I understand how it can be interpreted as snarky, but how could it have been written better? It's a hard path to walk and recruiting/interviewing is inherently sensitive it seems.
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)