Ammon Bartram
Co-founder, Tabula Bio · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveengineer@ammonbartram ↗tabulabio.com ↗
Ammon Bartram co-founded the video app Socialcam and Triplebyte, a technical hiring platform backed by Y Combinator. He later co-founded Tabula Bio, applying machine learning models to DNA design.
31statements → 8claims → 2claims resolved → 3.68/5average certainty → 2.39/5average debate potential → 1said about them ↓
0 supported 1 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 5 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
8 assertions · 4 opinions · 19 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Ammon argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable contradicted claim
Bartram: 80% of software engineers lack side projects to show
“The reason it's the right decision is that most engineers don't have side projects. Most engineers have been, have, you know, been working at a company, and it's all proprietary code, and there's very little they can show. That's, you know, eight out of 10 eng…”
Everything Ammon Bartram said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Bartram: Recent grads often outperform senior engineers in technical interviews
“People who are fresh out of university and boot camps actually in many cases, because they've been practicing, are better at the kind of problem that gets asked in an interview than your very senior, you know, eight, 10 years of experience at that large compan…”
Bartram: Experienced engineers get job offers despite worse interview performances
“If you have five years of experience, it's just flat out easier to pass an interview. You will get a job offer You know, after a worse performance”
Bartram: Tech interviewer agreement rates match online movie reviewer agreement
“A pretty interesting stat we dug up is I compared the rate of agreement between interviewers at companies with a data set of users reviewing movies online, right? And the numbers were actually, were basically, and the integrator agreement was equivalent.”
Bartram: Easy interview questions predict engineering success better than hard questions
“Asking pretty easy interview questions is often more generally predictive than asking harder interview questions.”
Bartram: Trial employment periods drive away top software engineering candidates
“If you've worked with someone for a week, you have a far better read of their skill than I think anyone can get during a three to four hour interview. The problem is that there's a pretty strong bias in who's willing to do trial employment. And that's, it's ad…”
Bartram: Whiteboard coding interviews make productive programmers look bad
“Whiteboard coding tends to skew toward the academic. It tends to Give preference to people who are really good at breaking their thoughts down into this sort of structured academic way and writing with a small amount of code. So you often have people who are a…”
Bartram: Past-Project Discussions Are Far Less Predictive Than Coding Tests
“We tried scoring engineers, and I had to have them talk about past projects. And scoring them and trying, like, even go, even like a full hour, like going into depth in the project, talking technical details, scoring it just talking skill. Ability to spin a ta…”
Bartram: Bootcamp grads perform comparably to CS degree holders in interviews
“Bootcamps versus CS degree, I don't think are all that different.”
Bartram: Coding interview question results correlate far less than companies assume
“If you just take a bunch of candidates and in a controlled setting, have them all answer, you know, three or four of these questions, you'll see there's just, you know, there's some correlation, but there's way less correlation than you would think.”
Bartram: Top Engineers Pass at Most 80% of Their Tech Interviews
“One thing, one number we have that's interesting is that the engineers who do the best At companies go on to pass, ah, about 80% of their interviews, but not a hundred. No, almost no one passes more than 80% of their interviews at companies.”
Bartram: Companies only look at side projects during initial resume screening
“So companies, Don't actually pay very much attention to side projects. Except for at the screening stage. So resume screen, you know, candidate applies to company, the company decides if they're going to interview the person at all. And there's some adverse se…”
Bartram: Evaluating engineer skill from large codebases is startlingly difficult
“It's actually, it's startlingly hard to look at a big bit of code and decide if you think the programmer who wrote it is skilled. Just again, like, there's so much context, you can't tell what bugs they spend hours over, like, finding, like, finding bugs, like…”
Bartram: Interview consistency matters more than which questions companies ask
“So like to come, just like to make sure that you're asking everyone the same question and make sure that you're evaluating them in the same way. And I think that's more important than what you're actually asking, right?”
Bartram: 80% of Published Interview Advice Fails Under Empirical Testing
“I truly believe that, like, 80% of what's written out about interviewing just doesn't actually hold up.”
Bartram: Cutting bad interviews short damages company reputation
“I'm generally Against cutting interviews short, actually, I think it's, I think, except in the case where the interview where the candidate is in pain, I think it's not worth doing. I think you save some time, but you damage your reputation, you know, they rea…”
Bartram: Conflicting definitions of "good engineer" create hiring noise
“Most companies think that they are trying to hire good engineers. That's, that, that's what they say to themselves. And that, and they, what they don't realize is that, you know, Company A's definition of a good engineer is significantly different from Company…”
Bartram: Later-stage companies must evaluate multiple engineering archetypes
“For companies at a bit of a larger stage, I think the obvious answer is you want to hire both those people. And so it's about building a process that can identify more broadly different types of skill.”
Bartram: Interviewers skew company culture by testing their own strengths
“When people are interviewing an engineer, they tend to ask about the things that they
Are the best at.
There's this overlap between the things that you're the best at and the things that you think are the most important.
Every engineer thinks the things that t…”
Bartram: Traditional interviews fail to test real-world debugging skills
“And I think this does a great job of solving some of those problems, basically, because the, you know, this is a skill that, that comes from experience that is often missed by more, more, more traditional interviews.”
Bartram: Big tech prioritizes innate ability; startups prioritize specific stack experience
“Bigger companies care more about measuring your innate ability and less about measuring whether you can jump into their particular code base and be productive on day one. So it's way more likely that a smaller company is going to say, we're using, you know, Ru…”
Bartram: Hash tables and BFS represent 40% of tech interview questions
“A surprising percentage of a new question ends up being Slightly obscured applications of sort of those, especially sort of, you know, hash tables and breadth first search. Those two things by themselves represent probably 40% of the questions that are asked b…”
Bartram: CS Applications Form the Majority of Big Tech Interview Questions
“Hard application, you know, sort of practical application of a computer science topic represents The significant majority of questions at big companies.”
Bartram: 80% of software engineers lack side projects to show
“The reason it's the right decision is that most engineers don't have side projects. Most engineers have been, have, you know, been working at a company, and it's all proprietary code, and there's very little they can show. That's, you know, eight out of 10 eng…”
The other half of the tape: Ammon Bartram's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →
Every mention by year
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2018 1 mention in 1 episode
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Hiring Engineers with Ammon Bartram · Y Combinator | May 17, 2017 | 30m |