My co-worker Daniel is really into Emacs. It’s his primary editor, his grocery list (via org-mode), and #4 of the 6 things he can’t live without on his OkCupid profile. Other engineers in the office, however, prefer Vim (or Sublime Text, or even RubyMine). Naturally, this leads to war. But after months of salvos (VimGolf one-upmanship, gratuitous references to this Stack Overflow question) no clear victor has emerged.

So last week, I set out to see what the Triplebyte data has to say on the issue. Take this with a grain of salt (correlation does not imply causation), but there is a correlation between what editor an engineer uses, their language and OS, and their ability to pass programming interviews. And, according to our data, Vim users pass interviews at a rate ever-so-slightly higher than Emacs users!

We're excited to announce that Triplebyte is now available for engineers and companies in New York!

Until now we've only been working with companies based in the Bay Area and engineers who want to work there. As we've grown, the biggest request we've had from engineers has been expanding to new locations. The most requested location has been New York, we've seen applications to Triplebyte from engineers either based in New York or wanting to relocate there double since the start of this year.

We do a lot of interviewing at Triplebyte. Indeed, over the last 2 years, I've interviewed just over 900 engineers. Whether this was a good use of my time can be debated! (I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat and doubt it.) But regardless, our goal is to improve how engineers are hired. To that end, we run background-blind interviews, looking at coding skills, not credentials or resumes. After an engineer passes our process, they go straight to the final interview at companies we work with (including Apple, Facebook, Dropbox and Stripe). We interview engineers without knowing their backgrounds, and then get to see how they do across multiple top tech companies. This gives us, I think, some of the best available data on interviewing.

Today, we're launching new versions of the Triplebyte process for front-end and mobile engineers. We started Triplebyte to try to fix some of the problems with programming interviews. Over the last two years, we've built a background-blind interview process, and helped hundreds of engineers get jobs. We've worked with people trying to break into their first job (we helped a pizza delivery person get an engineering job at Instacart), and we've worked with credentialed engineers looking for new opportunities (and helped startups hire their first employee). I'm proud of the process we built. We've convinced major companies to waive their phone screens for our candidates, and globally our candidates receive job offers after 1 out of every 2 interviews they do. (This is about twice the average rate in the industry.)

If you’re a programmer considering a move to the Bay Area, you probably know at least two basic facts: 1) tech salaries are higher here than elsewhere, and 2) living here is really expensive. Both facts have been true for a long time, but they have become especially true in the past four years. Since 2012 home prices have risen by about 60% and rents by about 70% in both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas. The absence of any apparent upper limit to these increases has given rise to a new journalistic subgenre, the Bay Area Housing Horror Story. Maybe you’ve heard about the cheapest house in San Francisco, a $350,000 “decomposing wooden shack” whose interior is “unlivable in its current condition”? Or the tent next to Google X that was renting for $895 a month? Or the guy on Reddit who calculated that it would be cheaper to commute daily to the Bay Area from Las Vegas by plane than to rent an apartment in San Francisco?

We launched Triplebyte with the goal of building the first credentials blind hiring process for engineers. Our mission is to give anyone who has the right skills, the opportunity to work at the best technology companies in the world regardless of what school they went to or which companies they've worked at.

We've now evaluated over 12,000 engineers without using their resumes. We've done this by designing a two step process. The first is an online programming test. If you do well on the test, the next step is a technical interview with our interviewing team where the interviewer knows nothing about your background. We've now interviewed over 2,000 engineers and 15% made it through to the final step of being introduced to the companies we work with.

Programming bootcamps seem to make an impossible claim. Instead of spending four years in university, they say, you can learn how to be a software engineer in a three month program. On the face of it, this sounds more like an ad for Trump University than a plausible educational model.

But this is not what we’ve found at Triplebyte. We do interviews with engineers, and match them with startups where they’ll be a good fit. Companies vary widely in what skills they look for, and by mapping these differences, we’re able to help engineers pass more interviews and find jobs they would not have found on their own. Over the last year, we’ve worked with about 100 bootcamp grads, and many have gone on to get jobs at great companies. We do our interviews blind, without knowing a candidate's background, and we regularly get through an interview and give a candidate very positive scores, only to be surprised at the end when we learn that the candidate has only been programming for 6 months.

Being a good programmer has a surprisingly small role in passing programming interviews. To be a productive programmer, you need to be able to solve large, sprawling problems over weeks and months. Each question in an interview, in contrast, lasts less than one hour. To do well in an interview, then, you need to be able to solve small problems quickly, under duress, while explaining your thoughts clearly. This is a different skill. On top of this, interviewers are often poorly trained and inattentive (they would rather be programming), and ask questions far removed from actual work. They bring bias, pattern matching, and a lack of standardization.

Short stock option exercise windows suck. They force startup employees to make hard decisions, and often rob them of fairly earned compensation. We’ve created docs that companies can use to give their employees 10 years to exercise their options. YC will recommend all their startups use these documents going forward. We’re advising Triplebyte candidates to favor companies making this change, and we’ve already convinced 12 companies to pledge to do this.