S2E19: Studying Law to Building Startups in Silicon Valley with Harj Taggar

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In today’s episode of the Learn to Code With Me podcast, I talk with Harj Taggar. Harj studied law in the UK before deciding to follow his passion into the tech world. Early success in startups and at Y Combinator led him to create Triplebyte. As the cofounder and CEO, he helps software engineers land jobs at top tech companies.

Harj’s journey to Triplebyte is full of twists and turns and making the most of new opportunities. After finishing university, Harj applied to Y Combinator and moved to the Bay Area. He sold his company and later became the first non founding partner of Y Combinator.

In our conversation, Harj discusses the importance of finding companies that value your skills. He talks about making the right connections and reaching out to people who can help you. We get to hear about the screening process for Triplebyte and how it can help match you with the best job. Ultimately, Harj’s dedication to following his passion is now helping others do the same.

Laurence:
Hey, it's Laurence Bradford. Welcome to Season 2 of the Learn to Code With Me podcast, where I'm chatting with people who taught themselves how to code and are now doing amazing things with their newly found skills.

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Hey everyone, welcome to the Learn to Code With Me podcast. I am your host, Laurence Bradford. Wow, it’s already the 19th episode in Season 2! Time sure does fly when you’re having fun. And I truly hope your 2017 has been off to a great start. In today’s episode, I talk with Harj Taggar, the founder and CEO at Triplebyte. Triplebyte is a website that helps software engineers land jobs at top tech companies. However, before getting into tech and the world of startups, Harj studied law in the UK. In our conversation, Harj shares how he began building startups, moved to Silicon Valley shortly after finishing university, later became the first non-founding partner at Y Combinator, and much more. Harj’s story is truly awesome. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Remember, you can get Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, at learntocodewith.me/podcast. Enjoy!

Hey Harj, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Harj:
Hey Laurence, thanks so much for having me.

Laurence:
Yes, of course. I’m really excited to talk to you today, but first, could you introduce yourself to the audience?

Harj:
Yeah, sure. I am Harj Taggar. I am cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte. It’s a company that helps software engineers get matched with top technology companies. Previous to that, I was the first non-founding partner at Y Combinator.

Laurence:
Yes, amazing. In case the listeners can’t tell, Harj is from the UK originally, correct?

Harj:
Yes, that is true. I moved out to Silicon Valley in 2007.

Laurence:
And you haven’t turned back since.

Harj:
No. I came out for three months initially to see what it was like and sort of coming up to ten years later and still here.

Laurence:
Oh wow, ten years, that’s amazing. I want to kind of backtrack a bit. I was looking at your background before we started the call and I saw that you studied law in college.

Harj:
Yeah. This is absolutely true.

Laurence:
Was your plan, and I guess it may be different in the UK, I’m really only familiar with the US, but was your plan to become a lawyer or get into politics or something?

Harj:
A few things going on there. One, studying law in the UK is slightly different to America in that you can study it as an undergraduate degree. It’s not so much actually sort of practical hard law that leaves you qualified to be a lawyer, it’s more theory of law, what is the legal system and slight politics, slight philosophy, that kind of stuff. The reason I did it, honestly I grew up with immigrant parents. We didn’t have a huge amount of money growing up and at the time they kind of had this dream that I would always grow up and get into a corporate career path with safety and stability. I was kind of assessing career options at the time. I had always personally been interested in computers and computing, but I felt that law was the safe, respectable career path. I decided to go down that and study law in college versus going down a more technical route.

Laurence:
Yeah, that’s so interesting because, at least for me, I sort of feel like, and maybe it’s different in the UK, I’m not sure, but in the US, I feel like it’s so much more lucrative to do computer science than law, at least today.

Harj:
What’s interesting is that really wasn’t the case, or it wasn’t clear to me when I was growing up. I’m making these choices, this is around early 2000. So late 90s, early 2000s. At that time, it wasn’t actually, there was sort of a conventional wisdom at the time that programming jobs were mostly going in that direction of outsourcing. Big Indian outsourcing companies were effectively going to flood the market with lots of software engineers and the value per hour of being a software engineer was going down. The real paths into making money were either in financial industry, like law or management and all of this kind of nebulous stuff. It wasn’t actually clear that if you were going for wealth or compensation that being a programmer was the right way to do it.

This was also specific somewhat to the UK where there just weren’t many success stories of people who had either founded a technology company or been early employees as an engineer at one where they got stock options. That just wasn’t really the way that people thought about lucrative career paths. Even the biggest example of a UK successful technology company at the time I remember, was lastminute.com and both of the founders of that company weren’t especially technical. At least their public image wasn’t as genius engineers, it was sort of these great business people. In general, I grew up in an environment where business success, business was thought of as its own discipline and the way you got good at business was to do corporate management things.

Laurence:
Yeah, that’s fascinating. I think it could have been more like that as well, maybe in the early 2000s. I’m thinking also here with the dot com bubble. I’m not quite sure because I was a little bit younger then. I wasn’t weighing career options yet, but I feel like maybe it was similar.

Harj:
I think the single best piece of writing on this as a cultural phenomenon or understanding it is The Refragmentation, an essay written by Paul Graham, my former employer at Y Combinator who kind of explains how a lot of the way we thought about career stability and the big corporate company was shaped by the post world war periods. It’s a really good explanation and quite a level of detail about how we kind of went through a period where big corporate companies and management and stability were the things that gave you status and were viewed as the prestigious career paths. We’re kind of now emerging out of that into a world where startups, and particularly technology driven startups that can grow really quickly, are becoming the new badge of prestige and credible career paths for people.

Laurence:
Yeah, could you name that again so we make sure the listeners hear it? I know you said it was by Paul Graham.

Harj:
Yeah, it’s called The Refragmentation.

Laurence:
The Refragmentation. Awesome. Thank you for sharing that again. We’ll make sure to link to that in the Show Notes for all the listeners. You studied law and then you finished school. Again, I was looking at your LinkedIn, I see you had a few companies that you started. When did you start your first and when did you end up moving to San Francisco?

Harj:
Yeah. So the exact trajectory here is, pretty much within the first six months of starting my law degree I realized it wasn’t really for me. I didn’t really enjoy the kind of work I was doing, which involved reading large amounts of text information and committing lots of stuff to memory and using that to create arguments. Within the first six months I started looking for more interesting things to do. I came across at college an entrepreneurial group which was people who would meet up and throw around ideas for projects to work on. It really wasn’t so much a company building thing, it was just, “Hey, this is an interesting idea. Wouldn’t it be cool if we had this on campus?”

I started getting involved with that and in my second year of college started working on a really simple website to help people at college buy or sell things to each other. At the time Facebook or social networks were just about becoming a popular thing. Facebook was not the most popular in the UK at that point, Myspace was. The interesting thing about it was we saw that college email addresses could act as a verification of identity. We thought that college students like trading things with other students and would trust that they’re not going to get ripped off in the same way that they might if it’s a total stranger. We effectively built a Craigslist on campus for college students, verified with your college email address with sort of a nicer design. That actually started working pretty well. That project just kept getting steam. We decided to launch it at some other colleges around the country. Everywhere we launched it it got steam, it got a bit of press coverage.

I just found that a lot more exciting than going into a law firm post-graduation. Post-graduation I actually dropped, law school in England comes in two parts. You do a three year undergraduate and then you do two years of vocational training. I dropped out after the three years to work on my buying and selling website full time, which is called boso, which stands for buyorsellonline.com. We actually applied to Y Combinator immediately after I graduated for funding. At the time it was somewhat odd because Y Combinator had never funded an international company before. They’d also never funded founders that didn’t have technical backgrounds, whether it was computer science degrees or a programming background. We were kind of a real longshot for them. We met up, they liked us a lot, we liked them a lot. They said that if we could make it out to the US for three months, they’d happily fund us. We realized that the UK tourist visa let you come out for exactly three months so we were like, “That works.” So we packed our bags, moved out to the Bay area to the Y Combinator program in 2007 for three months to kind of see what happens.

Laurence:
Okay, so 2007 you went out for three months and that’s when you went and never came back?

Harj:
Yes, basically. I did come back because I didn’t have a visa, so I was back and forth a lot. Once I got the visa I stayed.

Laurence:
Okay. You said that was the fall of 2007?

Harj:
That was, yeah, the fall of 2007 was when I got a visa. Missing a few beats here, we came out here in 2007 with this idea of, “We’re building the Craigslist focused on college students.” We move out here and we felt like the idea wasn’t big enough or ambitious enough. We had office hours with Paul Graham. He basically helped us brainstorm and said that a more exciting opportunity would be for us to build e-commerce software for small businesses, helping them sell their items online. A lot of them wanted to but there was no easy way to do that. We actually, within three weeks of moving here, completely changed the company idea into something brand new which was called Auctomatic, which was building software to make it easy for businesses to sell online.

We then teamed up with Patrick Collison, who’s now the founder of Stripe, who Paul had introduced us to as a good match for our skills because Patrick was technical and came on as a CTO. We kind of threw the company together and we sold it fairly quickly. The following summer we had been acquired by a Canadian company, Live Current Media, and I moved to Vancouver as part of that deal, for just under a year before moving back to Silicon Valley to work at Y Combinator.

Laurence:
Wow, that’s so exciting. Again, I did look at your LinkedIn and I see some of these things but I didn’t have the whole backstory so thank you for sharing. So you went to Vancouver for a year, was that part of the deal?

Harj:
Yes. So the idea at the time, it was a very interesting period of time. Live Current Media was this interesting company where, it had gone public and they had a lot of domains that were highly valuable. Like e-commerce domains. Things like perfume.com, beauty.com, body.com. They were getting lots of organic traffic to these domains from people who wanted to buy things, which is always a hard thing to do when you’re building a marketplace, is getting the demand side of that. They had that off the bat. What they didn’t have was a good experience for sellers to upload their inventory, list their items, and work with the buyers. We built all this great software for sellers to manage their inventory and post online and it was a very natural fit to plug ourselves into Live Current’s domains and build so called marketplaces, which we were really excited about.

What happened was we landed in Vancouver literally five days before Lehman Brothers completely went under, which sent most of the world into a state of panic. We joined just as this company had gone from this ambitious, growth mode, let’s do all this new stuff, into the world is ending, let’s kill all new projects and just make sure we can survive. It was an interesting period of time. I stayed there for just under 12 months as we worked on a few products, integrating our software in. Then I left because ultimately I wanted to be based in Silicon Valley where everything happens, technology wise.

Laurence:
Yeah. That’s all so interesting. So you move back and you become the first non-founding partner at Y Combinator. And I’m sure you could talk about this for hours, probably even write a book about it, who knows. But how did you get into that position, how did that happen, especially at such a young age? I don’t know what the average age is, but I feel like you’re probably pretty young still at the time.

Harj:
Yeah, it was like a series of serendipitous events really. Exactly what happened is, it’s coming up towards the end of 2009. I had left Live Current Media, our acquiring company, I knew that I wanted to work on another startup. I had actually made a trip back to the Bay area for a month or so, just to catch up with people. I was grabbing lunch with Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, who were the founders of Y Combinator. At that time, Y Combinator was still very much a project being run by Paul and Jessica. They didn’t have any full time employees. Between funding rounds of batches of companies, they would take vacations and there wasn’t a huge amount going on because it was still a relatively small operation. I was grabbing lunch, I was talking to them, I was saying, “Hey, I’m looking to go back to the UK just to see my family for a bit and then I’m going to come back out here and start pursuing some new startup ideas that I have with a few friends.” And they were like, “Okay, that sounds great, let us know when you’re back and we’d like to help you out with all that stuff.”

Then Christmas that year, I get an email from Paul saying, “We’ve been thinking about it and actually kind of want to be more ambitious with Y Combinator itself, we want to fund more startups, we want to grow the organization. To do that I need to hire someone to see if it scales having more than one person advising the startup.” So he asked me if I’d be interested in trying that out. It was pretty informal. There wasn’t really a job description or a role description. I said, “Sure, that sounds great. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do next and this sounds like a great spot to do that.” So I moved back out to the Bay area officially in January 2010. I worked with Paul and Jessica for a batch of Y Combinator for three months, realized there was something really interesting being at Y Combinator and ended up staying there for almost four years.

Laurence:
Wow, that’s insane. That was 2009, or started in 2010 and then you were there for three years?

Harj:
Yeah, almost four years. The thing is, the age thing is interesting. When I joined Y Combinator I was 24 turning 25. If you think of Y Combinator as what it is now, sort of a prestigious investor, the age does seem somewhat unusual. It’s worth remembering at the time, Y Combinator really didn’t seem like an institution. It was Paul and Jessica funding people that had interesting project ideas and no really big companies had emerged from it. No one thought that Dropbox and Airbnb were huge companies. They thought they were things that would likely get acquired by Google or someone, but it was still very much viewed as this sort of cool place where cool technical people hung out and worked on interesting projects. It wasn’t like it was that unusual for someone who was pretty young like me to be joining there and working there.

Laurence:
Yeah, I feel like I’m sure a lot the companies that go through have some employees that are around that age, maybe even younger. I’m sure there are a few that are 18, I’m not sure if there’s an age requirement.

Harj:
I don’t think there’s a formal age requirement, but when I was working there we were generally pretty reluctant to fund people that were younger than 18 with few exceptions.

Laurence:
Yeah, that’s a whole other legal thing. So I’m sure you did tons of stuff there, but looking at your LinkedIn, I see you would go through applications, you would interview people, you would also work with companies going through the program at the time.

Harj:
Yeah. Y Combinator actually ended up having a broader range of things to do than I had expected. I would say the core of it, the core of working at Y Combinator, at the time at least was one, read the applications.

Basically twice a year you’re in application reading mode for a few weeks where you’re doing nothing other than reading all the funding applications. Then you’re in interview mode where you have a couple weeks where it’s just back to back interviewing as many companies as you can and making decisions on which ones to fund. Then you’re sort of in batch mode and during that you’re mostly advising the companies on what their plan for their Y Combinator program should be, what metrics they should use to define if they’re successful or not, helping them come up with ideas, giving product feedback. It’s all very focused on getting them to prove the most evidence that they can about their company having the potential to be successful as is possible in three months. I did a lot of that.

Also there was a lot of other stuff that was really interesting. Like scaling Y Combinator itself. We knew we were getting more applications each round, we knew we would have to start changing the structure of the batches to accommodate an increasing number of companies that we wanted to fund. That kind of stuff, the challenges of scaling Y Combinator itself were the things I found most interesting about working at Y Combinator.

Laurence:
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I love talking about your time at YC, but I definitely want to talk about the present day and what you’re doing with Triplebyte. How did you transition out of being the partner at YC and then how did you end up creating Triplebyte, which is very relevant to listeners of this podcast because essentially you’re helping people get engineering jobs at top companies?

Harj:
Things are pretty linked actually. After three and a half years at Y Combinator, I knew that I wanted to go back onto the other side of founding and running a startup versus advising and investing in them. I kind of had a conversation with Paul and Jessica and I said, “I think after the next batch I’m going to look at moving on.” I didn’t have a specific thing I wanted to start just yet, I wanted to take a six month sabbatical and clear my head and travel and do various personal things I’d always wanted to do.

Then when I got back I started talking to some friends of mine who had also gone through the Y Combinator program with Socialcam, which was a startup that was acquired by Autodesk. We were generally talking about things that we found interesting. My cofounders Ammon and Guilaume, Ammon in particular, were really interesting cases where Ammon is a really fantastic engineer, was one of the top engineers at Justin.tv which became Twitch and then sort of spun out of Socialcam. Ammon and Guilaume were able to scale Socialcam to 100 million users with just the two of them, so really top quality engineers. But neither of them had really great resume credentials. Ammon hadn’t gone to a top school, Guilaume had moved out here from France. When they first came to Silicon Valley to get jobs as engineers, they really struggled. The reason they ended up at Justin.tv was Justin.tv at the time was not a prestigious company that everyone wanted to work at so they couldn’t compete for the best people, or at least the best people on paper. Their hiring strategy was to try to find people that didn’t have great resumes but might be really good and just take take a chance on them. They took a chance on Ammon and Guilaume, it worked out really well for them.

In that conversation, I was just kind of talking about how Y Combinator itself did the same thing for startup founders. If you were already in Silicon Valley, if you already had connections to venture capitalists and the Angel Investors because you went to Stanford or you’d already started a company, then you didn’t have need for something to help you or vouch for you. But if you’re a really talented person in Chicago with no connections to the Bay area, you needed someone to vouch for you to get into that community, which is what Y Combinator did.

Through all these conversations we basically decided that there was obviously a real need for helping companies find the best people because every company that would graduate Y Combinator would complain that they couldn’t get enough engineers. We felt that companies overly focused on the credentials versus trying to test for the skills of candidates. That kind of makes sense because companies don’t have the time to test the skills of every single person who applies. Drawing analogies to Y Combinator, we felt that there was room for a company to exist that just evaluated the skills of engineers and used that to match engineers to companies that might not otherwise have spoken to them. As a by product, that company would gather lots of data about what every company was hiring for and how to run a really great technical interview process. All of those ideas came together into Triplebyte, effectively.

Laurence:
Yeah, that’s such a good story. I think you’re so right. At the same time of course, having connections, who you know is so important. I love that you guys are just focusing on the skills. Could you, I was going through the website a bit and I reading somewhere that only 1% of applicants who come to Triplebyte make it through the technical evaluation. In brief, what is the technical evaluation, how did you create it, and what makes it so tough?

Harj:
Yeah. So the technical evaluation is split into two parts. One is an online programming test where you answer multiple choice questions that involve looking at short snippets of code and identifying what’s going on, effectively. The second part is you do a technical interview which is done over Google Hangouts with an engineer on our team. We’re actually building out a dedicated interviewing team. That interview is done without the interviewer knowing anything about your background or credentials, you just work on solving programming problems. At the end of that, we effectively kind of grade you across a set of different criteria and make a call on whether we think we have enough companies that would value the strengths you have enough to bring you onsite and likely make an offer.

That’s the technical evaluation part. The way that we designed it is kind of interesting. The way we designed the automated programming test was actually to put together our best guess of what we thought effective programming tests might look like, give that to all of our friends who we already knew were good engineers, see how well they did on it, and then also get a random sample of people on Craigslist to answer the test, and at a high level just check that a random sample of people did worse than the people selected who were good engineers. We found that was true so we were like, “Okay, this works with sufficient precision to use as our first pass filter on whether we think someone might be a good engineer or not.” What we actually did when we launched the company, for the first month we said that anyone who makes it through the programming test, the first 300 people, we will do technical interviews with. Without knowing anything about how you actually did on the test, all we knew is that you didn’t completely fail it. We’ll do the technical interviews and if you do well on the technical interviews, we’ll vouch for you to companies where we have friends who are hiring and say, “Hey, we did a technical interview with this person, we really think you should take a look at them.”

What we did after that first month is go back and analyze, “Okay, we did 300 technical interviews and we have all the data on how these people did on our programming test, let’s see if there are correlations here. Can we tell if how well you do on the test predicts how well you’re going to do on a technical interview?” We found the results were really telling. We found that our test was really predictive and since over the last year we’ve effectively repeated this process, and specifically which questions have the most predictive value. We throw out the rest and replace them with new ones and keep going until the test gets more and more predictive of how likely someone is to be a good engineer.

Laurence:
Yeah, that’s so fascinating. So when you talk about both the technical tests you’re doing on Google Hangouts and also the multiple choice one, right?

Harj:
Yes.

Laurence:
How long does the Google Hangouts technical interview, how long does that last?

Harj:
The Google Hangouts usually lasts for just over two hours.

Laurence:
Oh wow, and this is, everyone who makes it through the online test is invited to the second test?

Harj:
Yes, effectively. We filter out, the drop off comes, we filter out the majority of applicants at the programming test stage. The majority of people being filtered out because they didn’t perform strongly enough on the online programming test, for us to think that it would be a good idea for us to do a technical interview with them. Of the remainder that we do identify, which usually ends up being around 20% of all of the test completes, is to do the technical interview with them. Again of those, we end up selecting a small percentage to move forward with and introduce to companies.

Laurence:
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, about introducing to companies. So assume the candidates go through the online test, they go through the technical interview, which is online and it’s about two hours long. Assuming they do well, what happens next for them?

Harj:
Yeah. What happens next, we have pretty rich data on what skills the engineer has. I’ll answer this in a slightly high level way. What we found when we launched the company is that there isn’t really a clear spectrum of being a bad engineer through to a great one and you just figure out where to set the cutoff and everyone who’s above that bar will get hired by every company you introduce them to. What ends up happening in reality is that there are lots of dimensions along which you can be a good engineer. You could be someone who’s really thoughtful and writes a well designed code but isn’t necessarily productive speedwise, you won’t be the fastest coder in the world. What we found is no one is great at absolutely everything. Although companies will tell you that they’re looking to hire people who are great at everything you could possibly be great at, in reality every company is making a trade off. Every company is deciding, whether they’re aware of it or not, that they value, for example, coding speed more than great design. Or that they value academic computer science knowledge more than the ability to fix bugs quickly on a laptop during an interview.

What we’re doing is, we get lots of data about every engineering candidate who comes through Triplebyte, on what their strengths are. On the flip side, we interview every company before we work with them and have the current engineering team complete a technical questionnaire that gives us an accurate model of the trade offs we think that company is making. Based on those two data sets, we can then tell any given Triplebyte engineer, “Hey, we think that these nine companies are going to be a really good fit for the skill you have. You are really strong on algorithm design and understanding how a web system works and we have these nine companies who care a lot about that and so you’re very likely to be a good fit for them.” Then we start the process of explaining what those companies do, the candidates opt in to the companies they’re most excited about and the ones they are excited about take an initial call with them and then fast track them through the hiring process to the final round onsite interview.

Laurence:
Oh wow. Okay, so my question is from what you just said. This candidate, how many companies do they end up interviewing with at once?

Harj:
It depends on every candidate and how much time they have and how many they want to do. Generally we encourage candidates to take an initial call with five companies, filter those five companies down to the three that they’re most excited about going onsite with, doing three onsite interviews and then kind of deciding between, on average, two offers. We can generally get candidates, from three onsites, at least two offers. And sort of decide from there. Some engineers will talk to more companies because they want to make sure they run a deep, thorough process. Some might talk to less because they have a very specific idea of what they want and they only want to talk to companies within that range. That’s kind of roughly what the flow looks like.

Laurence:
Yeah, that’s so awesome. How long does this take, I mean from the time they sign up on Triplebyte? Of course I know companies are different and may have longer interview processes or take longer to make offers and what have you, but you also said that after they go through your process they’re usually on a phone call and then fast tracked to the onsite interview. About how much time on average does it take a person?

Harj:
From signing up with Triplebyte, you can do the programming test pretty much immediately. On average it takes about three to four days to book a technical interview with us. Once you do the technical interview often what ends up being the bottleneck is more on the engineer side. You need to set aside some time to do the onsite interviews. The companies we work with, and we specifically select companies that are responsive and have a process that’s efficient and can move people through quickly because we find that’s the thing that’s most important for a good experience for an engineer on the Triplebyte platform, is companies are responsive and can move quickly. All in all, once we’ve introduced you to companies, we can actually have offers within ten days and then sort of you’re in decision making mode and you take as long as you like. Our goal is to make the job search process as efficient as possible. One we can filter companies that are likely to make you an offer, versus having you waste your time interviewing at companies that just are never going to be a skills match. Two, we filter for companies that are fast responsive and you also get fast tracked to the final interview versus doing coding screens or phone screens.

Laurence:
So throughout this person’s interview process, after you screen them, I guess it could only be like ten days if that’s when they’re getting an offer made, do you repeatedly follow up with that candidate throughout?

Harj:
Oh yeah, for sure. We spend a lot of time, at that stage we view ourselves as a resource to help candidates get the support they need. If that’s helping them schedule the interviews, if that’s answering questions about moving to the Bay area, whatever it is, we are in constant contact and doing our best to help them have a hassle free job search process.

Laurence:
I guess it should be noted that this is only available in the San Francisco area at this time.

Harj:
Yeah, at the moment. Early next year we’ll be opening up some new locations.

Laurence:
That’s awesome. Could you tell anyone what you have in mind for the locations?

Harj:
Yeah, we’re looking at moving into Seattle, New York, and Chicago.

Laurence:
Are most of the people that go through Triplebyte already based in those locations or are there also people that are like, “Yes, I want to relocate, let’s do this,” and then go through it?

Harj:
I would say most of the candidates, it’s a slight fraction more, are based in the Bay area or around the Bay area, but a significant chunk are outside of the Bay area and are looking to move out to the Bay area to join a traditional Silicon Valley company.

Laurence:
Alright, that’s awesome. I honestly could ask you so many more questions, I think it’s so fascinating. We are pretty much out of time. Finally Harj, thank you so much for talking and sharing your story and all this information about Triplebyte and how you guys vet candidates and the job process. Lastly, where can people find you online?

Harj:
The best way to reach me personally, I use Twitter a lot, so feel free to tweet me. My handle is @harjeet. My email is harj@triplebyte.com and obviously if you want to learn more about Triplebyte, then check out our website.

Laurence:
Awesome, thank you so much again for coming on.

Harj:
Cool, no worries, thanks for having me.

Laurence:
I hope you enjoyed our conversation. Again, the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, can be found at learntocodewith.me/podcast. If you’re listening to this episode in the future, simply click the search icon in the upper navigation of the page and type in Harj’s name. It’s spelled like Harj and then his last name is like Taggar. Regardless, if you liked my interview with Harj, head on over to learntocodewith.me where you can find even more awesome code related content, like my 10 Free Tips for Teaching Yourself How to Code. Thanks so much for tuning in and I’ll see you next week in the final episode of Season 2.

SPECIAL THANKS TO THIS EPISODE’S SPONSORS

Xojo: Want to create native apps for desktop, mobile, web, or Raspberry Pi? Check out xojo.com/learntocode and get 20% off with the coupon code learn20.

Flatiron School: If you’re looking for a career change, sign up for classes today at flatironschool.com. Don’t forget to take advantage of the special Learn to Code With Me discount and get $500 off your first month!

Key takeaways:

  • We now live in a world where technology driven startups that grow fast are the new badge of prestige.
  • Many companies that can’t compete for the best people look for those who don’t look great on paper. If your resume is lacking, find an employer willing to judge you on skills rather than your job history.
  • If you don’t have connections in Silicon Valley, your skills might not be enough to get you in. Expand your network so you have someone in the community who can vouch for you.
  • Follow your passion, even if it may not seem like the best move. Don’t underestimate the value of taking chances and reaching out to people who can help you.
  • There isn’t a clear spectrum of bad engineer to great engineer. Instead, there are a lot of dimensions along which you can succeed in the right job.
  • Seek out a company that values your specific skillset and places a high priority on the type of engineer you want to be.

Links and mentions from the episode:

Thanks for listening!

Thanks so much for tuning in! Remember, you can listen to the Learn to Code With Me podcast on the following platforms:

  1. The LTCWM website (https://learntocodewith.me/podcast/)
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Special thanks to this episode’s sponsors

Xojo: Want to create native apps for desktop, mobile, web, or Raspberry Pi? Check out xojo.com/learntocode and get 20% off with the coupon code learn20.

Flatiron School: If you’re looking for a career change, sign up for classes today at flatironschool.com. Don’t forget to take advantage of the special Learn to Code With Me discount and get $500 off your first month!