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Comment by game_the0ry | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

This is an interesting way to recruit. Much better than standard 2 leetcode medium/hard questions in 45 mins.

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This is simply to enter the recruiting pipeline. once you're in you will do the same leetcode interviews as everyone else.

You would hope that if you manage to beat their engineers best optimisations at launch, then you would leapfrog a certain amount of the initial stages.

Then again, this may just be a way to get free ideas at optimising their product from outside the box.

One could use any number of LLMs on a take-home problem so in-person interviews are a must.

One could use any number of LLMs on real-world problems.

Why are we still interviewing like its 1999?

Old habits die hard. And engineers are pretty lazy when it comes to interviews, so just throwing the same leetcode problem into coder pad in every interview makes interviews easier for the person doing the interview.

If you want people to interview better, you have to both allocate resources to it, and make it count on perf. It’s not laziness, it’s ROI.

As an interviewer, I ask the same problems because it makes it much easier to compare candidates.

How do you know if one candidate happened to see the problem on leetcode and memorized the solution versus one who struggled but figured it out slower?

It doesn’t matter. It’s about looking for candidates who have put in the time for your stupid hazing ritual. It signals on people who are willing to dedicate a lot of time to meaningless endeavors for the sake of employment.

This type of individual is more likely to follow orders and work hard - and most importantly - be like the other employees you hired.

Once upon a time, the "stupid hazing ritual" made sense.

Now it means company is stupid.

It's very easy to tell, but it doesn't make much difference. The best candidates have seen the problems before and don't even try to hide it, they just propose their solution right away.

I try give positive feedback for candidates who didn't know the problem but could make good use of hints, or had the right approach. But unfortunately, it's difficult to pass a Leetcode interview if you haven't seen a similar problem to what is asked before. Most candidates I interview nowadays seem to know all questions.

That's what the company has decided so we have to go along. The positive side is that if you do your part, you have good chances of being hired, even if you disagree with the process.

Because if you want to hire engineers then you have to ask engineering questions. Claude and GPT and Gemini are super helpful but they're not autonomous coders yet so you need an actual engineer to vet their outcome still.

Is this a fact or an assumption?

It would take something like one week full time to work on this. It's not something you can do if you have a full-time job and apply to several other companies. I find it unreasonable to ask a candidate to spend that much time for an uncertain result.

It's true that being ready for leetcode takes practice, but at least it's standard so you can re-use the skills to other interviews. Optimizing some generated code is certainly fun, but it's as useless as leetcode for your average programmer.

As long as there are qualified candidates willing to do unreasonable tasks for the chance to work at a company, there's not much incentive for the company to change their system. Those people will also probably work unreasonably hard and make unreasonable sacrifices for the company.

> It's not something you can do if you have a full-time job

> I find it unreasonable to ask a candidate to spend that much time

And same for some reason does not apply to leetcode style interviews?

> It would take something like one week full time to work on this

I am not sure if this is satire or what? You need months of continuous preparation to be ready for the leetcode style interview.

> Optimizing some generated code is certainly fun, but it's as useless as leetcode for your average programmer.

No, it is not. This is specifically the type of job you would be doing tomorrow at Anthropic team if hired. And they are specifically hiring people who are already good enough at that very task. The same cannot be said for the leetcode, not even remotely comparable.

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