DEV Community: Charles Treichler

How I Got a Software Engineering Job Without Work Experience or a CS Degree

Charles Treichler — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 16:14:11 +0000

"Triplebyte is a really good platform for people with nontraditional backgrounds who are really passionate about developing things. I don't want to say it's a requirement for them, but it makes things much easier. I wish I'd found it a lot earlier than I did. It's definitely something that should be part of their job search."

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.

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Becoming a Programmer

How did you get into programming?

I was actually first interested in writing literature as a kid—I loved Harry Potter—and I used to buy a lot of books on writing. One day I was at Books-a-Million, and they had stashed their programming books right next to the how-to writing books. I saw one called C++ For Dummies, and it seemed like an interesting name, so I started reading it. I ended up reading several more books on C++ after that. I was just interested in learning about the languages, not even necessarily building any software. I'd just turned 12 or 13, so I was still pretty young.

Why did you find programming so interesting at that age?

I liked that you could create things without having to actually build anything with your hands. I wasn't someone who liked being outside much, and it was interesting that I could start from scratch, with just an empty file, and build something really complex without having to leave my chair. I could be creative without actually having to exert much physical effort.

What were some of the first things you built when you started programming?

I worked through that book, starting with the basic things that you typically work on, like making a calculator, and then I advanced to more complex things. I made a few small text-based games and then my own version of Minesweeper—things like that.

How did you know that you wanted to do computer science for a living?

Most of my motivation came from the fact that I just really enjoyed it. It's something that I would do even if people didn't pay me to do it. That's what I used to do all the time. Even now that I'm getting paid to do it, I write software at work, and then I write more software at home. It's something that I just enjoy doing. It was an obvious choice when it came to picking my major in college.

You mentioned that neither of your parents finished high school—was going to college a challenge for you?

I don't come from a family that has a whole lot of money, and no, neither of my parents finished high school, and they didn't go on to college either. My dad is a construction worker. My mom was always a stay-at-home mom. I have a sister as well who has an associates degree in Psychology. I was hoping to be the one in our group that actually finished—but it didn't happen.

I didn't finish high school, so the initial problem that I had was that I wanted to get into a four-year school to study computer science, but I couldn't find any funding because I hadn't finished high school. I only had my GED and no one was going to let me in with that, so I thought, "Okay, I'll do well at a community college and then I'll transfer."

Where did you attend college?

I initially started at Calhoun Community College near home, taking general courses, but I always had the intention of going on to be a computer science major. I eventually transferred to the University of Alabama at Huntsville, a year and a half after starting at the community college. I was there for a year maybe, and then I transferred to the University of North Alabama. I think I was there for a year as well. I didn't actually finish college.

Why did you leave college before finishing your degree?

I had to leave college because I didn't have enough money anymore. My reasoning for going to the University of North Alabama in the first place was because it was the cheapest in the state that would have been reputable enough, so at that point I was like, "Okay. I can't afford to remain here. But, there really isn't anywhere else to go." So that was the end of that.

That must have been a really tough decision.

Yes. I really enjoyed school, and I did really well for a long time. I just couldn't get any scholarships. I think people weren't interested in giving me scholarships because I focused a lot on the academic aspect and not much on extracurriculars or anything. I wasn't very balanced I guess, and people like to see you balance things.

What did you do after you left the University of North Alabama?

I came home. I'm really grateful that I could just go home and not have too many complaints from my parents. So I stayed with them for slightly over a year, just trying to become a better software engineer in hopes that some company would value my skills more than a degree.

How did you try to become a better software engineer after leaving school?

I was already decently competent, I guess. I had a firm base in developing software. So what I spent a lot of time doing, actually, was watching conference talks, like QCon or GOTO. They were presented by technical leads or engineering managers who would explain, "This is the really difficult problem that our team had to solve, and here are a lot of the ways that we failed, and here are some of the ways that we had success. So I got into the habit of watching those sorts of videos pretty frequently.

I also listened to podcasts on software engineering, and read a lot of company engineering blogs where they picked interesting problems that some of their engineers were working on and wrote about them. I spent a lot of that year just consuming media about how to develop quality, production-ready software. And I learned to build software like people in that sort of environment would. I worked on a lot of really complex systems at home that didn't really do a whole lot. I just sort of intentionally baked in the complexity just to see how I could work my way out of it. It was sort of like an internship but not in a professional environment.

Applying for Jobs Before Triplebyte

What was it like applying for software engineering jobs before using Triplebyte?

I think part of the problem that I encountered was just a geographical one. In Alabama, there isn't much variety in the software engineering jobs. Most of them are military related, like military contracting to build missile defense systems. That's a really big thing there, and it's not something that I've ever really been that interested in. Partly because I'm not really in low-level systems, but also because it just seemed like a lot of pressure. I don't want to work on systems like that. So I applied for jobs outside that area. I think that the problem that I encountered mostly was that I wasn't local, so a lot of companies weren't interested in that.

Another problem was that I didn't have my degree. It seems like companies have a checklist like, "Does he meet these requirements? If he doesn't, it goes into the trash. It didn't really matter whether I was capable of actually performing the job functions.

Did you ever get the chance to show what you knew during a technical screen or were you passed over because you didn't have a degree on your resume? I have a resume that really doesn't fit with what people would view as a successful hire. I know a lot of in-demand technologies, and I think that should've gotten me past certain screens, but I don't have the job experience that people want and I don't have the degree. I felt like in certain cases there were automated systems that will actually filter your resume without a human involved, so I would get auto-denied, which seemed to happened a few times.

That sounds frustrating. What was that like for you on a personal level?

It was a bit discouraging at first. I would create the cover letters and put a lot of effort into them. Some would take me an hour, and I would submit them, and then I wouldn't get a response. But after a while it sort of just becomes a thing that you're doing. Not like “I'm finding a specific job,” but “I'm applying to jobs and I know that I won't get responses from most of these things that I send out.” I don't know, I guess you just become very desensitized to not getting responses back.

And how many different positions did you apply for?

Way too many to count. Over a hundred.

Using Triplebyte

How did you hear about Triplebyte?

I was listening to Software Engineering Daily and Triplebyte was the sponsor that day. I think the host mentioned that people who listened to the show often score petty highly on the test, so I wondered, "Will I actually score highly? I was at a point where I thought, "This is probably going to require much less effort than doing another cover letter, so I might as well.

So I did the quiz, and it was a difficult test, and I didn't know if I was going to pass it or not. But I did, and then I scheduled the phone screen. At that point I went from being just like curious, to being a bit invested in succeeding in the process.

What was the process like for you?

The technical interview was nice. I tried to be as prepared as I could, but it was still pretty difficult. At the time I thought it was pretty long, but then I went on to the actual interviews at companies and I was like, Yeah, that was actually pretty short.

After that I got paired up with Kevin, my talent manager, and he laid everything out. It made things pretty easy. I felt like I was in this factory line or something. Like a job factory. It just seemed like I was definitely going to end up with a job at the end. I had a lot of confidence in that. It was very smooth.

I didn't initially have confidence that companies would want to look at my profile and be interested because of all the rejections I had had in the past. But I started to get responses at a rate that I didn't initially think I would. The companies that were involved in the process were more concerned with my abilities than some of the things that I had been rejected for in the past. So I was really happy with that.

What did the background-blind process mean for you?

I think it meant that all of the effort I had put into being the developer that I am paid off. Before, I hadn't really had a chance for people to see that I was actually capable, because I just kept getting denied during the resume process. So having a background-blind process was really helpful for me.

So you said you got more calls from companies than you expected. Was there anything else that was unexpected about the Triplebyte process? I really enjoyed that Triplebyte paid for the trips to the onsite interviews. That was a major reason why I didn't apply to certain companies prior to Triplebyte. I don't come from a family that has a whole lot of money, so it was like, Okay, I can apply to certain companies but if they don't pay for the interview then it's just wasted time because I can't actually go there to do the interview. A major reason that I was interested in Triplebyte was because I could actually go to the interviews and not worry about how I would pay for them.

What has this whole process meant for you personally?

I guess it just gives me more motivation to keep pushing forward. It gives me a lot more confidence that I can put in effort and get the results that I want.

What was the value of using Triplebyte for you?

I think that it exposed me to companies that I wouldn't have been able to get to on my own. So it certainly opened the door and allowed me to go in and show who I was, whereas before I was just encountering a lot of closed doors. So I think that it was a really important part of that process.

What are your favorite parts of the new job?

I enjoy the people more than most things. Before I was building a lot of software alone, and didn't get to encounter things that I encounter developing software at a company with as many people as American Express. I'm getting to encounter new challenges that I didn't really have before, and that's something that I really enjoy.

At American Express, I work on the technology that allows people to become card members. It's great back-end stuff, but it doesn't really tie into what you or the consumer would see on the front end, but it's pretty critical to the flow of people's information.

How does your family feel about you moving to New York City?

They're happy. They want to see me again, though. I haven't been back home since I came here at the end of September. I'm going back home for Christmas, though, so I'm excited about that.

Is there anything else that you'd like to say?

Triplebyte is a really good platform for people with nontraditional backgrounds who are really passionate about developing things. I don't want to say it's a requirement for them, but it makes things much easier. I wish I'd found it a lot earlier than I did. It's definitely something that should be part of their job search.

Why Isn't Everyone Happy All the Time?

We've been ending our interviews with tis question: why isn't everyone happy all the time?

I think it's because the goalposts always move. People like improving things. I guess another way of saying that is that they always want more. One is a bit more optimistic than the other. People like improving their situation, so that they can obtain some state that they want prior—but they can always ask for more. They're certainly entitled to do that, but when they realize there is actually more that they could ask for, then the situation that they're in is degraded a bit. It doesn't hold the same value anymore. It's like if you buy a phone, and it's a really nice phone, and then the new version comes out six months later, then it's suddenly not as nice as you initially thought. So I think it's that people want improvement. That's what got us, humanity, to the point where we are today. It can happen over the long-term or the short-term. People are always chasing improvement.

Thanks so much, Marcus! It was great speaking with you.

CS Degrees Are Mostly Just Signaling - An Interview With Economist Bryan Caplan

Charles Treichler — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 20:26:48 +0000

"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."

In his controversial book, The Case Against Education, Dr. Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, uses statistical analysis to argue that our eduction system is a big waste of time and money. But he isn't suggesting that you should drop out. Data shows that education pays big dividends (the so-called education premium), and Caplan does not dispute that fact.

What he does question is WHY education pays. Rather than providing practical skills, Caplan argues that education serves primarily as a signal to prospective employers that a given candidate is likely to be a productive employee. That's why education can be both a “big waste” for society (because it's an inefficient way to filter job applicants), while also being extremely lucrative for the individual (because it IS the way our society filters job applicants).

We recently spoke with Dr. Caplan and asked him to explain his thesis and to discuss how it does (or does not) apply to practical fields like computer science and engineering. We also got into topics like changing child labor laws (at least in CS) and finding more efficient ways to filter candidates.

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and style.

Why Education Is a Waste of Time and Money

Why is most of education a big waste of time and money?

Most of what you study in school you are highly unlikely to ever use in a job—if you even remember it. A lot of what I do in the book is go through the high school curriculum and compare it to what people actually use in the real world and show that the connection is much weaker than propaganda would have you believe.

I do the same thing for college majors to show how few of the classes you take are actually relevant to a job that you're ever likely to get. [This is true] even for many college majors that sound vocational on the surface—like psychology or communications. When you look more closely, you see that there are so few jobs in those areas that the vast majority of people who get majors in those fields have to find a job someplace else because it just doesn't arithmetically work out for them to actually end up in the field that they studied.

Then why do people with more schooling earn more money?

There are two very different ways that education could cause earnings to go up. One is that it actually teaches useful job skills. And, of course, education sometimes does that, and for that there's no real intellectual puzzle. It's pretty obvious why someone who can read is a better worker than someone who can't.

But what's interesting to me is, why does all of the other stuff that doesn't seem useful also pay? And there, my explanation (which is not original to me—it's been around for a while, but I push it much harder than almost anyone else) is that even studying the most useless subject is a good way of persuading employers that you're a good employee. It's a way of convincing them that you've got the brains, the work ethic, and just the sheer conformity to get through the whole process. One way I like to describe it is that most education is not job training, rather, it's a passport to the actual job training, which occurs on the job.

So you should still get that piece of paper?

Yeah, the whole idea of signaling is that you want to get in with a group of people. You want to join a successful group, the most successful group that will have you as a member, so you can say, “Hey, look at me! I'm part of this group.” If you're a highly able person you don't want to go into low status things because then you get stigmatized. Or, if not true stigma, then at least a relative stigma: “Sure that's good, but it's 'pretty good.'” And if you're awesome, then you don't want to be in the “pretty good” group, you want to be in the “awesome” group.

Educational Signaling in CS

Does your argument apply to fields like Computer Science where you need to know some fairly concrete things to be successful?

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. You can't simply go and drop-out of high school and take a test of programming competency and expect to get hired at Google or Microsoft or Facebook or some other prestigious place.

I want to push back on that a little bit. We have a number of people on our own engineering team who dropped out of CS programs to take jobs with us. Also, our platform has done a pretty good job placing software engineers who dropped out, even at major tech companies.

To me, the fact that you have a bunch of people who dropped out of their CS programs working for you isn't that much more surprising than an insurance company with a bunch of people who didn't finish their English degrees. These people have to find jobs somewhere.

The important thing to remember is that drop-out rates are really high in general and just because you dropped out doesn't mean you'll never get a job. In my mind, the question is just how much better off would that 25% of people you're talking about be if they had stuck with it? On average, it seems pretty likely that having a degree would have opened up more doors.

[You could ask,] isn't it possible that [the tech] field is changing so rapidly that the usual rules don't apply, and maybe we can actually break out of this equilibrium? I hope you're right, but my default is always that there isn't going to be any big change. The education system as we know it has been around for about 1,000 years. If something has been around for 1,000 years, and someone says, yeah, but it's breaking down right now, that's the kind of thing [that makes me think] like, is it really? I'd like to see it break down, but we gotta separate our wishes from our predictions.

On the other hand, there's about a 1.9% unemployment rate amongst programmers, and lots of talk about a “developer shortage”^[1]. Do you think tech companies are just so desperate for people that they might be willing to overlook a lack of credentials?

I mean it's just a question of, will they overlook it only in the employment decision or in wages as well? It is true that it's easier in Computer Science to go and get a job just because you know the stuff, but there are a lot of reasons why someone who's great at coding could still make a bad employee, and these are the things that employers use credentials for in order to weed people out. Which makes sense if employers are worried that, even if the person is a competent programmer, [the fact that they didn't graduate means] that they're not a team player, or they're unreliable, or have a problem following orders.

That said, dropping out of a CS program to work in tech is almost part of the mythology in Silicon Valley. So I wonder if the social stigma is less here? Some early-stage startups might even want people who are a little non-conformist?

Maybe. Really I would just like to see the data. Is it true that people who have the same tested skills but very different credentials wind up doing just as well in terms of earnings? Or do people who have the skills but not the credentials have to settle for a lower career path? That's the main thing that I'd be looking at.

It seems hard to believe that, on average, you don't wind up making more money and having a better career if you just stick with the program and finish it, although, of course there can be stand-out exceptions to that rule. It's just a matter of whether you should let those exceptions make you forget there's a rule.

The Wage Premium in CS

Do you think that the percentage of the wage premium that can be attributed purely to signaling goes down in more technical fields like CS?

That's a good question. I'd say my honest answer is, I think so, but I'm not completely convinced. So here's the thing: the total wage premium in tech fields is higher than for other ones. It's still possible that the ratio of the signaling share to the skills share could be the same, but you're just getting more skills. For example, if a CS degree has twice the percentage effect on your earnings as a business degree, say, it could be that he's learning more skills in CS, but it could also be that CS sends a better signal, it's more convincing in terms of the percentage of the pay-off from just saying, “Oh wow, look at me!” versus, “I know skills.”

People have often noted that one of the best ways to profit from your physics degree is to go to Wall Street and get a job doing finance. They work in an area that has absolutely nothing to do with physics, but the physics degree opens doors.

Coding Bootcamps

There's a lot of focus right now on coding bootcamps. I know you're a proponent of vocational education, so I wonder what your view is?

[Bootcamps are] very good for society. This is something that tax-payers don't have to pay for, and people are acquiring real job skills.

For the individuals concerned, I think a lot of it depends. If you are the kind of person who just couldn't stand to go through a regular, conventional education, then it's probably a great option for you, and you'll at least do a lot better than you would have without it. On the other hand, if there were kids saying, “I got into Princeton—should I do Princeton or bootcamp?” I think I'd say, “From your point of view, yeah, go to Princeton because I think Princeton will open up a lot more doors for you than the bootcamp will.”

Innate Ability and Motivation

Do you think some people have the innate ability to be programmers and other people don't?

There's two things. [First] there's a difference in ability. There's work saying that besides general IQ, there's also specific differences in quantitative versus verbal abilities. Think about the SAT. Math and verbal correlate—we have a high positive correlation—but it's far from perfect. So there are people who are very quantitative, but not so verbal. For computer programmers, it's clearly more important to have good quantitative skills than good verbal skills.

Motivation is also a big deal. If you don't like something, the fact that you would be good at it if you worked hard at it just isn't all that relevant because you're not likely to work all that hard at something that you just don't like.

Finding More Efficient Ways to Filter Candidates

Are there other, more efficient ways to filter prospective employees other than educational signaling? For example, Triplebyte does background-blind, skills-based assessment, and companies pay us because we find good developers (some with non-traditional backgrounds) who they wouldn't have found on their own.

My guess is that you know more about it than I do. An important thing to remember, is that I can still be right about how the world generally works, and yet you could run a very successful business working with the one or two or three percent of the CS workforce [who don't fit the norm]. Something can be rare, and yet a business can make billions of dollars going and serving that rare thing.

Doing online skills-based testing is great as far as it goes, but there's the question of, if there's someone who doesn't have any conventional credentials but does well on the test, should you think that they are comparably good employees as someone who has the same score on the test but has the credentials? It's hard. My strong guess is, in general no, because, especially in this society, when a person drops out of school, there's normally something deviant about them. Not in every case, but it's something that, as an employer, I would be nervous about. Why didn't he go to college, what happened? What's his problem?

Some people suggest work-trials as a better way to evaluate people.

The main problem with just doing on-the-job testing or just giving people a trial run is that there's a limit to how many people you can give that to, especially for highly skilled jobs.

In your ideal world, how would we filter candidates?

In an ideal world, there would be so little government funding for education that people would just regard it as an extreme luxury good and then people would take into consideration a lot of things that we currently ignore. I'd say that the system we have is largely a product of the easy accessibility of education.

In a world where it was just a lot less accessible, people would have to look at cheaper routes. What I always tell my students is, “If governments listened to my policy advice, a lot of you couldn't afford to be here. But, you also wouldn't need to be here any more. You'd be able to go and get the job that you are going to get right now.” Whenever you are thinking about the effects of policy change, think about how it changes the whole system. Don't just think about how it affects you individually.

Degree Inflation and Upward Mobility

That's the whole idea of degree/credential inflation, right?

Yeah, precisely.

Could you just explain that briefly?

There's been a lot of work on how the education and training of workers has changed over time, and one of the strongest results is that as the education level of American workers has gone up by about four years over the last 70 years, the amount of education you need to get a job has gone up by over three years—but for one and the same job. It's not that the economy has modernized and now you need college degrees to do modern jobs, rather we see that even for jobs that we think of as not really being college-type jobs (like being a waiter), still the average education of those workers has gone way up. The key point is that education levels have changed a lot more than job skills.

Would you rather be a high school drop-out looking for a job today, or a high school drop-out looking for a job in 1950? In 1950, the stigma would have been a lot less because there were so many other people in the same boat as you. It just didn't say such a bad thing about you, and now it does. There is this treadmill effect where you have to have more education now to get the same job that your parents or grandparents could have gotten.

I wonder about upward mobility. Is there some truth to the idea that universal education opens up doors for people?

I'd say that increased access to education both opens and closes doors. For one individual, it opens doors. If a poor kid gets a scholarship, then it has opened some doors for him. But it's important to remember what we lost. We've lost the ability to get a good job right out of high school. Because the more accessible it is, the more education you need in order to impress employers.

Really, we have expanded opportunity for the brightest kid from a poor family at the same time the siblings of that brightest kid probably have worse opportunities, at least in terms of their chances of getting a more highly-skilled job. There's this nice meme that says, When everyone has a bachelor's degree, no one does. That's really the idea.

Child Labor (in Software Development)

One of the controversial things you talk about in in your book is changing child labor laws. A lot of programmers start programming super young—should we hire more high school drop-out programmers?

Absolutely, yes. What I'm saying in the book is this: we have these negative associations with child labor because we are picturing a 19th century coal mine or a steel refinery or something, and that has almost nothing to do with modern employment. These freakish scenarios of kids being dropped into vats of molten steel have nothing to do with child employment.

Right now, it's up to parents to decide whether or not most activities are good for their kids, and so parents can go and take you to dangerous countries, they can take you mountain climbing, and they can also go and deprive you of a childhood if they want to. They can say, “Hey, you're gonna be an Olympic ice skater.” Or, “You're going to spend all of your spare minutes learning the piano.” And for all of these things, we rely upon parents to make the decision (even though we know that some parents make bad decisions) because we think parents are the best guardians of the interests of their children, and it's not really appropriate for outsiders to interfere unless they've got a really strong reason to do so, such as physical abuse. I say we should have the same standard for child employment. Except in freakish situations, it should be up to the parent to decide whether or not it's a good idea for their kid [to work] or not.

If you feel this is terrible—that a kid gets a job when he's 12 years old programming computers—then explain why that kid's life is so much worse than a kid who was made to spend every day practicing violin? I'd rather be the kid making money programming computers than be the kid stuck with the violin lessons.

Dr. Caplan, thanks so much for your time!

Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a blogger for EconLog. He is the author several widely read books including The Case Against Education and The Myth of The Rational Voter. Dr. Caplan has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, and Intelligence, and appeared on ABC, Fox News, MSNBC, and C-SPAN. Dr. Caplan is a proponent of Effective Altruism, and he describes himself as “an openly nerdy man who loves role-playing games and graphic novels.” Caplan lives in Oakton, Virginia, with his wife and four kids.

^[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-08/demand-for-programmers-hits-full-boil-as-u-s-job-market-simmers ↩

How to Refactor Your Finances - An Interview With a Programmer Who Retired at 34

Charles Treichler — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 22:53:04 +0000

For the uninitiated, FIRE (or just FI, or FI/RE) stands for “Financial Independence/Retire Early.” FIRE adherents live frugally and save as much as possible in order to achieve financial independence (the ability to never work again if they so choose). Financial independence (FI) is generally associated with early retirement (RE) but more broadly signifies personal autonomy and the ability to live according to personal values—rather than the dictates of a boss or a normal 9-to-5.

Interest in FIRE is growing rapidly, especially among programmers, and FIRE was recently featured by the NYT and boasts a 500K+ reddit community.

I wanted to know why FIRE resonates so deeply with software engineers, so I spoke with Brandon, A.K.A The Mad Fientist, a leading voice in the FIRE community—and a software developer himself before his retirement at age 34. I asked Brandon to explain the basics of FIRE and why so many programmers are getting on board.

Note: this interview has been edited for clarity and style.

What Is FIRE?

For those who don't know by now, what is FIRE?

FIRE is a pretty recent term, actually. It stands for Financial Independence/Retire Early. And I don't really like it. I prefer FI, which is why I'm the mad FI-entist and not the mad FIRE-entist, because I think Financial Independence is the important part. Early retirement is like the carrot at the end of the stick, but the real benefit comes from being financially independent, meaning that you have enough money to live your life without having to work again.

That sounds great. How do I get there?

So, the common number that gets thrown around is 4%. This is how it works: if you live on $40k a year, for instance, and you have a portfolio of 1 million dollars, you should be able to sustain yourself indefinitely because, if you've invested in a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, you should be able to withdraw 4% per year ($40k) and never run out of money. That all comes from the Trinity study, which looked at sustainable withdrawal strategies for retirement. How do you get there? You just spend less than you earn and try to invest as efficiently as possible, at as low a cost as possible.

That's pretty much FI in a nutshell. You save as much as you can and build up a stack of cash that can sustain your spending indefinitely.

Saving money is hard, so how do you encourage people to save money for FIRE?

It comes down to prioritizing what you want out of life and cutting back on all of the rest. For example, I don't care about cars. If a car can get me from point A to point B—hopefully using as little gas as possible—that's fine. I don't care if it has hubcaps, or if it's dented, or any of that stuff. If it's safe and it gets me there efficiently, then that's all I need a car for. Sure, I could go out and buy a Lamborghini right now if I wanted to, but I don't care about that enough to spend the money on it, so I don't.

But, I do care about other things. We live in the center of Edinburgh because it is really important to me to be right in the city, so that I can walk around, and get out during the day, and see people, and utilize all the things the city has to offer. That is important, so we spend a little bit more on rent than we do on our car.

Just because society, and advertising, and peer pressure is telling you that you should have all the fancy things, that doesn't mean that you actually want or need them. Obviously it's easier said than done, but that's really all it boils down to. You can't have everything. Luckily, you don't really want everything. You may think you do, but it actually won't make you happier. The key to FI is figuring out what's important to you and optimizing for that.

Software Engineers and FIRE

Why are there so many software engineers in the FIRE community?

I really think it's about efficiency. 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, super clean, super brief 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.

Why should programmers consider pursuing FIRE?

Because what else are you gonna do with all that money? You're earning a ton of money that you don't need to spend—and you won't be happier if you spend it. What else are you going to do with it? You might as well just start buying your freedom. You're buying more options, and that makes your career and working life a lot more fun.

Is software engineering a good career to pursue if you want to achieve FIRE?

Absolutely. I think it's an amazing career to pursue. Not only do you earn great money, but it also allows you to create things on the side that you love and that could bring in money and give you something meaningful to work on after you retire early. And that makes early retirement more fun, 'cause you can build interesting stuff and do fun projects that you probably wouldn't have been able to do otherwise if you didn't have programming skills. I think it opens up the entire world and is a great skill to have.

What things can trip up programmers on the path to early retirement?

I don't know if this is true of all software developers, but for me, you can get too obsessed with efficiency and too obsessed with the perfect code or the perfect algorithm. That was definitely what happened to me during my journey to FI. It was like I couldn't handle any sort of spending inefficiency, and I couldn't handle any sort of overspending on anything. I got way too obsessed with it. I think that's something that programmers should be wary of. Just like with your code, there's definitely “good enough.” Yes, you can maybe make it more efficient or cleaner or more perfect, but that's not really the goal. The goal is functioning code that's clean and easy to read. In the same way, you just wanna have a happy life where you're spending money in relation to your goals and your purpose and what you wanna do with your life. And yes, you can hyper-optimize, but there are diminishing returns, just like there are diminishing returns when optimizing code to a ridiculous level.

The Philosophy of FIRE

What about the trade-offs? What do you have to sacrifice to achieve FI?

If you do it right, there are no trade-offs. Sadly, I didn't do it right. I went too crazy, and I ended up depriving myself of things that were actually important to me. That resulted in me and my wife living in the woods of Vermont, not really doing anything and being sort of hermits, and that wasn't good for anybody. Once I realized what I was doing, we moved back to Scotland to be closer to her family, and I relaxed a little bit with money.

After that, I got to a great level of spending where I felt that even if I won the lottery I wouldn't spend any more, because I knew that the we were spending the right amount. The only reason I was able to get to that stage, though, was because I actually worked a couple years longer than I expected to. When I was working those extra years I was like, Okay, this is unexpected money, so this year I'm just gonna go crazy and spend as much as I want. We didn't actually end up spending that much more, but we did realize some things.

What did you learn by spending as much as you wanted that year?

One thing we realized was, Hey, we don't like eating out as much as we were that year. Because it lost the specialness, and it's less healthy than cooking for yourself. We also traveled a lot that year and realized that we didn't enjoy traveling that much—it just became a chore. It was like, Okay, I guess we gotta do the touristy things in this city. It wasn't fun and exciting like it is when you do it as a treat or something different every once in a while. It just lost the appeal because a lot of the appeal is in planning for it and getting excited about it—looking forward to it—and just the contrast with normal life.

If you can do those sorts of experiments on your journey to financial independence, then you actually become happier because you remove all the stuff from your life that wasn't actually important in the first place. It seems like most Americans' lives are just packed full of activities and stuff, and they're just overwhelmed by it. But what you actually want is to be in this beautiful equilibrium with your money where it feels like you can spend as much as you want, but you don't have to spend that much, because you know that spending that much won't make you happy.

I would just say, experiment both on the low spending side and the high spending side, and then just find that sweet spot. And then there's no trade-off. You're living the life you want to live. You're saving a lot of money so you never have to work again if you don't want to. I'm happier now than I ever have been, and my spending is still lower than probably a normal American.

How much money is enough?

There have been a lot of different studies about what level of income makes you happiest, and the last thing I read was something like $75k a year. I've earned anywhere from very little to quite a lot over my career, and I would say that $75k is probably a pretty good marker. I can't even imagine spending $75k a year, and if you have a partner, I can't even imagine what $150k spent in a year would be like.

I know that my wife and I can live very happily as a couple spending anywhere from, I don't know, $35k to $50k a year? I don't think we've ever spent more than $50k, and we're usually closer to the $40k a year mark, and we feel like we can do everything that we'd ever want to do. So $75k is great, because that's a huge buffer. You can spend that much, and have this great life, but you're also saving and getting the security and power that comes from having money saved up.

Some studies do report that more money can make people happier, so why not just focus on making and spending as much money as you can?

I don't think people should focus on making and spending as much money as they can because you're gonna be at the same level of happiness no matter how much you're spending, but you won't have the security, and you're gonna have a hell of a lot harder life because you're gonna need to sustain that level of income to sustain that level of spending.

I would just get good at being happy with what you have and definitely not focus on maxing everything out because that's never ending. If you think you're gonna be happy when you're spending a million dollars a year, and you actually hit that level, then, by the time you get there, everything's gonna change, and you'll be bored with it. You'll be like, Actually, I'll be happy when I spend two million a year. It's just a never ending cycle that a lot of people are actually caught up in, which is sad.

Many people love their jobs. Should they NOT pursue FIRE?

I would say you should still pursue it, but I would focus on the FI part of it, not the RE. For example, my wife is an optometrist. She loves her job, she loves helping people, she loves eyes, she loves reading about all that stuff, and she can't see the point of ever retiring. But she may change. Something may change with the industry, and she'll change as a person obviously. But having the security [of FI] is great because then she doesn't have to take any crap from any of her bosses or any of her clients. She picks and choose the best places to work and she works there. It gives you a lot of power and flexibility, so I definitely say that people should always be working towards that financial independence. But if you love your job, then obviously the early retirement part is not gonna be as big of a focus for you.

The Mad Fientist's Journey to Financial Independence

Let's talk a bit more about your story. How did you first get interested in FI?

I was always really efficient with my money. I was always saving. I was always frugal, but I didn't have any goals—I just wanted to get rich. Not because I wanted to buy fancy cars or a big house or anything. I just wanted to have a portfolio to manage, and I liked the idea of having a lot of money saved up. I did that for the first part of my career, but I had no real goal or purpose for that money. Then in 2011 I came across earlyretirementextreme.com, and I was like, Oh, this is amazing. You mean, I could just buy my freedom earlier in life? This is incredible. From then on, it was just like “all hands on deck” for that goal. I just ramped up my savings even more.

Taking a step back, how did you become a programmer?

In my junior year of high school, I took pre-calculus, and I had a teacher named Mr. Burns. I was one of the youngest kids in the class—it was mostly seniors—but I think I was at the top of the class. He took me aside and said, Hey, you're obviously good at math, and it looks like you like it, so do you wanna learn how to program computers, 'cause that's a good way to use those types of skills in your career? I said, Yeah, that sounds great. So I started going after school to learn Visual Basic.

He taught me a lot about programming, and I started using those skills to program my TI-85 graphing calculator during classes, which was fun because I was bored in class, but nobody's gonna yell at you for having a calculator. I'd do stuff like write a virus that I would put on my friends' graphing calculators. It wasn't like a real virus, it would just show a screen that said, You are infected, and the only way they could get out of that screen was a password that I had programmed into it. Fun stuff like that. Later, I went to UNC Chapel Hill, and I majored in computer science. That was pretty much the start of it.

What was your career like? Did you have a lot of different positions along the way?

Yes, I ended up having three different jobs during my career. My first was in Scotland. I studied abroad for my junior year in there during undergrad and ended up meeting my now wife. As soon as I graduated, I moved back over and got a job. At first, it was desktop applications, using VB6, but luckily we convinced them to go to web-based applications after a little while, 'cause shipping CD's is just crazy, especially when they're boxing and things. So we went to web-based applications, so that was VB.NET and ASP.NET. I stayed there for, two or three years, and then I ended up moving back to the States with my wife.

I kept working remotely for them for a while though. Then I ended up getting a job in downtown Boston for a financial company. Again, that was C#, .NET and ASP.NET and things like that. Then I ended up moving to Vermont, but kept working for the Boston company remotely, and then I ended up getting a job at Dartmouth, which was my final job, doing Ruby on Rails web development for them.

The best thing that happened in my career was having the ability to leave a job. I obviously saved up money way before I found FIRE was possible, and that allowed me to just quit jobs without having another one lined up, which led to great pay raises and remote working arrangements.

How did quitting your jobs lead to pay raises and other perks?

The biggest boosts in my salary came when I left a job. When I left Scotland I was like, Hey, I'm leaving Scotland. This has been great, thanks for everything. But they were like, Wait, wait, wait, do you wanna keep working remotely? So that was already a huge boost, because at the time I was commuting into the office five days a week. I was like, Wow, you're gonna let me work remotely—and you've offered me 25% more than I was earning when I was actually commuting in? That was awesome.

And then the same thing happened again when I was working for the company in Boston. I was like, Hey, I gotta go. I'm gonna move to Vermont. I'm gonna stop working. And it was exactly the same. She said, "Hey wait, wait, you can keep working remotely if you want and, by the way, here's over a 50% raise.” It was crazy, and then she ended up giving me another boost when I said I was gonna start working for Dartmouth. But I ended up enjoying that boost for just a few months because I did end up going to Dartmouth.

Thanks for telling us about your life, Brandon.

Why Isn't Everyone Happy All The Time?

We end our interviews with this philosophical question: Why isn't everyone happy all the time?

That's just not how people work. I wish everyone could be happy all the time, but it just doesn't happen, no matter what. People seem to blame their scenario or their situation for why they're not happy, but I think it's just how people are. Even now that I have a 100% control over my day to day life, and I can do whatever I want whenever I want, there are still days when I don't feel great, or I feel bummed out, or I feel lazy, or sad. It's just how humans are. But luckily there are things you can do to help that, like going to the gym a lot, something I do more now that I don't have a job. That's really helped, and I wish I'd done it when I was working 'cause that would have made my working life a lot happier. Obviously, financial independence gives you the freedom to do exactly what you want, which helps, but there are just some days when you're still not happy and you just have to roll with it. I wish we were all happy all the time.

Brandon, thank you so much for your time!

Brandon, A.K.A. “The Mad Fientist,” hosts a popular podcast and blogs at madfientist.com.

Charles Treichler is Triplebyte's Content Manager. Email questions or comments to charlie@triplebyte.com

Programming Interview Questions Are Too Hard and Too Short

Charles Treichler — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 16:20:50 +0000

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.

Programming under time pressure is difficult. This is especially true during interviews. A coding exercise that would seem simple under normal circumstances somehow becomes a formidable challenge under the bright lights of an interview room. Stress hormones cloud your thinking during interviews (even though, sadly, neither fight nor flight is an effective response to a menacing programming problem). And it can almost feel like the questions are designed to be perversely difficult. I actually think this is more than just a feeling.

Interview questions are designed to be hard. Because the cost of hiring a bad engineer is so much higher than the cost of rejecting a good engineer, companies are incentivized to set a high bar. And for most companies that means asking hard questions. Intuitively this makes sense because harder questions seem like they should result in a more rigorous screening process. But intuition turns out to be a poor guide here. Our data shows that harder questions are actually less predictive than relatively easy ones.

Interview Questions Are Too Hard

Hard questions do filter out bad engineers, but they also filter out good engineers (that is, they have a high false-negative rate). Easy questions, in contrast, produce fewer false-negatives but more false-positives (since more engineers get them right, including some bad ones). Balancing these two signals is the core problem you face when selecting the optimal difficulty level for interview questions. Companies—seeking to avoid false positives at all cost—tend to skew towards the harder end of this spectrum.

However, whether or not a candidate answers a question correctly is not the only source of signal during an interview. You can also evaluate their process by, for example, observing how long it takes them to finish, how clean their code is, and how much they struggle while finding a solution. Our analysis shows that this second source of signal (process) is almost as predictive as the first (correctness).

But there is an additional trade-off here. The questions that carry the most process signal are significantly easier than the questions that carry the most correctness signal. The reason for this becomes clear when you distill process down to how much a candidate struggles while finding a solution (the aspect of process most directly related to question difficulty). If a question is hard enough to carry a strong correctness signal, then all candidates will struggle with it (even those who eventually answer it correctly). So struggle will carry no signal.

Conversely, questions that carry a strong process signal will be easy enough for most candidates to answer them correctly, thus having little to offer in terms of correctness signal. An optimally difficult question is one that balances process and correctness to extract the maximum signal from the combination of these two factors (which may not be the peak signal for either).

We interviewed thousands of engineers and scored their answers along multiple dimensions, including process and correctness, and compared these scores with later performance. And, after regression analysis (looking at both process and correctness signal) our data showed that the most predictive questions were actually much easier than we expected (and easier than the questions that many companies ask).

Harder questions ultimately filter out too many qualified candidates to be optimal. So, if you want to make your hiring process more accurate, you should probably ask easier questions.

I want to state clearly, however, that this doesn't mean you should lower the bar and pass more people. Asking easier questions doesn't necessarily mean making your interviews easier. The difficulty level of the questions you ask and where you set your decision-threshold are independent decisions. You can still implement an extremely rigorous hiring process by asking relatively easy questions and evaluating them demandingly. Our finding is simply that easier questions provide more signal. But what you do with that signal is up to you.

Easier interview questions are also less stressful, which is an important advantage. Stress causes candidates to under-perform. But, on the other hand, when candidates are more comfortable, they perform their true best, which actually makes interviews more predictive. I think that interviewers tend to under-estimate the effects of stress on candidates while over-estimating their own abilities. When you're the one asking the questions, it's easy to forget how hard it is to get much real programming done in 30-60 minutes. To counter this bias, we've adopted a rule at Triplebyte stating that interviewers have to give candidates 3X as much time to answer a question as they think it would take to solve it themselves. Usually this works out to be the right amount of time.

Interview Questions Are Too Short

Easier questions are beneficial for another important reason. They allow you to fit more content into your interviews. This means you can use longer, multi-part problems which have compounding benefits in terms of prediction. You can ask questions that ramp up in difficulty over time, and these longer, real-world questions are more predictive than their shorter and harder cousins.^[1]

This is partly because longer questions serve as better proxies for real-life programming. Production programming involves working with a relatively large codebase over a long period of time, and longer questions just do a better job of approximating this reality.

Additionally, longer questions allow you to offer hints when a candidate gets stuck. I think this is vital because even strong engineers can get tripped up at some point during a coding problem. Asking longer questions gives candidates the chance to recover from errors and show off their skills later on during an exercise. A single misstep shouldn't ruin an entire interview. Finally, being able to offer help makes interviews less stressful which, again, results in more accurate outcomes.

Conclusion

Companies can get stuck in a vicious cycle when it comes to question difficulty. They start out asking questions that are already too hard and too short, which leads them to make sub-optimal hiring decisions based off noisy signals. When they experience poor outcomes, they may attempt to correct by making their process even more rigorous (which generally means asking even harder questions). But this only makes their interviews less accurate. And so on. Both companies and candidates are hurt by this cycle. I see companies missing out on talent and candidates missing out on jobs—and everyone getting more stressed than they need to be.

I hope interviewers will embrace this finding. Not only can it make their work more accurate, but easier as well. It's much less time intensive to come up with straightforward, multi-step problems than perversely difficult short challenges.

So, here's our advice, if you actually want to make your interviews more accurate, you probably need to start asking easier programming questions. This doesn't mean lowering the bar. It just means getting a better signal so you can hire the right people.

If you decide to ask easier questions during programming interviews, or find this post helpful in some other way, I'd love to hear from you! Email me at charlie@triplebyte.com

^[1]“The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it.” - (Wired Magazine) ↩