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.
Why sad? I think it's great. It's awesome that folks can stay where their families are, where they want to live, and participate in this awesome industry. It's going to bring so much more wealth to other parts of the world. We should celebrate that.
Congrats on expanding, looking forward to when you come to the midwest!
> Why sad? I think it's great. It's awesome that folks can stay where their families are, where they want to live, and participate in this awesome industry.
In my case, the problem is needing to move away from where my friends & family are, because the bay area has gotten too expensive due mostly to the lack of housing. Given a choice, I'd rather be here.
It's sad because the cost of living is eliminating choice. It's great if you want to stay wherever you are and have a fulfilling life there. But it's still sad if someone else wants to move to the Bay Area and can't because prices have gotten out of control.
> 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 thread to Silicon Valley's dominance as the center of the technology industry.
Yes, 100% this. The Bay Area's loss is rest-of-world's gain, so I suppose it's fine in that sense. But it's still really sad to see such completely and utter failure of leadership from our local politicians on housing, and our federal politicians on immigration.
As a person in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle-Vancouver area) it would require a truly ridiculous amount of money to convince me to live in the SF Bay/South Bay area, and physically commute to an office 5 days a week.
Considering the cost of California income taxes, housing costs, etc.
Vancouver has an insane housing market but it is still possible to buy a nice 2BD condo in a concrete high-rise building for a relatively reasonable price, that a couple with two professional level salaries can afford.
>> Vancouver has an insane housing market but it is still possible to buy a nice 2BD condo in a concrete high-rise building for a relatively reasonable price, that a couple with two professional level salaries can afford.
Yes, but is this the pinnacle we should aspire to reach?
2 professional salaries to eventually own a 2br condo somewhere in the lower mainland?
Vancouver and Toronto have a comparable ratio of salary to home costs as many of the hottest US locales right now. I don't see how it's a sustainable way to grow a city...
No, it's not ideal, but for my personal lifestyle choices I have no desire to deal with yard maintenance and tasks related to owning a regular single family home, whether in the city limits of Vancouver/Burnaby or in a suburb. I like being very close to the center of downtown and being able to walk most places, or take the Skytrain.
Vancouver is a much more pedestrian and transit friendly city than Seattle or anywhere else in the US outside of Manhattan.
When I compare what $700,000 (USD) buys in the south bay vs what $700,000 converted into Canadian at an exchange rate of 1.29 can buy, Vancouver still comes out way ahead.
Vancouver technology industry salaries are, sadly, significantly lower than Seattle or Bay area, or other large cities in the US (Chicago, Dallas, NY). There's a reason why so many Canadians leave to work in the US.
Yeah, moving out of Bay Area sounds more and more reasonable now. I wonder if salaries in Vancouver would match that in Seattle. Both of them are very interesting cities to move to
This is accurate. The tech industry is really anemic in Vancouver, to the extent that people consider HootSuite a "big deal" and it's mentioned in the local media as an example of a big, successful company. The total number of employers with >15 staff doing something IT/Networking/Software Development/Internet related is a lot lower in Vancouver.
I always wonder why the Stripes (and similar) of the world don't build engineering outposts in LA. It seems like it would get them access to large pools of devs in the same time zone and just a short flight from the main office in SF.
The FAANG of the world do it, but any idea why it's not more common with midsize or large startups.
Harj, I'm curious, what's involved in "launching a city" for Triplebyte? Why not accept candidates from anywhere? From an employer's perspective, I would love your service in Toronto.
Many of my friends from the Bay Area have been moving down to Los Angeles. Better weather, larger city, and booming tech opportunities - although CoL is still somewhat high compared to Seattle/etc
I moved to Seattle from the Bay Area 4 years ago. Uprooting my family aside, it would take a phenomenal opportunity to get me to move back, even though I loved it there and still miss it.
Hopefully you get over to Boston soon. It looks like you've got an actually decent recruiting process, but the Bay Area, LA and NYC are not places I would ever go live, for love or money, and while Seattle is charming, it's way the heck across the other side of the world.
> 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
Absolutely. Highest income tax in the nation, couple with some of the highest cost of living in the world.
SV is in big trouble once more non-SV companies start paying comp that is competitive with SV.
This is already happening and I know several great engineers who preferred offers for the same or slightly lower comp outside of SV.
The trend will be strongest among senior and veteran engineers, since buying a decent house and raising a family is virtually non-affordable in SV.
Especially since SV was never great about paying extra for senior and experienced engineers. They're going to have a serious problem when the only people willing to relocate to SV are fresh grads willing to live with roommates.
California has benefited immensely from SV growing in its backyard, but now that this fortunate growth needs some tending, California is just shrugging its shoulders, and in some cases making it worse (e.g. NIMBY laws in SF preventing new construction).
ARGH! Now it all makes a bit more sense. Triplebyte is a YC alumni, and that's why they're allowed to spam HN.
I got downvoted in the comments of another spam post of theirs because I made a snarky remark. I think they have mod access here -- they can delete your comment, make it invisible, etc. I think they're deleting comments in this very thread right here.
I'm just tired of seeing your ads everywhere, Triplebyte.
You're right, I am an engineer. You have found me. But, I have a job that I plan on staying at for years.
May I please, please be excused from the endless barrage of triplebyte "stories"? (not "spam", guys, OK? that word is not to be used anymore in 2018)
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that sharing an internet connection with someone means that you will see ads influenced by each other's network traffic, assuming you're going through the same router.
Right, it's not the only identifier, but it's one of them, and you will "pollute" each other's targeted ads to an extent. I'm assuming some sort of adtech stuff is happening at the carrier/provider level as well, independent of your browser or individual browsing device.
Reddit's ad platform provides standard metrics on clickthrough rate and the like. I'd be surprised if the TripleByte guys didn't have the impact of it modeled.
Yeah, I almost feel bad about how often I see Triplebyte ads, since I'd like to use the service but I'm not intending to relocate to one of their cities right now.
I think they're probably more for hiring managers than candidates. Each job that they fill probably nets them 20-30k in revenue. So one hiring manager filling out a team might be worth $100k in revenue for them. That sort of revenue can pay for a lot of ads. I've seen literally thousands of them over the last year or so on reddit alone.
Serious question, if your wife is a non technical ordinary end user, isn't it better to install ublock origin in Chrome and Firefox and somewhat reduce her risk of clicking on something malicious, by not showing the ads at all?
Yes, under any and all circumstances, this is the correct thing to do for safety and sanity.
When I get roped into doing "fix my computer" work for friends and family, it's also best to slap down a hosts blockfile. People get into some things I can't even imagine; it's like they're a one year-old sticking everything in sight in their mouths, just clicking on everything.
> We're offering new companies in both Seattle and LA a special $15,000 fee on your first hire.
That is an insane amount of money in the world of education and skill training.
For an industry that prides itself on being “efficient” and “productive”, it is kind of amazing to see how institutionalized the gatekeeper business has become.
That's a very big discount compared to a typical engineering placement fee, and it isn't even the biggest cost to an employer hiring an engineer and training them to get up to speed.
The triplebyte application is remote (or was when I did it in ~2015), but the jobs they match you with are not. As the author confirms elsewhere in this thread, they need a critical mass of employers and candidates before the process is effective for both parties.
Re the SEO play idea and jumping straight to the assumption of deception, I've found it useful in life to switch my mental model away from "I don't understand, what's wrong with you?" towards "I don't understand, what's wrong with me?"
What aspect of the process requires a non-remote component?
I'm unfamiliar with TripleByte, but it seems like they're matching online candidates with jobs, and that looks something that should be doable online. Other companies in this space are fully online and are recruiting for employers everywhere.
> What aspect of the process requires a non-remote component?
For "job placement" in the abstract, nothing. I'm sure they could do the whole thing over skype were all parties so inclined.
In practice, this seems not to be what their company and customers are interested in. They do in-person onsites, for in-person roles. They're chasing a successful business with an operational scope that pleases their customers, not a locational-egalitarian remote utopia, so I don't fault them for only supporting a subset of work types. They do what works for them, and don't owe the market total coverage.
> Re the SEO play idea and jumping straight to the assumption of deception
I wasn't accusing them of doing something wrong. I don't consider SEO to be deception and see no problem with a company doing something like this purely for SEO.
Like Taxi apps or food delivery apps, they need multiple types of users on the platform in new locations at the same time to provide reasonable user experience.
Anyone else feel Triplebyte is one huge candidate data collection scheme? It really feels like this is a "you're the product, not the consumer" situation. I can see a scenario where a big 4 company would pay for this data and match it to a direct hire application to weed out candidates beforehand.
Suppose I'm not looking for a job, but take your quiz for fun (which your site says is OK). I'd probably take the quiz in some area I'm not good in, such as front end web [1], because that might provide some guidance as to what I should be looking at if I want to get better in that field.
There is, of course, a good chance I'll do terrible on that (but have a lot of fun).
Then let's say that months or a year or so later, I've had a chance to actually get good in that area, and I'm looking for a job. Will that botched for fun quiz in that area sink me if I try to use Triplebyte seriously in that job hunt?
[1] I've only had to do simple web stuff--simple PHP generated pages with simple framework free JavaScript now and them.
You can retake any quiz after 4 months. My understanding is they only propagate you to hiring companies on a pass/fail basis and they use your most recent score
I passed my triple byte exam with "very high scores" (I'm sure that's BS), but I don't know any of the languages they were testing me on. What should I teach myself before I schedule the interview? Rust? Go? Php? A framework instead?
As someone who was also rejected even though I solved their challenges, I've got a feeling they are measuring the wrong stuff. The rejection said that I "didn't show the growth they are looking for". Maybe a fresh 2018 CS grad could do it? I don't know, I started out with qbasic on a 386...
Last job search a little over two years ago, I put a profile up on both Vettery and Hired. I had a MUCH better experience on Vettery. The Vettery rep assigned to me reached out and communicated probably 3-4x as much as the Hired one, who basically just sent form emails for "your profile is live," "you have a new contact to respond to," etc... while I talked to the Vettery person on the phone to go over my resume and talk about what I was looking for, and she gave me feedback and suggestions before my profile was even "live."
I've used both services in the past. Vettery doesn't seem to vet your technical skills the way Triplebyte does (3 hour long technical screen for me). All the companies I've matched with on Vettery asked me to go through a standard phone screen or two whereas it's waived for Triplebyte-partnered companies.
Yes, I found my current job through Vettery. All around great experience, however I think with most of these services it depends on if you get a good recruiter. Mine happened to be fantastic. Roughly 1/3 of our engineering team was also found through Vettery (we are in NYC).
Triplebyte isn't doing the hiring there afaik. It is referring you to companies that hire there, who will offer their standard salaries for those cities.
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.