Anthropic candidates face blunt money question | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic candidates face blunt money question

axios.com

36 pointssamizdis69 comments

> One applicant — who spoke to Axios on the condition of anonymity for fear of hurting future job opportunities — recalled being asked how they would feel if the company someday abandoned its AI ambitions for safety reasons, and that decision sent the stock to zero.

Is that a scoop? I thought that was a well known thing with Anthropic interview process. They were very transparent about it beforehand from what I remember.

On HN I’ve said things very critical of the company but that’s really not one of them, overall they had a pretty good (but intense and time consuming) interview process. I don’t understand the value of that article

Isn't the obvious response that they should offer a comparable comp package without any sort of stock aspect?

This rough question has been in the culture interview since at least 2021.

Would your wife Email people to fund her company? Answer correctly and youre hired bub

Based on Opus 5, I can only conclude they've activated their plan to drive the stock price to 0

"Damn kids today, working for their money, not mine!" Since Dario believes in the mission, he should give away all his stock and work for a regular employee salary

I hate these types of questions because they're not just selecting for people dedicated to the mission, they're also selecting for people who are convincing liars

What’s the alternative? Selecting people without caring at all about their character?

I agree with the parent commenter – it's too on the nose.

If you were concerned about someone's character then you need to ask questions which really help you to understand who the person is – not questions which are easy to game by lying.

I'd argue asking something like someone's opinion on veganism is a better question because it might help you understand how the person thinks about the types of harms Anthropic are concerned about without being such an easy thing to lie about.

Obviously they could say "yeah, I think veganism is good", but someone who actually inhabited that view or was just conflicted about balancing meat consumption and the suffering of animals would probably answer with a lot more nuance that helps you understand how that person thinks about similar kinds of ethical concerns.

Fair, but I disagree. This person is interviewing at Anthropic. If they’ve done a decent job of prep work, they know something about the business, the challenges, possible adjacencies, etc.

Springing “hey what if our core business goes to zero, what then” seems qualitatively different from “what do you think of veganism” as far as learning what someone’s motives are and what their understanding of the core business is.

If I were the interviewer asking that, I would score “oh that’s fine I don’t care about money” exactly the same as “wow I’d be out of here so fast”: total failure.

I think HN folks are imagining the question, imagining the responses, and imagining the interviewers’ criteria. Which, sure, easy to decide it’s a terrible question on that basis.

Isn't mostly any question not directly verifiable subject to that? At least the more questions you ask a liar to pin them down the easier it is to eventually notice them tripping up.

I’m not sure I understand the correct answer. A public company has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. This company opted to become public.

That's a common belief, but that duty is not absolute and does not imply the executive must choose money over morals.

Why not ask the same question your wife asked Epstien? Oh they do?

This is such a good example of a straight forward question that achieves the exact opposite of its purpose. What do we want? Highly ethical people that are mission focused and willing to give up on economic upside for the mission. What are we going to get? Sociopaths who are perfectly happy lying to your face about their intentions, or sycophants who are going to tell you what you want to hear.

Do you know who has the best answer to a moral quandry they've had to navigate during their career? Liars! That's a really difficult question to answer if you're honest, it's a really easy question to answer if you're dishonest.

If you really want to pursue this strategy rather than setting up bullshit interview questions you could do something much more straight forward. Agree some standard of living that's acceptable for your employees - let's say 250k in the bay area. Give them that as cash comp, and everything else goes into a "fund" which gets paid out when specific milestones are achieved, as judged by some panel. Cure cancer? You all get 10% of your deferred comp.

If you want your employees to be prioritizing things other than stock price you can literally just encode that into your compensation strategy if you like!

Obviously no one would do that, because they don't actually want to give up the comp.

Also that would open you up to lawsuits galore, since “curing cancer” is not easily definable, but share price is.

It's not difficult to define what curing cancer is, we've got tonnes of measures we can define. Let's define curing breast cancer - we have cured breast cancer if the 5 year survival rate is above 99% for all SEER stages, or less than 1 in 1000 women get diagnosed with TNM stage 1 or above. It's not that hard, it's just that deep down, they don't want to be judged on that basis.

(Details of the definition of these terms: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/breast-cancer/understand...)

Yeah but this is a conclusion you’d reach after a lot of studies have confirmed it and general consensus is that we’ve “cured cancer,” insofar as breast cancer, for instance, is no longer a personal or social concern at all. But testing that would take many years and there would not be a single point of inflection but rather a gradual forgetting of the illness as a cause for concern, similar to how Covid is today. So legally it would be very easy for a company to exploit this definition, claim the studies are not comprehensive enough, the statistical analysis biased, etc. etc., and really drag out the legal proceedings as long as possible and make it extremely painful for anyone to pursue their bonus. I don’t think Anthropic would do that but these sorts of things happen all the time especially when there is a lot of money involved, so tying compensation instead to something very concrete and not grounded in empirical determination, like stock valuation, makes it significantly easier. And since our society is grounded on the trade of commodities which can be given concrete valuations in exchange which are irrespective of their actual use value, the valuation of a companies stock is the only way to measure these things concretely.

The candidates should read up on effective altruism before applying to this company.

If you don’t know what that is, then you won’t understand why Anthropic are asking those sort of questions.

This is good advice. And if you don’t want to spend too much time reading about EA, imagine for yourself the inner dialogue of someone struggling with the tension between wanting to get really, really rich at any cost, and also really, really wanting other people to cherish them as a heroic-level Good Person, and also (this part is crucial) not have to sully their hands doing any actual hands-on good directly.

The ideal runs close to the output of Bill Gates’ PR machine.

Shame that machine didn't manage to erase Epstein's emails.

> EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS STAYS HAPPENED.

> “What kind of philosophy is that?”

> THE ONLY ONE THAT WORKS.

— Thief of Time (Pratchett)

Why are you so anti-anthropic? Hundreds of posts on hacker news decrying anthropic.

Admit it HN, you have sour grapes for not having a job at Anthropic/OpenAI.

I have no clue how to get my resume past their Claude ATS so it's kind of moot.

The decision to hire me is load-bearing and genuinely yours.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com