> To improve the quality of your idea conversations be picky about who you discuss ideas with.
I’ve now mostly figured out the right balance for me to do this in real life. Where I struggle is with conversations online. I think one reason HN has such a high quality of conversations, compared with other forums, is most people here are motivated by finding the truth behind ideas. Twitter, for example, is at the opposite end. It feels like a firehose of conflicting motives coming at me at once. The only solution I’ve found there is to stay logged out most of the time.
reply
To improve the quality of your idea conversations be picky about who you discuss ideas with.
I’ve now mostly figured out the right balance for me to do this in real life. Where I struggle is with conversations online. I think one reason HN has such a high quality of conversations, compared with other forums, is most people here are motivated by finding the truth behind ideas. Twitter, for example, is at the opposite end. It feels like a firehose of conflicting motives coming at me at once. The only solution I’ve found there is to stay logged out most of the time.
In what ways does it seems the motivations and goals have changed? I’m particularly interested in this as I just rejoined YC as a partner after running a startup for five years. I first joined as a partner 10 years ago.
I've been founding and investing in startups for over a decade now, so I know that founder transitions are inevitable as a company grows. This is one of the instances where having "startup experience" helped me a lot with thinking through the different options and picking the right one. I'd be happy to talk with anyone who is thinking through their role as a founder.
Marissa described possibly the most thorough and analytical job search process I've heard from anyone, when she was talking about how she joined Google. I really liked her reflection on this in hindsight on how being overly analytical is dangerous and it's something I try to remind myself of when I'm in danger of overthinking a decision:
"I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up with. They look at things as if there’s a right answer and a wrong answer when, the truth is, there’s often just good choices, and maybe a great choice in there."
Rather than treating predicting startup success as an intractable problem, I think anyone considering joining a startup should act like a startup investor making a bet on how much the value of equity in that startup will grow over time. Startup investors do this for a living and that's essentially what you are too. You're investing your time and they are investing money.
Working with Paul is one of the things I miss most about working at YC. Besides being interesting to talk to about pretty much any topic, I remember analyzing the data on how accurate YC partners were at reviewing applications to YC and Paul being top despite spending the least amount of time reading each one.
In addition to already seeing an increasing number of engineers from both Seattle and Los Angeles applying to Triplebyte, two other trends drove our decision to open up in these two locations.
First we've seen a continual drop in the number of Seattle based engineers who are willing to relocate to the Bay Area. It's dropped by over half since the start of the year and it's the first sustained drop we've seen since starting Triplebyte in 2015.
Second, we've seen an increasing number of Bay Area engineers interested in moving to Los Angeles even as the average software engineer salaries in the Bay Area continue to grow.
As someone who moved halfway across the world and left family/friends to move to the Bay Area, it makes me sad to see how it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to move here. I believe this is the biggest threat to Silicon Valley's dominance as the center of the technology industry.
I agree hearing what sounds like a pre-prepared, generic spiel about the company isn't very effective. That's why I suggest hiring managers/recruiters ask the candidate what they're looking for first and then talk about how the company fits into that (or not).
Being able to tailor the pitch on the fly like that is what we've seen be the difference between average and great recruiters.
I used to write rejection emails for companies at the end of YC interview days. It always sucked, especially when it was borderline decision (which it often was) but PG made doing these well an important part of internal YC culture. We couldn't leave until they were finished and each one was reviewed by another partner before sending.
In hindsight I'm glad we did this. In the years since I've had multiple people tell me the rejection was a positive turning point and the only honest feedback they'd received.
What was always most interesting to us about starting a recruiting company was seeing what would happen if you treated hiring as a data problem. Partly we've raised more funding for the same reason any startup does, so we can grow faster to get more customers = more revenue = more success, etc. But we're also driven by how the larger the scale we operate at, the faster we can run experiments to answer questions about the best way to evaluate technical skills. More rigorous and data focused approaches to hiring benefit everyone.
Interviewing and evaluating engineers is an area a lot of people feel passionately about and have strong opinions on. We're continually looking for ways to improve our process, if you've any thoughts or feedback please ping me - harj at triplebyte.
What was always most interesting to us about starting a recruiting company was treating hiring as a data problem. As we increase our scale, we get more data we can use to improve the accuracy of matching engineers to companies. We're now testing the equivalent number of engineers per month as a company that itself is hiring almost 1,000 engineers per year. Very few companies operate at that scale and we'll be releasing some more blog posts analyzing our data soon.
If you've used Triplebyte as either a company or candidate and have feedback, please ping me - harj at triplebyte.
Triplebyte doesn't work as a common app to all YC companies like Work at a Startup. Specific things that we do differently are:
- A background blind technical skills evaluation is our application process in lieu of submitting your resume.
- We don't introduce you to all the companies we work with, only the ones where our data predicts you have a high chance of receiving an offer.
- Companies expedite their own hiring process for Triplebyte candidates skipping technical phone screens/coding challenges.
- Each engineer gets a Talent Manager who offers them career advice, interview and negotiation help and general support throughout the job search process.
- Work with non-YC companies e.g. Apple, Asana and Coursera.
I'd say that Work at a Startup is a good way to get in front of a lot of startups at once and run a breadth first job search. Triplebyte is a good way to run a targeted job search optimizing your offer to interview ratio.
The number one request since we launched has been expanding to more locations and top of the list has been New York. We're working on expanding to more locations through the rest of the year.
We'll also be opening up for remote engineers and companies. If you're a company hiring remote engineers, I'd love to hear from you - harj at triplebyte.
The goal of our process is to identify which areas of strengths and weakness an engineer has. We do have a section where we ask algorithm and data structure questions to test academic/textbook CS knowledge but we also have sections testing very different skills e.g. practical web programming, debugging and low level systems.
We've helped many engineers who didn't perform well in the algorithm/data structure section still find jobs at great companies because we work with many companyies who don't care about those skills (as evidenced by not evaluating it during their interview). This is one of the main ways we can help engineers have a better job search process, if textbook CS knowledge is not your strength we won't match you with companies who evaluate that during their interview.
I’ve now mostly figured out the right balance for me to do this in real life. Where I struggle is with conversations online. I think one reason HN has such a high quality of conversations, compared with other forums, is most people here are motivated by finding the truth behind ideas. Twitter, for example, is at the opposite end. It feels like a firehose of conflicting motives coming at me at once. The only solution I’ve found there is to stay logged out most of the time. reply