What should young aspiring engineers do to get a job at Anthropic? Well, for starters, forget that they’d give you any coding assignment.
The company seems to be on the verge of retiring the age-old practice of putting interviewees through the grind of coding challenges. In fact, Anthropic so strongly believes in this change, a hiring manager at the company has gone on record to say, “The coding interview is dead.
It had a good run.”The Anthropic hiring manager in question, Felix Rieseberg, has taken to X to pen down a long-form essay which is nothing short of a 101 for engineers looking for their next job amid all the AI hullabaloo. Rieseberg says he is officially putting an end to traditional coding interviews from this month.
The reason behind this move is AI. He explains that Claude has basically rendered these tests useless.
Coding challenges once helped assess how quickly candidates could define problems and find elegant solutions. However, AI has changed the equation.“There’s no more point in giving you a littlejob React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both,” Rieseberg notes.
The argument is not that coding skills no longer matter. Instead, the manager believes that simply passing a coding test does not necessarily show whether someone can build useful products or solve real-world problems.What should junior engineers do now?Unlike all the doom and gloom talk surrounding AI, the hiring manager seems optimistic about the future of junior engineers.
He believes this shift led by AI could create new opportunities for them. With AI making software development easier, people with less experience can now turn ideas into working prototypes without waiting for lengthy approval processes or large teams.
The manager has also noticed newer engineers outperforming more experienced colleagues by questioning established practices and taking initiative. “Hunger beats tenure,” the post reads.So, what should aspiring developers do? The manager suggests focusing on business problems rather than simply working through an assigned backlog.
Engineers should understand what their company wants to achieve, identify an ambitious idea that could help, and use AI to build a working prototype. He wrote, “Pick a radical idea: Come up with a few ideas that would, if successful, dramatically improve the chances that your organisation achieves those goals.
Be ambitious!” The advice is to keep that prototype focused on one strong idea instead of packing it with too many features. A working demonstration can help decision-makers understand the opportunity and see the person behind it.The manager also encourages junior engineers to use their fresh perspective.
They may spot problems that experienced employees have stopped questioning, or find simpler ways to solve challenges that others consider impossible.“Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things,” the post says, quoting software industry writer Patrick McKenzie.What does the future look like?The Anthropic hiring manager does not expect traditional coding interviews to return. However, they admit that finding a better way to assess candidates who build with AI remains a work in progress.For now, the manager is looking at resumes and portfolios for prototypes “that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking.”The post also highlights how quickly AI-assisted development can move from idea to product.
At Anthropic, two relatively new engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, built a working prototype of a graphical interface for Claude Code over a weekend. The first public version shipped roughly eight days later.The bigger takeaway is that AI may change how engineers prove their worth.
Rather than relying only on years of experience or performance in a coding test, companies could increasingly look at what candidates can actually build.- Ends