The main thing I'd say about computer science is that [programmers] have a self-concept of being totally skills-driven, but if you actually look at employment in computer science, that's not how it works. Degrees from leading schools really do seem to matter. They really do seem to open doors.
I'm sure a lot of developers would agree that refactoring is the best part of writing code—because you can make it super efficient and make every line useful. I think the same principles can be applied to your financial life and your life in general. If you're super efficient with your spending, and you're making a software engineering salary, then money piles up quite quickly. That's why I think there are so many software engineers in the FIRE community. They are used to systems and algorithms and efficiency, and it's like you're applying all those things to your financial life. You're refactoring your life pretty much all the time, which is just great and can get you to FIRE really quickly.
[Triplebyte's process] seemed too good to be true, and I wondered where the catch was. But after some thought, I could see how it made sense. Companies are looking for people with skills and aren't necessarily looking as much at credentials, especially in Silicon Valley. I was really apprehensive about whether I'd actually get any interviews with companies. And then, even if I got interviews, if I would get any offers. It hadn't even crossed my mind that I would have to choose between offers. But I got three offers, and that was a really cool experience.
tl;dr Programming interview questions can feel unnecessarily difficult. Sometimes they actually are. And this isn't just because they make interviews excessively stressful. Our data shows that harder programming questions actually do a worse job of predicting final outcomes than easier ones.
It was nice to skip a lot of the repetitiveness. You skip the technical phone screens. And I wouldn't have heard of Benchling otherwise. There were lots of companies on Triplebyte that I'd never heard of and wouldn't have found on my own. I had searched Angel List for healthcare companies, but Benchling hadn't come up, so I don't know how I would've found out about them otherwise. I'm really happy for that as well.
tl;dr Humility is an important quality in technical interviewers. Our data shows that interviewers who are strongly confident in their own abilities give less consistent interview scores. Interviewers who are aware of their own weaknesses (and of how noisy interviews can be) in contrast, give more consistent scores. We've developed an exercise to help train interviewers in this area.
Marcus Posey is a 23-year-old software engineer from Decatur, Alabama. After dropping out of high school, he received a GED and entered college in order to pursue his dream: a career in software engineering. But finances got in the way and he was forced to leave school before finishing his degree. Without a degree or experience on his resume, Marcus applied to more than 100 companies, but couldn't get past the resume screens—despite having strong programming skills. Then, in 2018, Marcus heard about Triplebyte on a podcast. Our background-blind, merit-focused technical screening process allowed him to demonstrate his skills without being disqualified by a piece of paper, and he received multiple job offers. He now works at American Express on the back-end. It's his first software engineering job.
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.
