I think they went out of their way to make the whole thing as vague as possible, and hide the value proposition, possibly because they didn't really know it themselves, and tried to be "flexible" to pivot and cater to everyone.
The whole proposition was to:
* charge $500/onsite to the employers (that's often way below what it costs to bring an out-of-state candidate to Cali for an onsite — Triplebyte intentionally low-balled the cost for the travel arrangements of an onsite to waste everyone's time on pointless onsites), and,
* bring candidates for a whole week of onsites to a given physical location (you were limited and encouraged to have up to 5 onsites in SF Bay and up to 5 in NYC, e.g., you'd spend a whole week (5 nights) at each location if you were to get and accept enough offers for the onsites, where both you and the employer have to make a decision after a single 30 minute phone call).
They did this by booking really bad flights out of far-away airports (unless you push back); really bad hotels in the most shady areas (unless you push back); not covering the hotel on the final day at the location (decent SF Bay always cover both nights) and requiring red-eye flights; and not covering per-diem, even though it's the industry's standard practice to cover per-diem; and also not covering airport parking or mileage to the airport — all of these items are always covered by all other companies hiring directly.
Because no employed candidate could simply spend two weeks interviewing all over the place, they've obviously prayed on the unemployed people, by misrepresenting the opportunity, and doing a bait-and-switch at the final minute in regards to the travel arrangements, once everything else is already in place.
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I think the biggest proposition and the selling point was for the startups to cheaply access out-of-state candidates for $500/onsite, and then offer a lower salary because it's been scientifically proven that salary expectations are lower for people moving to SF Bay Area from out-of-state (e.g., look at the study that Hired did a few years ago).
I was determined by Triplebyte to be in the top-3% of folk — I was accepted by Triplebyte after passing the 2h technical interview with one of their engineers; but my onsites weren't particularly aligned; and Triplebyte did several misrepresentations and dragged their feet throughout the whole process as well.
I would not recommend Triplebyte to anyone until they raise the price of an onsite to maybe 750 to 1k per onsite for the employers and cover travel in full for the candidates (including parking, mileage and per-diem). Low-balling the cost of the onsite results in employers giving these left and right without much thought; the candidates aren't even informed that standard travel costs won't be covered, in fact, Triplebyte does the opposite, and claims that it covers all travel expenses, which is a big lie.
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However, do I think it's a good idea for Triplebyte to pivot to tackle LinkedIn? Yes, most definitely. Triplebyte introduced candidate certificates a while ago, but I don't think these were particularly marketable the way they've been implemented in the past; it's also not particularly clear how it'll work from the financial perspective, because it costs real money to do all those 2h interviews.
Is it a good idea to require an opt-out instead of an opt-in? Yeah, if you could not follow such a sleazy business practice and make yourself available to potential FTC oversight for 20 years, that'd be great. I won't be logging in to toggle any settings, because I'd rather not disqualify myself from the extra fun of being a part of the class!
> The extra 2 hour interview with Triplebyte is literally pointless - and any company you try to discuss this “policy” with will be caught confused and off guard.
Their contract with Triplebyte stipulates that companies that use their service aren't to incur additional technical interviews, and according to the Triplebyte representative I talked to, apparently the company has legs to enforce the contract if a candidate informed TB of a breach.
When companies try this, and pretend to be confused when there is push back, it's because they got caught with their pants down trying to breach an expensive contract.
It was my experience that every company, big and small, that I interviewed with through TB did on-site technical interviews anyway. In the end, the value-add of TB was that you could filter out many of the companies on the platform because of how cavalier they were to dance around their contractual agreements with their recruiting agency.
Their whole “Fast Track” program claiming to allow you to skip technical interviews is a total fraud of a marketing ploy.
They make you take a 2 hour live coding interview with a Triplebyte engineer, with the promise that if you pass, you won’t need to do any more technical interviews with companies through Triplebyte, only “final-round personality-style on-sites”.
The reality is that any company who contacts you is STILL going to run you thru their entire interviewing process. The extra 2 hour interview with Triplebyte is literally pointless - and any company you try to discuss this “policy” with will be caught confused and off guard.
It’s no surprise to me that a company that blatantly lies about their offering would do some crap like this.
Shame on Triplebyte for their fraudulent and dishonest nature.