My sense is that Triplebyte focuses on “can this person think like an engineer” and “which specific math/programming skills do they have, and how strong are they?” Then companies do a second round of interviews where they evaluate Triplebyte candidates for company culture. Triplebyte handles the general, companies handle the idiosyncratic.
I used to work as an interviewer for TripleByte. Most companies using TripleByte put TripleByte-certified candidates through their standard technical onsite. From what I was able to gather, the value prop for companies working with TripleByte is mostly about 1. expanding their sourcing pipeline to include more quality candidates and 2. cutting down on the amount of time their engineers spend administering screens to candidates who aren’t very good.
Some of your comments make it sound like a TB like service for EA has to be a lot better than what EA orgs are currently doing to screen candidates. Personally, I suspect there’s a lot of labor-saving value to capture if it is merely just as good (or even a bit worse) than current screens. It might also help organizations consider a broader range of people.
Thanks for that context, John. Given that value prop, companies might use a TB-like service under two constraints:
They are bottlenecked by having too few applicants. In this case, they have excess interviewing capacity, or more jobs than applicants. They hope that by investigating more applicants through TB, they can find someone outstanding.
Their internal headhunting process has an inferior quality distribution relative to the candidates they get through TB. In this case, they believe that TB can provide them with a better class of applicants than their own job search mechanisms can identify. In effect, they are outsourcing their headhunting for a particular job category.
Given that EA orgs seem primarily to lack specific forms of domain expertise, as well as well-defined project ideas/teams, what would an EA Triplebyte have to achieve?
They’d need to be able to interface with EA orgs and identify the specific forms of domain expertise that are required. Then they’d need to be able to go out and recruit those experts, who might never have heard of EA, and get them interested in the job. They’d be an interface to the expertise these orgs require. Push a button, get an expert.
That seems plausible. Triplebyte evokes the image of a huge recruiting service meant to fill cubicles with basically-competent programmers who are pre-screened for the in-house technical interview. Not to find unusually specific skills for particular kinds of specialist jobs, which it seems is what EA requires at this time.
That sort of headhunting job could be done by just one person. Their job would be to do a whole lot of cold-calling, getting meetings with important people, doing the legwork that EA orgs don’t have time for. Need five minutes of a Senator’s time? Looking to pull together a conference of immunologists to discuss biosafety issues from an EA perspective? That’s the sort of thing this sort of org would strive to make more convenient for EA orgs.
As they gained experience, they would also be able to help EA orgs anticipate what sort of projects the domain experts they’d depend upon would be likely to spring for. I imagine that some EA orgs must periodically come up with, say, ideas that would require some significant scientific input. Some of those ideas might be more attractive to the scientists than others. If an org like this existed, it might be able to tell those EA orgs which ones the scientists are likely to spring for.
That does seem like the kind of job that could productively exist at the intersection of EA orgs. They’d need to understand EA concepts and the relationships between institutions well enough to speak “on behalf of the movement,” while gaining a similar understanding of domains like the scientific, political, business, philanthropic, or military establishment of particular countries.
I used to work as an interviewer for TripleByte. Most companies using TripleByte put TripleByte-certified candidates through their standard technical onsite. From what I was able to gather, the value prop for companies working with TripleByte is mostly about 1. expanding their sourcing pipeline to include more quality candidates and 2. cutting down on the amount of time their engineers spend administering screens to candidates who aren’t very good.
Some of your comments make it sound like a TB like service for EA has to be a lot better than what EA orgs are currently doing to screen candidates. Personally, I suspect there’s a lot of labor-saving value to capture if it is merely just as good (or even a bit worse) than current screens. It might also help organizations consider a broader range of people.
Thanks for that context, John. Given that value prop, companies might use a TB-like service under two constraints:
They are bottlenecked by having too few applicants. In this case, they have excess interviewing capacity, or more jobs than applicants. They hope that by investigating more applicants through TB, they can find someone outstanding.
Their internal headhunting process has an inferior quality distribution relative to the candidates they get through TB. In this case, they believe that TB can provide them with a better class of applicants than their own job search mechanisms can identify. In effect, they are outsourcing their headhunting for a particular job category.
Given that EA orgs seem primarily to lack specific forms of domain expertise, as well as well-defined project ideas/teams, what would an EA Triplebyte have to achieve?
They’d need to be able to interface with EA orgs and identify the specific forms of domain expertise that are required. Then they’d need to be able to go out and recruit those experts, who might never have heard of EA, and get them interested in the job. They’d be an interface to the expertise these orgs require. Push a button, get an expert.
That seems plausible. Triplebyte evokes the image of a huge recruiting service meant to fill cubicles with basically-competent programmers who are pre-screened for the in-house technical interview. Not to find unusually specific skills for particular kinds of specialist jobs, which it seems is what EA requires at this time.
That sort of headhunting job could be done by just one person. Their job would be to do a whole lot of cold-calling, getting meetings with important people, doing the legwork that EA orgs don’t have time for. Need five minutes of a Senator’s time? Looking to pull together a conference of immunologists to discuss biosafety issues from an EA perspective? That’s the sort of thing this sort of org would strive to make more convenient for EA orgs.
As they gained experience, they would also be able to help EA orgs anticipate what sort of projects the domain experts they’d depend upon would be likely to spring for. I imagine that some EA orgs must periodically come up with, say, ideas that would require some significant scientific input. Some of those ideas might be more attractive to the scientists than others. If an org like this existed, it might be able to tell those EA orgs which ones the scientists are likely to spring for.
That does seem like the kind of job that could productively exist at the intersection of EA orgs. They’d need to understand EA concepts and the relationships between institutions well enough to speak “on behalf of the movement,” while gaining a similar understanding of domains like the scientific, political, business, philanthropic, or military establishment of particular countries.
An EA diplomat.