Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, has dropped coding interviews from his team's hiring. He says Claude is now better than people at small coding challenges, which he calls a weak predictor of success. Instead, he advises engineers without status to build a working prototype of one ambitious idea over a weekend.
Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, has dropped the coding interview from his team’s hiring. He explained the change in a blog post published Tuesday, October 27, titled “Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers.”
Rieseberg leads engineering for Claude.ai, Claude Code Desktop and Anthropic’s Cowork tool, according to his bio. He previously worked at Notion, Stripe, Slack and Microsoft, and his post is written as advice to engineers rather than as a formal company policy.
His reasoning was blunt. “There’s no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both,” Rieseberg wrote.
Why is Anthropic dropping coding interviews?
He described small coding challenges as “a weak but useful predictor” of success on his teams. The people who have had the biggest impact on his projects, he wrote, succeed whatever their scores on those tests. That gap between test results and real output is the core of his argument.
If coding skill matters less, what does? Rieseberg said impact now depends less on years of accumulated knowledge of frameworks and libraries. That shift, he suggested, gives newer engineers a real opening to pass colleagues who have been in the field longer.
“I’m seeing engineers who are comparatively new fly past people who are probably better coders and have been around much longer,” he wrote. “Hunger beats tenure.”
What he tells engineers to do instead
What should engineers build instead of taking coding tests?
His advice is aimed at engineers “without social capital, status, or power.” He suggests they start by finding out what their company is trying to achieve. From there, they should pick one ambitious idea that would help, then build a working prototype over a weekend.
He warned against cramming several ideas into a single prototype. Focus, in his view, matters more than breadth.
Rieseberg pointed to a recent example from inside Anthropic. Two relatively new engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, built a prototype graphical interface for Claude Code over one weekend. The first public version shipped roughly eight days later, he wrote.
Rieseberg also said he has not yet worked out how to interview for people who build well with AI. For now, he scans résumés and portfolios for small prototypes that show “taste, empathy, and principled thinking.” Finished prototypes, in other words, are doing the work that coding tests once did.
Other companies are also rethinking how they hire and evaluate engineers. Google is expanding pilots of engineering interviews that let candidates use Gemini, according to Hugh Langley’s report for Business Insider last week. Amazon this week warned its engineers against chasing AI usage metrics.
The shift in Rieseberg’s thinking reflects how much Anthropic’s own products have changed the job. The company has said that Claude writes 80% of its own code.
Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
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