I failed my Anthropic interview, came to tell you about it, so you don't have to | Hacker News Reader

I failed my Anthropic interview, came to tell you about it, so you don't have to

blog.goncharov.page

44 pointsfxlrnrpt29 comments

Don’t worry. I found a bug in one of their repos, fixed it, documented it, and submitted a PR—four months later, it’s still not merged.

People love to believe that Company A has top-tier engineers while Company B doesn’t based on mostly nonsense interview practices. The best ideas come from deeply thinking through a problem from the customer’s perspective for days and days not from rushed coding interviews.

This would be a more compelling post if it wasn't written in Linkedin Standard English.

If only I knew English well enough xD Originally, it was in Russian.

I found OP's English to be fine and the article sounded authentic. Nothing like "LinkedIn fluff".

Sure. From the employers perspective, I get the appeal of references.

As a candidate I find them to be a huge overstep and will almost never provide them.

No, I’m sorry. I’m not going to pester my friends and colleagues to “hop on a quick call” or fill out a 2 page survey every time I interview somewhere.

Quite frankly, I really don’t need or want my friends to be intimately involved in my job search.

This poor guy had to have all his references book a call, only for them to all be notified shortly after that they weren’t needed any more, because he flunked the interview.

I don't usually give, as references, people who think I am a useless waste of space.

> I get the appeal of references.

Referals and word of mouth are 1000x more valuable than the references candidates put on their CV.

> Sure. From the employers perspective, I get the appeal of references.

Respectfully, it doesn't seem like you do. References in many cases are actually needed for compliance purposes. An example for Anthropic is if the employee might be exposed to medical data, then reference checks can be used as part of a larger validation of employee identity to satisfy HIPAA requirements.

Amazon and others have the importance of reference checks baked into their agreements for those who work with them.

Don't you mean background checks? A company sees the value in talking to 4 people of the candidates choice for HIPAA is just sad.

> References in many cases are actually needed for compliance purposes.

Those aren’t the kind of checks we’re talking about. In any case, those can be performed once an offer is made.

It's the exact same checks. I know this because I've had to fill out some of these compliance documents and implement similar sorts of procedures with the legal dept. In addition to background checks, candidate reference calls prior to onboarding are becoming a checkbox that must be ticked by various external groups.

And to clarify, it's not something I support or that I find it makes a lot of sense to me -- it's just an unfortunate situation of where things are currently at.

You run legal compliance on everyone interviewing for a job? What a waste of everyone’s time. Very inefficient and expensive. Do it after an offer is extended.

So references are popular again? Interesting.

I probably would not have hired you based on your description of things, you probably wouldnt have hired you either.

Nevertheless, based on the process, it sounds like they will end up hiring pretty medicore candidates.

I doubt so. Open ended questions like "generating ideas" allows the interviewer to judge what your level of reasoning is. If you propose "add more GPU" or "let's tweak the transformer parameters with some quantization, like in this research article published a year ago" it makes a huge difference.

IOW the expectations are hidden from the interviewed person.

Open ended questions like generating ideas was the "Culture Fit" session (and if it wasnt or the company doesnt realise it is then it is an even bigger problem)

Culture fit is a funny thing. I was set up for an interview and one of the things was a take-home tic tac toe.

I asked "uh, what's the point when I can just ask ChatGPT to do this? Is there something else I could be doing?" And I was instantly dinged because I didn't align with their culture. Which I guess is true, since I'm not into time-wasting questions that aren't even fun.

Or rather, you're not into "following orders without challenging them first". What the order is, doesn't really matter.

Well, I definitely failed the brainstorming stage. Disappointed with the result, but have no hard feelings. Wish they let me do the take-home assignment, but it is what it is. Rolled the dice. It was not my day. Will roll it again with as many companies as it takes to get a good gig.

> Nevertheless, based on the process, it sounds like they will end up hiring pretty medicore candidates.

What would you change in order to hire higher quality people?

Its the answer nobody hiring wants to hear, spend more (skilled not hr) human time screening and interviewing the candidates.

The process outlined put a stronger emphasis on luck, and catching fire in the 6 minutes you had than skill.

Don't forget the inevitable emphasis on "grinding Leetcode."

As usual the best existing employees would fail the interview process.

That sounds absolutely awful and like you dodged a bullet. Meanwhile deepseek is hiring college grads and the like, for way better tech.

I highly doubt that they've got a better ai but are too scared to show it off. Is there any independent verification of that?

Thank you or your support! I am disappointed with the result, but, to be honest, no hard feelings. Wish they let me do the take-home assignment, but it is what it is. Rolled the dice. It was not my day. Will roll it again with as many companies as it takes to get a good gig.

> Meanwhile deepseek is hiring college grads and the like, for way better tech.

If only I knew Chinese...

> I highly doubt that they've got a better ai but are too scared to show it off. Is there any independent verification of that?

Nope. Just the rumor

>Also, 3.5 Sonnet was not trained in any way that involved a larger or more expensive model (contrary to some rumors).

Source: https://darioamodei.com/on-deepseek-and-export-controls

Seems like you dodged a bullet.

I would rather take the "bullet" but it wasn't my day xD Tbh, I don't think there was anything substantially wrong with the process. They have a ton of CVs from thousands of the smartest people out there. They have to filter somehow. I'm certainly sad I did not make the cut, but it's not like the guy next in line is any worse then me.

Thanks for posting this, interesting to see the process at a large AI company.

yeah, interviews like that are artifical bullshit interviews whose main purpose is ensure conformity with the way the company thinks rather seek innovation. Be glad you didnt make it thru

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