As a young person without a degree and with little prior professional experience, it's hard to demonstrate the skills you have. But, because Triplebyte is resume-blind and entirely focused on what you can do, it allowed me to demonstrate that I have the ability to build real things.

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.

I remember when we made a huge revenue guarantee to AOL to get the account. We did a best-case scenario projection, a middle of the road projection, and a worst-case scenario projection. Worst-case scenario and middle of the road had us going out of business with the contract. The best-case scenario had us breaking even.