Anthropic hiring manager kills the coding interview: hunger now beats tenure
Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
A hiring manager at Anthropic has stopped giving traditional coding interviews, arguing Claude now outperforms candidates on small React and assembly challenges alike. His advice for engineers without status: understand what your company is really trying to accomplish, pick one radical idea, and build a working prototype over a weekend instead of lobbying for buy-in. Two new engineers did exactly that with Claude Code, shipping a popular graphical interface about eight days after their first prototype.
Ignorance, sheer ignorance— you know there's no confidence to equal it. It's only when you know something about a profession, I think, that you're timid or careful.
- plugger
"Work to live, don't live to work".
When you're on your deathbed work won't sit there with you and hold your hand. People are critical, not buildings or computers or networks.
If you do choose to go down the path of overwork for recognition (as I did in my early 20s to earn a business visa) set strict guidelines around it and ensure you benefit as much as your employer.
No one will manage your own work life balance better than you.
- epolanski
Technical interviews have always been silly and our is one of the very few industries where they were common practice, with take home assignments and multiple rounds.
Just hire and fire fast.
- gopalv
This Ousterhout lecture lives in my brain (this one and the one about scar tissue).
"A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up For a Lot of Y-Intercept"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE98Is1quwY
> Pick a radical idea
> Build it over a weekend:
What AI has done is that we can do 10x more work a week, while only delivering 2x to production.
Right now, there are 4 people (and me) working on the same idea in 5 different ways - we're all training small language models, the goal is to get smaller or fewer active parameters.
By next week, we'll have lost on 3 different approaches. I know my approach is a dead-end already, but I'm not ready to give up till the pencils down.
The people I work with are great, because they will see the better solution by the end of it, whether they proposed it or someone else did.
A couple of them have been in the industry for less than 5 years and I feel like their slope is better than mine, which means I'm going to have a good time when they're fully up to speed :)
- arjie
dy/dt more important than y. Happens to everything. People, organizations, civilizations. One day the world woke up and a country that had only recently had sheep on the lawn in front of the seat of power was defacto ruler of the world.
If you’re the big y, that can change too. The big dy/dt is coming.
Far called, our navies melt away,
On dune and headland sinks the fire,
All our pomp of yesterday,
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre
- marifjeren
The article talks about the coding interview being gone but it is still around. I don't know about the other companies in this post but Stripe still does no-AI hackerrank style interviews for example.