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.

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?

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.