Flunking my Anthropic interview again
taylor.town
taylor.town
That is to say that you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back. There are so many reasons that a candidate might get rejected that have nothing to do with one's individual performance in the interview or application process.
Having been on the hiring side of the interview table now many more times than on the seeking side, I can say that this is totally true.
One of the biggest misconceptions I see from job seekers, especially younger ones, is to equate a job interview to a test at school, assuming that there is some objective bar and if you pass it then you must be hired. It's simply not true. Frequently more than one good applicant applies for a single open role, and the hiring team has to choose among them. In that case, you could "pass" and still not get the job and the only reason is that the hiring team liked someone else better.
I can only think of one instance where we had two great candidates for one role and management found a way to open another role so we could hire both. In a few other cases, we had people whom we liked but didn't choose and we forwarded their resumes to other teams who had open roles we thought would fit, but most of the time it's just, "sorry."
My first career was in theatre, which a) is (or at least was, back in the day?) much more competitive than tech - par was one callback (ie, second screening) per 100 auditions, and one casting per 10 callbacks; and b) is genuinely, deeply vulnerable - you have to bring your whole self into your work, in a way that you don't in any other field.
It's still never personal, and actors who don't develop thick skins wash out quickly.
I once auditioned three rounds for Romeo, at a company I really liked, and thought I'd killed it. I didn't get the role, and was pretty bummed (particularly since - actors are nothing but petty - I didn't much like the performance by the guy who did). Six months later the casting director button-holed me after seeing another show I was in, and told me I'd been their first choice, and he was sorry they'd not been able to cast me. The trouble was, he said, their only good choice for Juliette was at least a foot shorter than I am, and there was no way that wouldn't have looked awkward.
It's never personal.
Furthermore, that "failed" audition directly led to two later jobs, and I think indirectly to a third. Having a good interview, even in a situation where you don't achieve the immediate goal, can only be good for you - both by developing your own skills, and for creating a reputation for competence within your industry.
Strong agreement. I can confirm for other readers that the day I realized this --- "Oh, rejection means nothing!" --- was a weird day. It takes a weight off.
And it is true across every other field. There are way more factors external to the "you" of the decision, and they're given more weight than the "you" of the decision. This is one of those cases where you only need to experience the "other side of the table" once for it to click.
Companies that are more humane in their hiring practices (even just actually send a rejection email vs. ghosting) deserve a bit of credit, because caring for the applicant is not a KPI.
One thing outsiders don't understand is that, for actors, auditioning IS the job. Getting cast, and working on a show, is a joy (some more than others, of course!), but the rest of your life is nothing, nothing but looking for work.
The were two things that made that "it's all cool" shift happen for me. The first is that once I'd been in the industry long enough I could pretty much guarantee that when I went in for an audition I'd see someone I knew, or at least with whom I had an immediate second-degree connection. Auditions stopped being a grind, or mainly about courting rejection - instead, they became an opportunity to hang out with some cool people for a while. I started looking forward to them!
The second was realizing that choosing and performing my audition pieces was the only time that I was in complete control. No one was telling me what to do or how to do it: I could make my own choices, and take whatever creative risks I wanted.
I think both of those approaches made me a much better auditionee than most. My batting average was a lot higher than most of my peers - even some that I thought were better actors.
I don't know how well those insights generalize. I've never (thank god!) had to do leet-code, but I'd hope that (though maybe only in a second screening?) taking a creative approach - if you can talk about it sensibly, and pivot if it doesn't ultimately work - would impress fellow engineers. I strongly believe that adopting a "what can I learn from this experience, and these people?" mindset is a good way to reduce the pressure you'd otherwise put on yourself.
But the idea of standing on a stage pretending to be someone else fills me with sheer terror. Even worse would be trying out for that job 100 times and getting rejected every time.
I don't know how actors do it. My hat's off to you.
You're right about training and experience, though. I screwed up on stage (in loads of tiny ways, not usually perceptible to anyone but me) every time I ever stepped onto one, and in big ways lots and lots of times as well. But, you know, I always knew that I (with my castmates' help) would get out of it. Failure is inevitable, and it doesn't matter. In fact, if you haven't failed somehow, in at least some small way, then you either don't know what you're doing, or you aren't trying hard enough to succeed.
Also, when I was training young actors I always told them that they will never experience such unconditional love as when they first step in front of an audience. Those people have given at least their time and maybe their money to see you - don't you think they want you to succeed? They're rooting for you, none more so.
To bring this back to the larger subject of the thread, I think all of that's also true of every job interview any of us will ever attend, or conference paper we'll ever deliver. It'll never be perfect, and that's just fine.
Your message and the child comment really has given me a perspective that I didn't have before.
Something Very practically stoic about it.
You never screened candidates who couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag?
I'm glad you brought that up, because it might be the exception that proves the rule. Those auditions did feel more personal, but it was entirely benign: I was rooting for them to succeed, and really felt for them when it became obvious (especially to them) that they had not.
Maybe it's not like that with other fields, or other companies, or other people - but if not, then that's not somewhere anyone should have to work. There's no incompatibility between high standards and human decency.
Building on that: There's a few reasons why a company won't explain why they reject a candidate.
One of the reasons is that they don't want candidates to "game" the system, because it makes it hard to screen for the people they want to hire.
Another reason is that often rejections are highly subjective, and telling a candidate that "we didn't hire you because of X" could be highly insulting.
Finally, quite often candidates are rejected because the people hiring ultimately are looking for people they will get along with. It doesn't matter how smart someone is, if something about the working relationship causes friction, the team dynamic can quickly devolve. (And to be quite frank, in these situations the candidate will probably have a better job working elsewhere.) These kinds of rejections are highly subjective, so no one really wants to give a candidate feedback.
If you don't say anything at all, the applicant has nothing to go on for a lawsuit against you.
If you say anything, and the applicant is a malicious litigant, you just became a potential paycheck via settlement.
If you're hiring a dozen people a year, you can probably ignore this. If you're hiring hundreds or thousands, and thus many times that number of applicants, you're going to step on that landmine eventually. Better then to have a company-wide policy "no feedback ever"
I could see if the feedback was "we wanted someone who better fit the culture," but giving a specific answer on a core hiring criteria doesn't seem like it would cause a problem.
In reality, I think the most likely reason is what others have mentioned, that candidates would argue the point.
Do you have examples? I know this is a real fear, but I've never heard any examples of lawsuits except for issues of discrimination due to age, gender, and ethnicity.
If they've written down notes or a stance/defence in a talent management system, all they need to do is regurgitate that in my opinion. I wrote about it upthread but having done a data request under my country's privacy act, I was able to get a raw dump of all the data (PII redacted). Recommend that as best course of action if they're unwilling to provide feedback.
I was old (55, at the time), and that seemed to actually upset the interviewers.
I had all the right buzzwords, but as soon as they saw my grey coiffure, the process started going sideways. Somehow, they seemed to think that a 30-year-old could have 30 years of experience.
I was treated pretty shabbily, a couple of times. It was clear that I was considered a waste of time.
I only made it to a test a few times. I failed the BTree part of one test (of course), and they didn't seem to like what I returned in a take-home, once. I also once failed a Swift test (I had just started programming in Swift), when I applied for an ObjC job. Otherwise, I did passably (but probably not outstanding) on the tests.
I've come to realize that there are so many aspects of life that are not under one's control and shaking your fist gravity doesn't accomplish anything; even more so when it comes to business and professional relationships.
One of my favorite quotes is from "Deuteronomy 18:13", or as the The Coen Brothers aptly put it:
- "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you"
I'm grateful that I had the means. Because of that, I would have been happy to take a lot less than many, if the work interested me, but it never got that far.
NBD. I've found that learning on my own is better, anyway. LLMs have been a Godsend, there.
These days, I get quite a bit done, but I do it on my own terms, and that makes all the difference.
This is what I’m working on, now[0]. Still has a ways to go, though. I should publish it next week.
My heroes are guys like Stu Nicholls and Howard Oakley. I've learned so much, since I decided to retire, and it's accelerating.
The most helpful job interview I had was when the interviewer broke script and just leveled with me about how I wasn't presenting myself well. There was a shared connection (our alma mater) that must have convinced him to be straight with me instead of hiding how poorly I was doing behind a mask. The HR handbooks say that you should never let a candidate know why they were not selected, but that information can be extremely helpful.
If you're not getting offers, I strongly recommend that you find somebody you trust to do a mock interview. Let them critique your resume, cover letter, posture, awkwardness, lame handshake, etc.
Very helpful for new interviewees, whether just out of college or during a career transition.
Slightly odd question but: what if it's the opposite of this?
Interviews are almost never an issue.
I would like to think (and have been told so too) that I'm both technically sharp and knowledgeable enough, and can communicate well enough. I have a firm handshake, and thanks to the ability to happily dive into topics I read up on, I can speak confidently - both on hard facts, as well as my understanding or opinion of any technical matter in my field - for hours maybe, if not longer.
But getting the interview... is.. legitimately hard. Multiple people have said my resume is quite solid, but I rarely get through beyond the base round.
Would you have any tips for just the act of getting a foot in the door, so to say? I'm reasonably optimistic I can take it from there.
(Two things I can probably change - using customized CVs (and a cover letter, where applicable), and reaching out to employees/HR at the places I'm applying at. Though that honestly seems exhausting with so many applications...)
Meaning, what you ask for (or how expensive you are perceived, if you have that strong resumee) for the industry you apply, may be too different and leading to limited access.
Sometimes I feel junior people have it easier (I felt like I did, personally) since the expense in salary is pretty limited compared to either other roles or more senior people
I'd want someone to do the same.
They've probably revised their policy by now, I suspect, but I appreciated that they made the effort.
Maybe it’s because my school wasn't on that list, but I remember feeling like if I got rejected like that I would very much feel like I wasn’t good enough. But it was essentially random.
This is definitely not a universal truth.
I know that if I had done better in every interview then I would’ve moved ahead and gotten the job. I guess that’s a different way of saying I was “bad” (not good enough). And it doesn’t affect my motivation in a negative way. I find that it actually helps me want to improve more.
https://opentext.wsu.edu/theoreticalmodelsforteachingandrese...
Best to ask for feedback but of course they won't give it to you. I thought I did really well after 6 interviews with a FAANG company. They let me down by saying that another candidate was preferred. I pressed for feedback a month or so later and was ghosted. So I submitted a privacy request to the privacy and legal team about all and any data pertaining to the hiring process and interview, and was given a massive dump of their talent management system, plaintext notes of the interviews, group chat messages discussing me, etc.
It turns out I had a pretty bad read of the situation; there was some things that I had said that were misconstrued, some bad traits that I wasn't aware of, and then the key reason I was rejected (lack of domain exertise and relevant experience).
Anyways glad I went down this route, I still need to process the data and translate it to improving myself, but as my buddy GI Joe says, knowing is half the battle.
Take Amazon for example that has a privacy query page: https://www.amazon.com/hz/contact-us/request-data
Send a message like this (have ChatGPT to tailor to your jurisdiction):
Dear Privacy Officer,
I am writing to formally request access to any and all personal information $FAANG holds about me under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), specifically pursuant to Australian Privacy Principle 12.
I interviewed for the $ROLE position with one of $FAANG's Australian offices between February and March 2025. While I understand that I was not selected for the role, I am seeking access to any evaluative records, interview notes, recruiter or hiring manager comments, assessments, and other personal information recorded or obtained during the recruitment process.
For the purposes of identifying my records, my name is $FULL_NAME, and I applied via $FAANG Job Portal.
Please provide this information in a commonly used electronic format. If you require any further details to verify my identity or locate my information, I am happy to provide them.
Thank you for your attention to this matter. I look forward to your response within a reasonable time, as required by the Act.
I'm rather surprised this worked, is there any reason to not do this for every interview?
I wouldn't do it for a tiny company / startup where such a request can easily be exposed to recruiter and interviewers, but in those cases you're very likely to receive candid feedback by just asking anyway.
Won't lie, both of those hurt, but I also reasoned it that if that's who I would have been working for, I wouldn't have enjoyed the work anyway.
And every role usually only gets one person accepted into it, or at most, a small number. Ideally they want the "best" person for the role (where "best" is highly subjective and context-dependent). Say 200 people applied for the role. Are you really going to feel bad about yourself because you weren't the absolute best person out of 200 applicants? Is it going to be a huge blow to your self-esteem that you might have been the 2nd or 3rd best out of that 200? (And that's assuming their interview process is perfect and accurately measures who the "best" person is, which is rarely the case.)
Rejections are hard. I get it. I don't enjoy them either. But it's so important not to take them personally.
When America prescribes that you only deserve health insurance and shelter if you have a good enough job, and you're at the end of your rope financially, it is in my experience very difficult not to take things personally. I was actually pretty good at this earlier on, when I still had savings! But contrary to what some people say, it became harder and harder to stay positive as time went on until it became all but impossible. The last straw was when 13/hr jobs started rejecting me for not having "moving things around in a warehouse" experience.
I'm now having to work an eye-wateringly menial job with no experience requirement just to make ends meet, and even that still isn't enough for my poverty-level expenses. It's not the prestige of the job that bothers me but the fact that it isn't livable. It does feel sometimes that my life could have diverged significantly if I had just passed that interview all those months ago. So much was riding on that final interview and yet I didn't perform to some arbitrary unknowable standard to deserve a livable salary, and this is the end result of my rejection.
I'm hoping that if I get an HVAC certification or something I can just... survive comfortably. I don't think I'd be happy changing careers and I wanted to work in tech until I died or retired, but seems like it's not going to happen at this rate.
Sometimes interviews are designed to be a hard grind that everyone fails and it's based on 'did you fail the least', but those are rare and once you've done a bunch of interviews, you can tell the difference.
If your half way through a process, recruiters are often ok to tell you what you didn't do as well on and offer that as feedback and tips. At the end they tend to be quiet so you can't figure out the final reason for a rejection unless you somehow have a friend on the inside that can find out informally for you. If your lucky to get a rejection call, you can even get vague hints as to why it wasn't a go from the recruiter if you have the social skills and the right recruiter. I often play guessing games based on my deductions.
But these are more obvious parts.
I mean, there might be, in two ways. Sometimes, you just mess up in some obvious way and can learn from that. But you also get a glimpse of the corporate culture. Maybe not for FAANG and the likes - the processes are homogenized and reviewed by a risk-averse employment lawyer - but for smaller organizations, it's fair game.
But as with layoffs, there's nothing you can win by begging, groveling, or asking for a second chance. The decision has been made, these decisions are always stochastic and unfair on some level, but you move on. You'll be fine.
There are cases where the company gives you some indication of why they rejected you but they are rare in my experience (in the USA, mostly for legal reasons, IDK about other countries). Or they give you information in some other way. Some companies will stop and send you home part way through if it's not going well. That also gives more information.
This is excellent advice in general.
When you're on Reddit long enough, you'll see posts from men about how they were kind and considerate to a woman, and she still didn't want to date them. But that's not how life works. It's not about putting kindness, skills, effort, and good intentions into the machine and receiving success in return.
You should do these things because you want to. For yourself. Not because you will definitely get any reward in return.
Aim to excel in a job interview because you are good at what you do. Aim for being kind to others because you're a good person. Aim to learn a new skill because you're curious and love learning. Help a friend because you value your relationships.
And be happy because of what you do, because of who you are, because you can be proud of yourself.
In bike racing, winning feels really good, but I don't think people really do it for the winning, because if you dominate one category, _congratulations!_ now you get to compete against the next level, replete with additional helpings of pain, exertion, and whatever the opposite of mental acuity is.
* In contrast to many sports where one of the two participants is guaranteed to win.
This hasn't been true for the interviews I've given. For technical interviews I was given a question and rubrik of what they should say and a clear guide on how to grade them and give feed back about performance. Unless they did something truly bizarre there wasn't room for being subjective
Without having been there, I have a sense of what you mean, but I do want to add:
1. Statistically speaking, there will misinterpretation and even outright errors on the part of interviewers.
2. As feedback gets passed up the chain, most processes I know about are not formulaic. People make judgment calls. They might be more or less consistent w.r.t. following some ideal, sure. A company might pride itself on consistency and that might be good. Another company might pride itself on adaptability -- changing a process to suit the current need, because maybe the old process wasn't that great.
3. There _will_ be differential treatment, as perceived by the interviewer, even if you behave _identically_!. Cultures are different, comfort levels are different, styles are different! Saying the same thing, with the same tone of voice, with the same timing might have different effects on different people.
There's a real reason. Maybe my perception is bad, maybe they misspoke, maybe they can explain something...
I don't want to be a fool and let a his candidate go.
I'm really picky but I'm also extremely forgiving and believe in improving the person and making it a beneficial experience regardless of the outcome.
Other people don't do this because I dunno, my pet theory is most people forget to be adults
That said, I have my doubts about the true extent of the radicalization of "the youth", at least in the USA, given that the DSA/Mamdani voter base is squarely bougie upper middle class college grads freaked out that elite overproduction has killed their job prospects. Whatever radical things they may do, the result won't be to create more jobs for college grads.
I'd hope HR told the candidate that the position has been retracted, but maybe the HR system just sent an "unfortunately" email, I have no idea.
Or they liked you just as much as the one they hired, but you lost the coin toss. Or, they hated you because they misunderstood something you said. Or...?
Frankly, if you want to get better at interviewing, it's better to do more general research on what hiring managers and companies want, and then do more interviews to practice communicating that you have the skills and temperament to deliver value.
One specific piece of advice to the OA: this kind of post might feel cathartic, but it doesn't get you closer to your goal. Sure, it will resonate, people will commiserate, and you'll get some dopamine and internet points—but if your goal is to work at a top tier company like Anthropic then such a post can only hurt you. The reality in fast-growing, ambitious companies at the forefront of the AI bubble is that expectations are sky high, and getting things done to attempt to meet those expectations is incredibly difficult for a hundred different reasons. In this type of environment, whatever technical skills you have are not enough. To be successful you need a sustained and resourceful effort to solve whatever problems come your way. One of the most toxic traits is having a victim mentality. Unfortunately it's a common affliction due to the low agency that individuals have in big companies and late stage capitalism in general, but you've got to tamp it down and focus on what you can control (which in practice is often more than you might think). While this post doesn't directly demonstrate a victim mentality, it suggests internalizing the rejection ("My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.") in a way that is adjacent and something that would give me significant pause if I was a hiring manager evaluating for a role in a chaotic company.
Well said. While it might have only been the recognition of that feeling, I do think it might reflect a deeper internalization. Though I'm no psychologist; I only have an intuitive, common-sense understanding of the concept of "internalization".
> ... in a way that is adjacent and something that would give me significant pause if I was a hiring manager evaluating for a role in a chaotic company.
Yes, I can see why some people would have this take. But there are other takes, such as "this person cares and feels things deeply, and as long as they process these emotions, they'll probably come back stronger."
At this point, having proved that can do something commercially valuable a couple times now, I think they should run with it. Start a YouTube channel. Keep racking up views. Then, eventually, do partnerships and sponsorships, in addition to collecting AdSense money.
If you like to write or perform for other people, you can monetize that now. This person is good at it. They should continue.
In general yes, wrt HN it's not; literally in this second post he bemoans that the first one didn't pay off for him.
I don't think it is a strong signal of an easy pivot to influencer-as-a-career.
I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry. Do you, as an interviewer, not read resumes?
I read loads of resumes and the truth is more like everyone are terrible communicators. Especially software engineers. Most resumes are badly formatted, badly typeset, full of errors and give me confusing/contradictory details about what your job responsibilities were rather than what you accomplished.
Most peoples' resumes are so low-effort that they're practically unreadable and I'm trying to read between the lines to figure out what you're capable of. I might as well not be reading them because I'm trying to figure out what you've done, what you're good at and what motivates you and nothing you've given me on that paper helps me do that.
One of these days someone is going to figure out how to cross-polinate technology people and sales people in the office to smooth out each others' rough edges. Whoever does is going to revolutionize industry.
It's not. I've been in a number of interviews where the interviewer has told me straight up "I didn't read your resume. Mind giving me a second to give it a scan?"
To be fair, as you mention, resumes are horrible tools. They should only be used as a place to start a conversation, so does it really matter if the interviewer reads it in depth before starting the interview?
I know I have privilege in being able to say this, but I'd rather get rejected by potential employers who don't get me, than have to pretend to be someone I'm not.
Its not always bad to expose it and not always bad to get rejected because of it. Personality mismatch can make any job miserable.
Regardless, it feels bad to get rejected and that, I think, is what the article is making a point about.
The modern internet is stuffed to the gills with branding and bravado. Some vulnerability is fine.
Once people flooded the field to make money, things changed. Used to be if I met another software engineer they'd 100% geek out over technology, CPU architectures, programming languages, etc. It wasn't ever just a job.
Or to put it another way, Microsoft used to be filled with people rocking back and forth in their chairs avoiding eye contact discussing cool tech things. When I went on my interview loop at MSFT I discussed the mornings Slashdot headlines with every person who interviewed me.
To reiterate - wow! the interviews are hard, every company is selecting for the top of a different metric, and there's really no shame in not passing one of these loops. Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-)
I know, because I’ve been rejected and accepted to the same company before based on different interview questions, and did just fine in the role once I was in there.
In short, if you have decent skills the tech interviewers are mostly total random luck IMO, so just do a bunch of em and you’ll get lucky somewhere. It won’t make any rational sense at all later where you end up, but who cares.
My experience exactly! I've been lucky in most of my interviews that I was asked about things I just happened to brush up on or had thought about deeply in some past project, so I was offered the job.
And like you say, the job rarely demanded any of the things I was asked about... which worked against me once, where I sailed through the interview process but struggled for the first year to get up to speed in my actual day-to-day job, although I did manage to get my act together before it became a big problem.
* to the company the cost of a false positive (bad hire) is very very much higher than the cost of a false negative (passing on a good candidate).
* AI companies have a large pool of strong candidates to interview
* Therefore they are incentivized to make their interview process hard enough that a poor candidate almost never passes it
* but then it becomes something a strong candidate can only pass with a bit of good luck
This is not “fair”, but it’s a marketplace. The best approach is the one you propose: accept it and don’t take it personally if you miss, roll the dice again.
Personally I don’t agree with the crazy tech interviews at all, no other job on the planet does it like this, even high skill jobs like doctors or professors. They hire based on your experience, your references, and a good chat to make sure you’d be a culture fit. If there’s a serious problem with a doctor once they start the job, they’d be let go, but they’re professionals so this isn’t a super common occurrence.
The exact same process could be taken with developers IMO. If I have a seasoned career, you should hire me based on that, not because I jumped through hoops you set up.
your dream job will not make you whole
Like the great Mike Tyson once said, "God punishes you by giving you everything you want... to see if you can handle it".
For many, achieving your dreams usually comes with the hard lesson that you had the wrong dreams and that the real dreams you should have had were many of the things you already gave away to get there.
Then again, infinite AI-developer money isn't the worst outcome, either. Something something land among the clouds.
You have much cooler opportunity in these new companies and product spaces versus the large ships. It really is a once in a lifetime opportunity.
I had a bunch of these my last round of interviews, and am not convinced most companies even know what they want from these or how to assess. In the majority of cases it was clear to me the interviewers never even read the code I had submitted.
As an example, one company wanted a full AI Question/Answer system for large code projects using RAG to work on an arbitrarily large code base with an eval suite to go with it and also an API endpoint that could be called to automate asking of questions. You only had 24 hours to complete the assignment from receipt.
It was clear even before this that the company was likely not a good match, but I wanted to implement it for fun anyway. I'd already built all of this in production at a previous job (though it took weeks, which still felt pretty fast) so I knew how to approach it. Got it all done in time, met all acceptance criteria, had it so the entire thing could be run with one line of code (including building the RAG system, running evaluations, starting the webserver for the running API endpoint)... and rejected with no feedback a week later.
The trouble with asking people to write massive amounts of code in short periods of time is that you actually have to review it. I also have to say, despite the competitiveness, I was pretty unimpressed with the technical skills of the people on these teams (mostly smaller AI startups for me). It takes a pretty skilled engineer to assess the quality of a code base in such a short period of time and these teams did not seem like that had a lot of extra time on their hands.
I know I'd be pissed if the work did go uncommented.
that is absolutely insane.
Some people really do find a whole lot of personal meaning from their work. And that's okay. It's their life.
If someone is the sort of person who might find meaning working for Anthropic, they would find that meaning at a lot of other jobs as well. I think that's a better emssage; not that "you shall not find purpose in your work", but "the purpose you may find from work is not limited to a single or even small number of AI companies".
Very critical difference in mindset and the reason a lot of these conversations end up talking past each other.
The greenfield projects arising from this leap look benign now, but I can almost guarantee that won't be the case in the next decade once these technologies optimize their revenue generation engines and enshittification takes hold. Humanity will be at the whim of the AI compute overlords much more so than we are now, and that's an inevitable nightmare dystopia that I'm not looking forward to. The gilded age will look like child's play by the time we figure this out as a society.
I suppose that if your ambition is to be on the winning end of that hellscape, then by all means, go for it.
They may find a candidate that succeeds, they may not. In the end, it’s up to you to decide whether that kind of environment is for you. I also interviewed at a few AI startups and while difficult, I wasn’t impressed with them. They seem to be too high maintenance with little to no experience.
But I don't care about any particular company. I'm just as happy automating refineries as I am factories or chemical plants. I just want to be a valuable member of a team that gets stuff done.
I wholeheartedly agree.
That said, if you pursue jobs that are at least somewhat aligned with your personal convictions and desire for impact on the world and not strictly based on money, prestige, and power, you might be able to able to derive some greater sense of wholeness through the work. Not "make you whole", but "contribute to your wholeness".
If you only chase money, prestige and power - which if we're honest is central to a lot of the tech industry today - you probably won't experience any wholeness contribution from your work. That's fine, of course. Hopefully in that case you can find it through family, friendships, or community.
(Got where I wanted, the fact that I didn’t want enough and could re-set goals helped but still not great to reach the self imposed dream goal.)
The assignment was hard for me for a few reasons: There were many requirements; the requirements as stated were quite unclear to me; and it turned out that they were really referencing a certain standard solution to a standard problem that I was unfamiliar with. So we spent half the interview explaining the idea to me (bad!), and then the other half was me trying to code it up, and I just didn't get nearly far enough.
the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated.
You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or several people helping you with different things, and finding the right person(s) is likely to involve several false starts and blind alleys. You should pursue this work in person. Parasocial relationships are a necessity in this day and age, but over-reliance on them is ver bad for your mental health.
anigbrowl might have been too direct and harsh (I would say the first paragraph of his comment could be worded differently), but he was very clear in the second paragraph about where to go from here.
If this is truly how OP thinks and this post is how they feel about everything that happened, I strongly recommend for OP to look for professional help (with emphasis on "professional").
I normally don't publish sappy essays like this, but I wanted to try sharing a common experience of rejection with a loud call for optimism and self-growth. I'm still learning how to be an authentic/vulnerable person, and I may have missed the mark
I like myself now. I really do. But sometimes that old self-doubt comes roaring back and I have to beat it down with a stick. You're totally right -- internet strangers cannot beat those feelings down for me.
By the time I published this, I was already back in a great headspace and moving on to the next thing :)
My hope is that somebody reads the essay and grows 1% more motivated to grab a stick and beat down their own self-doubts. I'll be sure to put that front-and-center in future essays
At the end of the day the grandfather comment is more or less correct, the internet is a cold unfeeling whatever. But the act of writing from the heart is deeply, genuinely human and in this day and age I feel that the more human things I do, the better. And perhaps by being more obviously human will inspiring others to be more obviously human, and eventually making the internet (and perhaps the world) less of a cold and unfeeling whatever.
I'll add that what qualifies as “weird” or “quirky” on the web is probably a world’s different than what did in the past. And the weird and quirky things that people are willing to indulge or entertain in certain online communities does not represent what the rest of the world is aware of or even finds appreciable.
It may just be that Anthropic isn't it.
I had a company that was like a white elephant for me for a long time. Got in there, and I will say: It was one of the worst experiences I had in my career.
Not all that glitters is gold, and happiness is often only discovered when it is gone. If you can avoid those two pitfalls in life. You'll do well better than me.
But it was a bad team fit. 100%.
That said, sometimes one has to have a few bad experiences to actually know what good is.
> My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.
> I don't mind feeling ugly or low-status or whatever -- I know my place.
> I don't need (or deserve) your sympathy.
It's difficult to tell if this is just rhetoric / sarcasm, or if the writer successfully processed through these initial feelings. Either way, I take these moments seriously because it's not healthy to let these feelings grow.
If you feel like you're struggling, I encourage you to talk to someone -- preferably a therapist, but anyone supportive works like a friend or family.
If you're adamant about not talking to someone, consider reading The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown.
I asked for feedback, and the recruiter sounded frustrated (about the internal process), because they had a moving bar on what was wanted from the hiring managers. I know I hadn't completely aced one of the interviews (they had me do a second one), and apparently they thought it was good enough on initial review, but when coming back to review it again it was not good enough.
It seems like they are going through growing pains as a company.
That feedback occurred immediately after another interview where I failed because I didn't show enough individual drive, I had talked too much about working in my team.
The irony was a bit too much.
You’ll typically get better info only when a company is small and has a role in low demand and they only had a couple of people apply. This situation is pretty rare.
This is not how to understand this. They may have been hiring for say 50 positions.
They will just fill up those 50 positions with the people who reach a threshold, not stack-rank _everyone_ who reaches the threshold and pick the top 50.
There's little ROI in doing that, and potentially it reduces their list of candidates by taking longer.
You might have been mid way through the test just as person 50 was offered their role.
Sometimes, a company has multiple candidates that pass the interview with flying colors for a single role. They need to pick someone, and reject the remaining great candidates. If luck or timing was different and you were the only great candidate, they would have just picked you. But now they have a few, and have a hard time deciding who is "better". Often, they kind of punt on hunches, gut feelings, or things that don't really say anything about you at all.
You end up with the "Unfortunately..." email anyway.
If you do happen to get some feedback, well that's actionable. It's something you can improve and the next time at bat you'll be in a better position to do well.
Also important to note, just because you like the product doesn't mean you'll love the team, anthropic is a well paying job but it's also just a job.
Initially I saw the folks in this field as hype-persons, but their concrete output was tools that were useful for developers. The author did create this! But it was in service of landing a role at the company.
The people that work in this field now seem to mostly just get into beefs on the internet, create funny posts on Linkedin. Which… doesn’t seem very useful for developers.
Hits close to home! For what it's worth, it sounds like you have an admirable level of self-reflection and - despite being painful at times - I expect that this will pay for itself over the course of your life.
So the only ones who make it are 100% flawless?
This is a really bad way of thinking. Apart from the fact that he doesn’t know the reason behind the decision (and this already heroically assumes that there was any reasoning to begin with), why would you make yourself so dependent on total strangers?
The only way to lose at the game of life is to give up.
There’s an old Soviet saying “even when you’re eaten by a bear , there’s still at least two ways out.”
You’re never out of options, there’s always new angles of imagination.
Was this your first polygraph? I never had one, but I heard that passing the first one for a high level ticket virtually always takes several tries.
Did they tell you that you passed the poly?
I think I passed the poly cause if I didn't then they would tell me that instead of saying they selected another candidate and honestly I was so depressed and defeated that I just didn't bother communicating with them after that, 3 weeks of constant waiting and reaching out for updates and then finally getting an 'Unfortunately' email kind of did it for me.
I do not know what the details of the situation were, for example was the offer contingent on additional background checks that you failed or on something else, but if it was related to a US security clearance I would seriously consider filing a request for information -- they are required to tell you their findings.
It would probably be an interesting reading (unless one has a very thin skin) and I would do it just for fun, regardless of the pulled offer. My 2c.
Some people find ways to focus on the process itself and don't couple their well-being to the "end result" (whether success or failure).* This is a practice. You can learn it from others and from experience.
It is one thing to be honest with oneself and say "Yes, this thought is coming into my mind". You don't have to deny that feeling. That is one thought in your head. Acknowledge it and move on. You don't have to repeat it. You don't have to try to 'analyze' it. You can think about something else, and changing your brain patterns is probably a good idea. If the same idea pops up again, fine. Remember to be patient with yourself.
Some ideas that might work for you include: Find emotional support where you can. / Learn cognitive techniques to remind yourself to not fall into ruts. / Put sticky notes on walls. / Do something totally different. / Sunshine and fresh air can do a lot of good.
If one of these things doesn't seem to help, thank yourself for trying it, don't worry, try something else. If you need more support (mental health for example), seek it out.
* And how do you define the end-result? How much you helped people you care about? Maybe a time-averaged well-being metric? Something else? This is deeply personal, and I think it is worth reflecting on.
Getting rejected from a job always stings, but it's worse if you build it up to be more than it is. There's a dozen other AI companies out there shoveling the same shit, go apply to them. It's a job, not a vocation. Try to keep it all in perspective.
As an employer, such brown-nosing would put me off. Being exceptionally eager to please can be a red flag.
I really like diggit.dev, your approach, and I appreciate that you use Elm!
Keep pushing forward!
Why not?
If you have conscious insight into what behaviour is or isn't "weird" in a specific situation or environment, you absolutely can choose to turn it off, or at least damp it down. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, and there's no judgement. But if you can identify it, you can choose.
I do wonder to what extent one could view it as a pattern recognition challenge, though. To an extent, what you wrote resonates with me: growing up, I was probably relatively "weird" compared to the norm of my peer-group, and yes, often either immediate feedback, or recognition of feedback sufficiently quickly, wasn't present.
But it was possible to learn, via reflection after the event. And after n awkward or painful reflections, I was able to analyse which aspects of my behaviour were judged negatively, and over time, those reflections embedded and I was able to slowly change my behaviour. And I never saw this as an 'act' or a 'mask' - I always saw it as a continual process of self-improvement, where the goal was to be better (according to the standards or expectations of the particular slice of the world I was part of at that time) - more sociable, funnier, a more engaging conversationalist, a better kinder friend or partner, whatever.
The (surprising?) positive flip-side to this approach is that as long as you have the right goals (and maybe role models) you can actually end up far more functional and able in many domains than your peers.
--
(I've often said privately that I see life as a continual process of self-improvement, and this absolutely wasn't something I got from parents, teachers, peers or books: it was these formative learning experiences that formed that private philosophy.)
If it’s really your favorite thing, your content will be world class.
If you do this, I’ll be your first paid sub. Get in the arena, OP (and maybe don’t quit your day job until you’ve gained much more steam! :)
Twenty plus years later and I've still never had more useful interview-related feedback and I'm still grateful he was willing to share that criticism. Now, having been on the flip side of the process quite a bit, I especially appreciate how hard it is to provide meaningful "negative" feedback.
> I posted diggit.dev to HackerNews and it hit the frontpage!
Again, too much emphasis on HackerNews and the position of a post
What do you want from them? Are you confused or distracted by all this?
This isn't a big deal, just a small thing. Be stronger.
Focus on what will bring long-term peace and benefit. Experience every process and enjoy everything, rather than frustration, self-blame, pain, or other negative emotions. It's always better to find solutions and enjoy the present moment.
I don't want to teach or instruct anyone, just a little of my thoughts. If you feel offended, sorry for that.
Do people really not understand that companies don't care one whit about your personality? They only care about whether you can make them more money. And that extends to interviewers; the number one thing interviewers care about is can you meaningfully contribute to the existing roadmap, not whether you can bring your own unique perspective. This is especially true at mega huge corporate places like anthropic.
When I worked at the original incarnation of HBO Max our #1 hiring criteria was "not an asshole".
When I joined MSFT out of college, they were big on hiring for future potential.
In any large company you're going to be reorged to a brand new project within a couple years of joining, so being flexible and capable of learning quickly is of paramount importance.
My gut reaction is something like: "don't wait around to be picked, get out there and do great stuff"
Want to help the world get the most out of claude? Go out there and do it at an ability and velocity beyond what others think is possible. Go so hard friends think you're mad. That devs consuming your stuff think you're mad.
Create so much amazingly useful/helpful content and help so many people in so many ways that looking back in 1-2 years at the idea of working for anthropic would seem insane to you.
And if there's any opportunity to show off, don't be shy :)
Also re this:
> “He’s cute, but he’s too weird”
If someone’s thinking this about you, you’re just not a good fit for each other. It isn’t that you’ve failed somehow. Maybe they’re cute but too “normal”.
That coupled with a high amount of candidates I wouldn’t think much of failing one (biased, I ”failed” one this summer :) )
Follow-up: do you expect companies to fire employees who make mistakes?
That might be your problem right there. Deciding you can't do something is always a self-fulfilling prophecy. How hard have you tried?
I learned to turn my weird off a long time ago. It wasn't easy. It took many years. It was painful at times. But I did it. If I can do it, you probably can too.
P.S. You might want to think about whether or not turning your weird off is something you actually want. Being normal comes with its own set of trade-offs. But if you are going to keep your weird you should do it because it's something you decide you want, not because it's something you decide you are powerless to change.
Is "God actor" a term reserved for only the best actors? :P
Do not "be yourself" unless being yourself is attractive. Even "be the best version of yourself" doesn't work if you're a brony or some other socially unacceptable group
This kind of shitty blue pill advice is why MAGA, the manosphere, etc are bigger than ever. The rise of fascism is walking on a grave of blue pills.
No, the real blue pill is pretending any of your culture war manosphere shit matters or wasting any time thinking about that, because every second you waste on that is a second you could've spent improving yourself.
Now if "weird" in this case actually means "kind of an asshole" then that's a different thing, and yeah, that's definitely worth working on.
I like "weird coffee people", and folks that are obsessed with fun hobbies. I'm not so into sociopaths though, so it depends on the kind of weird.
I mean, everyone is weird when you look really close. But we can be cool with one another. To me it just sounds like they're still quite sensitive to judgement, and looking for explanations as to the rejection. I totally get that, I'm in the same boat. Sometimes you just don't have a good explanation, and you have to solicit valuable feedback elsewhere.
what a ridiculous statement
A job process is not an exam where if you do well you succeed.
Your "performance" plays a small role in whether you are accepted (maybe less than 30%). The rest is:
- The pipeline: that is who are your competitors, is there someone late in the process, is there someone a manager worked with / knows
- Your CV: obviously at the point of the interview, you can't change your history
- The position fit: basically who they're looking for. They might have a profile in mind (let's say someone extrovert to do lots of talks, or someone to devrel to enterprise) where you simply don't fit.
- The biases: And there is looot of these. For instance, some would open your blog and say it's unprofessional because of the UI. Not saying that is the case, it's simply their biases.
So, my advice, you reached hn front page twice in a couple of months. Most people, me included, never did. You clearly have something. Find work with people that see that.
Rule #3: popularity is not an indication of utility.
Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win.
The fact is all employees that produce intangible assets look like a fiscal liability on paper. If you don't have project history in a given area, than managers quietly add training costs and retention issue forecasts on that hiring decision.
I found the dynamic range anecdote by Steve Jobs (a controversial figure) was rather accurate across many business contexts =3
If I recall, it was mostly gleaned from meetings with startup CEO/CTO after years in operation. Mostly just documents the various cons pulled on technical people... like illegally farming CVs for LLM products, and cheap work Visas. =3
Perspective is developed rather than earned. Having said that, a numbered list of rules can be given freely. That's, like, one of the points of writing things down or otherwise committing them to long-term storage.
To give some advice that is loving but entirely unkind: knock it off.
No amount of spreading joy or do gooding is going to make you feel better. It can not, anymore than doing math homework will convince yourself that you are smart.
The problem is not what you want, it's how you want it. Or to put it another way, be the ocean not the wave.
Then they do this magical thing called — moving on. It's an incredible skill to cultivate.
You're amongst many of us who have also faced rejection.
> AI systems are no longer just specialized research tools: they’re everyday academic companions.
The article basically shrugs its shoulders at the problem of LLM-driven cheating and, to the best of my recollection, shows not a shred of honesty or willingness to face any of the real issues. Fuck Anthropic.
[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-ho...
See, for example, self-deprecating British wit. Or anyone from the upper Midwest.
I saw good people rejected for stupid reasons, illegal reasons, and borderline reasons. It’s just a decision that is personal and largely irrational to the people who control the process.
Many people in a position to hire want someone they believe they can control. Do you come off as a doormat? Congratulations, you are more employable.
Many hiring managers want to be with attractive people. Are you attractive?
Fuck some companies and their opaque, convoluted and too-precious hiring processes.
I mean--maybe their interview process is overly harsh? They could miss out some good candidates that way.
> I don't need (or deserve) your sympathy.
Hey person, don't be so hard on yourself. The world is already hard enough to just live in. Hoping you find an alternate and maybe more enjoyable career path :)
That's the point at which I would have stopped the process personally.
Why is that? I love take-home assignments. At least, if it's just an initial get-to-know-you interview, and then the assignment. What I utterly despise is the get-to-know-you interview, then a tech interview with the entire dev team, then a take-home, then a meeting with the CTO.
I will never, ever, ever go through with any job that has an interview process like this again. I always ask up-front what their interview process is like.
If you want early stage bulk screeners, go for it, I'm sure you need them, but don't take much of my time or the math don't math.
Why would I spend 4 hours (in the best case scenario, otherwise days) on the very first step of the application process, where, regardless of my resume, I have an extremely high chance to be rejected, while the company puts literally no time in?
Right after that, they said there were no positions available. It was pretty disappointing.
there's only info in a rejection if the company that is rejecting cares about their field ..., meaning so rare almost no professional has ever witnessed anything like it ... ever ...
anyway, ... dude ... if any of the shit you write is true, you are applying at a submissive company while having zero submissive traits except those you fake ...
And here's my dating advice: you want someone you can fight with all the time and chill the next second and then fight again, while knowing you don't want anyone else ... and vice versa ... it's quite likely something along the unwritten but equally sarcastic, cynic, ironic reversed (inversed?) lines of Tim 'The Wannabe-Leprechaun' Munchkins (Minchin) "If I didn't have you" ... good luck
I enjoyed reading, thank you
Does this really belong on HN? Someone didn’t get a job they wanted. The end.
> The first time I flunked an Anthropic interview (ca. 2022), I accidentally clicked a wrong button during their automated coding challenge. It was easy to swallow that failure. I made an honest mistake; I expect companies to reject candidates who make honest mistakes during interviews.
> This is different. I didn't misclick any buttons. My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.
That’s a physically difficult passage for me to read, what an awful way to talk about yourself.