With Trilogy still in start-up mode, and Microsoft ratcheting up the competition for talent, Liemandt made a decision about hiring that might have been the single biggest bet of his entire career. He wagered that talented, overachieving students with zero real-world experience - that is, people like him - would be the key to Trilogy's success. As a result of this decision, the vast majority of Trilogy's hires were new graduates [...] "We're elite talent. It's potential and talent, not experience, that has merit." With Liemandt's believing passionately that success could only flow from a meritoratic hiring process, "only the best" became the shorthand with which Trilogians described themselves and hte candidates they were looking for. [...]

[...] Recall those brainteasers that Trilogy and other major tech companies used throughout the 1990s and into the next two decades. There has never been any evidence that they were useful in measuring who would be a good programmer. Yet it took until 2013 for Google to finally stop using them. "Brainteasers are a complete waste of time," Google's longtime former head of HR Laszlo Bock admitted to the New York Times in 2013. "They don't predict anything."

Well, maybe not anything useful, but they might have been good predictors of the sort of hyper self-confidence men are more prone to. [...] "We are going to ask you a question that has no relation to your job and one you've had no training in how to answer. Do you have the chutzpah to pretend that you can?"

For Trilogy's tenth anniversary, in 1999, Liemandt flew hundreds of employees to the Bahamas, where they stayed at the Atlantis Resort, and gifted employees crystal vases from Tiffany and bottles of Dom Perignon. When the first tech bubble burst, Liemandt's net worth plummeted, and in 2001 hundreds of Trilogy employees were laid off. Today, Liemandt is quietly running a downsized Trilogy and keeping a low profile in Austin. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.