The snarky writing of "if you beat our best solution, send us an email and MAYBE we think about interviewing you" is really something, innit?
> If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing.
That doesn’t seem snarky to me. They said if you beat Opus, not their best solution. Removing “perhaps” (i.e. MAYBE) would be worse since that assumes everyone wants to interview at Anthropic. I guess they could have been friendlier: “if you beat X, we’d love to chat!”
"do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you"
It sounds incredibly condescending, if not snarky, but I would classify those adjectives as mostly synonymous.
There's more to employees than their raw ability to go below some performance threshold. If somebody passes the test, but lives in an US sanctioned country with no plans to move, is well known for using the n-word on social media or has previously broken an NDA, Anthropic probably doesn't want to interview them.
Hiring and interviewing is in a weird place right now. We’re coming off of a period where tech jobs were easy to get and companies were competing for candidates. A lot of candidates quickly got used to the idea of companies working hard to charm and almost beg them to join. When those candidates encounter what it’s like to apply for highly competitive companies who have 1000x more applicants than they’d ever consider, the resulting straightforwardness can be shocking.
>If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing.
Not condescending
> If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code so we can schedule an interview.
> do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you
If you think telling someone that after passing a test that 99.999% of humanity cannot pass, that they _may_ get an interview, you are being snarky/condescending.
You may want to consider the distribution and quantity of replies before stating that you WILL do something that might just waste more people’s time or not be practical.
The classy thing to do would be responding to every qualifying submission, even if it’s just to thank everyone and let some people know the field was very competitive if an interview won’t be happening.
Does that change the fact that they are condescending?
people are mentioning that they do this for a reason, which explains away that behavior, so yeah, it kinda does change the fact of whether they are being condescending.
(yes, yes, not every human will try this test)
Do you think if the applicants are really in that level of demand that they would be getting a take home test instead of being actively recruited?
Legitimately lay out your understanding of a world where an employer is chasing after employees who are high in demand, give them a test that is expected to take hours, and have a hedged bet in their wording, instead of saying we will absolutely hire you if you pass X bar?
If three people send them improvements, they'll probably get interviews. If three thousand do, the problem is easier than they thought or amenable to an LLM or one bright person figured out a trick and shared it with all his classmates or colleagues or all of GitHub.