Rethinking Triplebyte
I clicked into this article knowing nothing about Triplebyte (not meant to insult), at all, and after reading the first paragraph, I&#x27;ll admit I jumped to a whole bunch of conclusions, the worst of which was probably:<p>I wonder what &#x27;fad-diet&#x27; solution this company I&#x27;ve never heard of is pitching for either (A) getting me an engineer or (B) getting me a job as an engineer.  Oh, let me guess, you&#x27;re going to find those magical engineers who come from non-traditional backgrounds or magically making it possible to both &quot;identify the top 5% of Ruby on Rails developers with no fewer than 2 years of React Devops Cloud Experience&quot;[0].<p>Going from that, if you RTA -- I was pretty horrified to hear what they thought would be effective in this space.  I realize you&#x27;ll have to take my word for it that there were literal sentences in there spoken as &quot;good ideas&quot; that would have literally had me thinking &quot;oh, so this company&#x27;s some form of scam&quot; had I happened upon them before they chose to reverse these ideas.  I gotta say, public profiles, entrance exams in an attempt to &quot;hack hiring&quot;[2] don&#x27;t know what this company is.  I have to take everyone&#x27;s word for it that they&#x27;re somehow big in this space as I haven&#x27;t <i>looked</i> for a job, nor been responsible for finding viable job candidates[1], so that&#x27;s probably me.<p>I was kind-of torn about his apology.  It was <i>really</i> un?-professional (I mean that as a compliment but I can&#x27;t find a way to say &#x27;not corporate-fake&#x27; either in &#x27;sorry-not-sorry&#x27;, &#x27;deflection&#x27; or with what appeared to be much concern for what the lawyers have to say on the subject.  I don&#x27;t know that the lawyers <i>would</i> have to say much on the subject but I&#x27;m told that this is often the reason why companies manage always manage to communicate &quot;Sorry,... (assholes...)&quot; every time they apologize.  There&#x27;s always that miserable thing, they&#x27;re going along &quot;We apologize to our customers ...&quot; it&#x27;s looking good &quot;... for the inconvenience this outage has caused.&quot;  Seems simple enough, except you&#x27;ve taken no responsibility -- the outage was to <i>your</i> software, or <i>your</i> hardware, running on wires that <i>you</i> pay for which <i>you</i> are supposed to have redundancy for, and all of this stuff is outside of your core competency but there are <i>many</i> companies who can help if you&#x27;re willing to spend.  And I&#x27;m sure when the issue happened, there was a key choice that had <i>you</i> spending a large amount of money and <i>me</i> getting a flight home; which you also chose to inconvenience me over.<p>But Triplebyte <i>wasn&#x27;t</i> Southwest.  I think the author went a little <i>over the top</i> on the apology, almost crossing into the &quot;trying too hard&quot;, except that the things he was apologizing for -- basically, being blind to some pretty obvious problems -- were kind of spot on.  Please don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m trying to throw some sort of slant compliment; I realize I sort-of sounded like a dick.<p>There&#x27;s no malice in that statement; I&#x27;ve been more blind to things I should have know that were <i>right in front of me</i> than a silly business model decision made too quickly.  I am certain I have not apologized this clearly&#x2F;bluntly.<p>And the thing of it is, if it hadn&#x27;t been done so well, I probably would have read the first two paragraphs, closed the tab and made a mental note to <i>never</i> touch them -- basically, having them go from &quot;I don&#x27;t know who they are&quot; to &quot;probably a scam&quot;.  It&#x27;s the risk a company takes when their apology gets attention beyond &quot;people who (currently) care&quot;.  I am not <i>currently</i> hunting, but I&#x27;m all around it on the &quot;need to hire someone&quot; side and I have no guarantee I&#x27;ll keep my current job, forever.<p>Thinking about it -- I&#x27;ve now read a very long post and written a very long comment about a company that I had never heard of and upon hearing about them, couldn&#x27;t care less about their services (the space, yes, deeply).  They&#x27;ll probably be the first address I put into the bar if my needs change in the next year or so because I can&#x27;t name a single other place I&#x27;d actually look.  This guy might be an evil genius; if I suddenly have a strong desire to change employment in the next three months, I call witchcraft and there&#x27;ll be pitch forks and hay, or...something. :)<p>[0] I must have been in a <i>really</i> bad mood because HN has never been a place that promotes that crap to the level of this post, so that should have been my signal that there was something of value here, and I&#x27;m glad I stuck it out.<p>[1] Mostly only interviewing; we have a pretty spectacular individual who has extensive knowledge about hiring for the rather broadly scoped kinds of work that just my tiny team in the 100-or-so company that employs me.  I have a process that, though I am always tweaking, the major points are about as perfect a process. I&#x27;ve commented like this on that subject many times in the past if you want to be <i>super</i> bored. :)<p>[2] I&#x27;m confident in my abilities as a software engineer; push comes to shove, there&#x27;s many, <i>many</i> ways to make enough money to live reasonably in most parts of the US.  I&#x27;ve never had problems making money writing software, either directly for an employer or on contract, independently.  Neither my wife nor myself have completed a 4-year degree (though I was one semester away; long story), she did a job that does <i>not</i> require a degree -- became a Realtor -- before we met, six-figures in 2003? I think.  The most Senior guys on infrastructure pulled that where I worked (they paid a little under average for the role&#x2F;area but like 1-2%).