I believe that most advice on choosing a startup to work for is wrong. Early employees at wildly successful startups suggest you assume the value of your equity is zero and instead optimize for how much you can learn. In this post I'll argue that evaluating how likely a startup is to succeed should actually be the most important factor in your decision to join one. As a former partner at Y Combinator, I know a lot about how investors do this. Now, as a founder and CEO of Triplebyte, I see how much less rigor the average job seeker applies to their decision and what they miss that investors would notice.

tl;dr Visual Studio Code usage is rising rapidly! VS Code is now the editor chosen by the majority of engineers during programming interviews, and it appears to be rapidly taking market share from other top editors.

Triplebyte interviews hundreds of engineers each week. For every interview, we record the editor, language and operating system each candidate uses. We don't use this data to decide who passes our interview (I don't think that would be fair). However, it is fascinating data! It gives us insight into which tools different cohorts of engineers prefer, and how these preferences have changed over time. It also allows us to identify correlations between the tools engineers choose and their performance during programming interviews.

Ralph Landon is a 32 year old software engineer and former oil worker who was recently hired by Render, a San Francisco based startup that lets users deploy web applications without having to manage their own servers or databases.

Every engineer has bombed an interview. Sometimes even very talented engineers unexpectedly bomb them, and this can be really frustrating for all parties involved. As one of Triplebyte’s content writers, I’ve read interview notes on hundreds of successful candidates and hundreds of candidates who didn’t make it through our process.

Although we've put a lot of effort into designing a background-blind technical screen, our process is still probabilistic and sometimes things other than raw engineering talent impact outcomes. Sometimes candidates make mistakes which make it impossible for us to accurately assess their ability. What follows is based on my own observations and those of our interviewing team, who have been doing this for even longer than I have.

Triplebyte is giving every software engineer accepted onto our platform $100 to donate to their favorite open source software projects.

We are leveraging the accumulated knowledge of our users to decentralize open source funding because we believe that crowdsourced decisions will lead to more merit-based funding choices.

Each month, we are making about $20K available to open source projects through our users.

Paul Buchheit is an engineer and partner at Y Combinator. He was the 23rd employee at Google, where he built Gmail and the first prototype for Adsense. After leaving Google he co-founded Friendfeed, which was acquired by Facebook.

Triplebyte co-founder and CEO, Harj Taggar, sat down with Paul to talk about how he got starting to program, joining Google, and becoming a great engineer.

Triplebyte is now available for engineers and companies hiring in Seattle and Los Angeles!

Our team just moved to a larger office with unterminated ethernet cables, no uplink, and no Wi-Fi. Here’s a smorgasbord of suggestions — some well-known and others obscure — that helped me get a reliable network running fast.