Top all-time · #5139
Otherbranch
Company blog · otherbranch.com/blog · on HN as rachofsunshinecareerbusiness
Otherbranch is the company blog at otherbranch.com, writing about career and business. Since 2024, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 28 times, most often “Why Triplebyte Failed”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Otherbranch's posts on engineer hiring, interviews and why Triplebyte failed. The comments mostly cite the posts or the company's assessment, and none directly judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
We're a better kind of technical recruiting agency. We do full coding interviews before making referrals, so great engineers skip the line and employers don't waste their time.
Most-linked posts?
- /practice-coding-problem3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-06-10
- /for-engineers3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-07-10
- Why Triplebyte Failed3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-06-10
- /shared/practice-coding-problem2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-02-20
- Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-06-11
What Hacker News says?
"There exist exceptions to a trend" does not mean the trend is not a valid proxy (see [1]), and "refuses to do fizzbuzz" is different from " can't do fizzbuzz". I run a technical recruiting company, and we ask candidates a question like [2] on our interview (EDIT: we ask other stuff too, this is only part of it). It's not exactly fizzbuzz, but it's really not far beyond it. A candidate we interviewed just a couple d…
Comment linking /shared/practice-coding-problem
on ““Normal” engineers are the key to great teams”Submitted You don't want to hire "the best engineers" as a story · 394 points
HN discussion1. Use a TripleByte replacement (e.g. https://www.otherbranch.com/ ) to filter out obviously bad applicants. Basically, job-seekers do a long set of interviews, and if they pass, are considered generally competent. 2. If you get a lot of generally-competent employees after applying reasonable filters (e.g. matching skillset, expected salary), don't give them a long automated test, pick a smaller set randomly. All of…
Comment linking /
on “Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers”Submitted Why Triplebyte Failed as a story · 226 points
HN discussion> [1] https://www.otherbranch.com/shared/practice-coding-problem Minesweeper? Huh. No wonder the PhD candidate who was supervising us was surprised I did that as a fun little side project in my first or second year at university. Still, I'm not absolutely sure I'd have gotten to the end of step 5 (correctly working flood-fill) within 25 minutes despite having implemented the whole game in Java, REALBasic, and JavaSc…
Comment linking /shared/practice-coding-problem
on “Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)”Submitted Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte as a story · 122 points
HN discussionThe thing you're missing here is that these two statements are not contradictory: -- CS grads are, on average, better programmers than non-CS-grads. -- The average CS grad is not a very good programmer. My company does a standardized interview with a straightforward coding problem that is only a few steps above fizzbuzz level. In just the past few weeks, we've had candidates who: -- Had to look up basic syntax (defi…
Comment linking /shared/practice-coding-problem
on “Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)”Submitted Why you should fail our interview as a story · 8 points
HN discussionRationality on an individual level is not the same thing as what produces the best long-term outcomes for both parties. On an individual level, bringing up comp immediately significantly reduces your chances of being moved forward. It shouldn't, but it does. See this other post from us: https://www.otherbranch.com/shared/blog/would-you-still-hire...
Comment linking /shared/blog/would-you-still-hire-me-if-i-were-a-worm
on “You don't want to hire "the best engineers"”Submitted What our data says about timed coding problems as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI don't know anything about the story of Otherbranch's business (they launched ~about a year ago†), but Patrick, Erin & I briefly worked on a firm with similar business dynamics (Starfighter, a contingency recruiter based on CTF qualifiers). The prospect of eventually writing posts like this is part of why that business got wound down. I think the points in this post are mostly all well taken, but I also think a hir…
Comment linking /shared/blog/rebooting-something-like-triplebyte
on “You don't want to hire "the best engineers"”Submitted Quantifying the Cost of RTO as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is something I have some expertise in (I run a recruiting company that uses a standardized interview, and I used to run assessments for another). It's also something I've thought a lot about. There is absolutely truth to what you're saying. But like most obvious observations that aren't playing themselves out, there's more to it than that. ----- One: curiosity, passion, and focus matter a lot. Every company tha…
Comment linking /practice-coding-problem
on “Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers”Submitted Quantifying the Cost of RTO as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWe don't ask "make the longest palindrome". We ask "convert this English into code that does what it says". If you want to make the discussion more concrete, we have a public practice problem [1] that we send out with our interview bookings so that people know what to expect. The real problems we ask are very similar to it. Do you feel like there's anything there that any reasonably skilled programmer shouldn't be a…
Comment linking /shared/practice-coding-problem
on “AI killed the tech interview. Now what?”I'm hoping someone will humor me: At the beginning the author states the "shorter version" is at https://www.otherbranch.com/blog/rebooting-something-like-tr... Then in this shorter article: > But maybe we can fork it. (In the Git sense, not that one!) With a wikipedia link to the Good Place TV show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Place I don't get it though, what does The Good Place have to do with any kind…
Comment linking /blog/rebooting-something-like-triplebyte
on “Why Triplebyte Failed”I don't have special knowledge of Toptal's screening process. But when I look at their pitch (linked below), what sticks out at me is the lack of specifics. ----- (From https://www.toptal.com/top-3-percent ) > We also test each applicant's technical knowledge and problem-solving ability through various assessments. "Various assessments" is about as maximally vague as you can be. Imagine if I asked you how you'd buil…
Comment linking /practice-coding-problem
on “Why Triplebyte Failed”Seriously, if you've never hired before, you have no idea how bad this can get. Here's [1] our practice coding problem. It's quite similar to the one we use on our interview, and not too far from the one Triplebyte used in the past (ours is tuned to be slightly harder at the beginning and slightly easier at the end). The vast majority of candidates, even with some reasonable pre-filtering, do not get past the first…
Comment linking /practice-coding-problem
on “Why Triplebyte Failed”Location: Melbourne, Australia Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Rust, TypeScript, SQL, C++, C, assembly (x86/amd64), Linux (userspace and kernel), Windows (Win32) Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VcCFgG2PbXG5IxLpSxxojZ9hGucpQCTm/view?usp=sharing Email: mak.andrlon@gmail.com I'm an ex-Google software engineer with a PhD in computer science. I excel at technical challenges. Experience all t…
Comment linking /open-candidates/lojkq
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2024)”Do you hire only software engineers? This page doesn't mention it but it seems like you do based on your sign up page. https://www.otherbranch.com/for-engineers (I am asking because I am more of a data science / research person.)
Comment linking /for-engineers
on “Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte”I've been thinking about how we assess software engineering skills, and I'm curious about others' thoughts on using open source contributions as a primary metric. My hypothesis is that real-world collaboration and communication skills, as demonstrated through open source work, are more indicative of a developer's capabilities than typical coding quizzes. (I tried OtherBranch's sample coding problem mentioned at thei…
Comment linking /practice-coding-problem
on “Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte”As the previous blog post[1] was all about, they're not really expecting to scale, right? Or not that far. [1] https://www.otherbranch.com/blog/why-triplebyte-failed
Comment linking /blog/why-triplebyte-failed
on “Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte”The website[1] (not the blog) looks like it was designed using a Bootstrap theme from 10 years ago. It doesn't inspire confidence about the legitimacy of the business. [1] https://www.otherbranch.com/for-engineers
Comment linking /for-engineers
on “Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte”Not sure if anyone from Otherbranch will see this but there's a tiny error in the description part of the coding problem on this page: https://www.otherbranch.com/practice-coding-problem Under step 2, the description says: > If the selection is not a mine, > but has adjacent mines in one of the squares next to it (including diagonally), > change that square to display the number of mines adjacent to it. However, the…
Comment linking /practice-coding-problem
on “Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte”Similar to another post from the same company - Why Triplebyte failed ( https://www.otherbranch.com/blog/why-triplebyte-failed ), discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774
Comment linking /blog/why-triplebyte-failed
on “Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte”To put some less anecdotal data to this: an 80th percentile salary ask in our data set (from engs looking for jobs) is 33k higher [1] for an in-office job than it is for a remote one; a lot of those are people who already live in HCOL areas. [1] https://www.otherbranch.com/blog/quantifying-the-cost-of-rto
Comment linking /blog/quantifying-the-cost-of-rto
on “Nearly 40% of software engineers will only work remotely (2023)”There's a double space on this page: https://www.otherbranch.com/for-engineers in "arbitrary black box" and it's really annoying me, but I can't see anyway to tell anyone about it
Comment linking /for-engineers
on “Why you should fail our interview”Location: Melbourne, Australia Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes (mainly Berlin or London, others possible) Technologies: Rust, TypeScript, SQL, C++, C, assembly (x86/amd64), Linux (userspace and kernel), Windows (Win32) Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ORFmNslCPkyc7marEIWJVTRwr0MhByTUDyrlayQuxaM/edit?usp=sharing Email: mak.andrlon@gmail.com I'm an ex-Google software engineer with a PhD in computer…
Comment linking /open-candidates/lojkq
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)”
