Flunking my Anthropic interview again

I have no idea to what extent Anthropic or other employers delve into prospective candidates’ blogs; but this strikes me as too much self-disclosure for one’s own good. We all have idiosyncrasies; but calling oneself weird on a now widely published blog article seems like it risks defeating the goal of making oneself an ideal candidate for many job opportunities. Look, many of my own eccentricities have been (net) valuable to be professionally and personally, but it was probably better they be revealed “organically” rather than through a public act of self-disclosure.

Maybe a good point, but honestly, interviewers barely read resumes, they’re very, very likely not going to read your blog, or remember “hey it’s the person from that blog post I ready 7 weeks ago.”

I expect that for a Developer Relations role, someone read the blogs.

> interviewers barely read resumes

I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry. Do you, as an interviewer, not read resumes?

I read loads of resumes and the truth is more like everyone are terrible communicators. Especially software engineers. Most resumes are badly formatted, badly typeset, full of errors and give me confusing/contradictory details about what your job responsibilities were rather than what you accomplished.

Most peoples' resumes are so low-effort that they're practically unreadable and I'm trying to read between the lines to figure out what you're capable of. I might as well not be reading them because I'm trying to figure out what you've done, what you're good at and what motivates you and nothing you've given me on that paper helps me do that.

One of these days someone is going to figure out how to cross-polinate technology people and sales people in the office to smooth out each others' rough edges. Whoever does is going to revolutionize industry.

It's a personal blog. I didn't read this as an employer. Someone greener may read this and think "this guy is really hard on himself but, unlike me, he's done so much more! Maybe we'll always feel this way so I should just be kinder to myself."

The modern internet is stuffed to the gills with branding and bravado. Some vulnerability is fine.

This is the age of social media. This person has hit the front page of HN twice now. That's a commercially valuable skill.

At this point, having proved that can do something commercially valuable a couple times now, I think they should run with it. Start a YouTube channel. Keep racking up views. Then, eventually, do partnerships and sponsorships, in addition to collecting AdSense money.

If you like to write or perform for other people, you can monetize that now. This person is good at it. They should continue.

Author here! Thanks for this. This is exactly what I want people to feel :) I'm willing to hurt my chances if it helps others

> This is the age of social media. This person has hit the front page of HN twice now. That's a commercially valuable skill.

In general yes, wrt HN it's not; literally in this second post he bemoans that the first one didn't pay off for him.

I’m a little confused, because first you challenge me, but then come to the exact conclusion that resumes are largely unreadable. I’ll look for something they claim to have done to dig deep on, see if it’s BS or not, but I’m not reading every X by Y% with my jaw on the floor. FWIW I’m generally on the back side of the process, where someone at the front (is supposed to have) vetted the person already.

You think too much of HN.

> where someone at the front (is supposed to have) vetted the person already.

I think that's a mistake, personally. Each interviewer needs to make an independent decision and relying on the judgement of a screener early in the process is giving that person disproportionate weight towards hiring for your team. Usually that resume screener is someone in HR. Would you trust them to decide who your team hires?

Your posts do indicate that maybe there is a larger segment of folks who don't read resumes than I realize...My amount of rigor may only come after being involved in some catastrophically bad hiring decisions. Like someone I made the deciding vote to hire was stalking multiple employees, was a heavy drug user, did zero work of value and ultimately crashed and burned by getting arrested for coming at someone with a knife. For years HR wouldn't let us fire that person because of their protected class and multiple false claims they made against a large number of employees.

Surely many of the kinds of companies this guy is applying to think the same?

As do many employers.

I still have to meet a person in computer science who isn't weird

I've met a few. None in SV, all in "flyover" states/provinces.

> I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry.

It's not. I've been in a number of interviews where the interviewer has told me straight up "I didn't read your resume. Mind giving me a second to give it a scan?"

To be fair, as you mention, resumes are horrible tools. They should only be used as a place to start a conversation, so does it really matter if the interviewer reads it in depth before starting the interview?

It is true for some companies. That said, in my experience, the more it was visible in an interview that the interviewer read my application, my website, my open-source code etc, the more enjoyable working for that company has been for me. I guess it’s a sign people at such a company give a shit. It transfers to other areas than just interviews led by them. At this point, if I see that the interviewer barely skimmed my CV, my expectations, that this job will be good, plummet.

As someone who’s hired many dev advocates, I definitely value the ability to turn mundane topics into posts that hit the HN front page. If they can do this about something as dull as failing interviews, imagine what they’d do with an actually interesting technical topic.

Absolutely. Especially for late-stage candidates.

People get hired all the time based on their online content. Or, at the very least, they get interviews when they wouldn't otherwise. Don't forget about the luck surface area!

Failing interviews is a favorite topic for HN, not a "dull" one; this is not the only person who's made the front page about it, and certainly won't be the last. HN's audience contains a large group that believes "tech interviews are stupid and broken" and this is right up their alley.

I don't think it is a strong signal of an easy pivot to influencer-as-a-career.

Most CS people I know aren’t weird and are actually pretty corporate and conformist. But at the same time, the people I know who do open source are some of the weirdest people I know haha

It's starting to sound to me like on both sides of this conversation, up-front effort made can be strong positive signal...

SV/NY is pretty concentrated with "non-weird" SWEs these days unless you count "money-oriented" as weird. "CS degree from a top program followed by FAANG or NYC Fintech" was a common default path for reasonably-smart/reasonably-socially-skilled/highly-career-motivated high school students to aim at for a while.

Others in the loop (sourcer/screener/recruiter at minimum) almost certainly read your resume for you to even make it that far.

That’s a good point, I’ve been a bit burnt out on strictly eng roles that I projected there a bit

Influence may be intentionally avoided by managers. Applicant should try the marketing team.

I have to think Anthropic is in high enough demand and looking for high enough skilled staff that any negative social implications from a blog post like this, as tame as it is, would be outweighed, for any actually suitable candidate.

The job they were applying for was DevRel, literally one of the goals of many DevRel roles is getting traction on places like HN

If it’s truly only HR and then direct to full interview panel then I agree with you, but I’ve never worked somewhere where a technical person wasn’t involved in screening. Yes recruiters will winnow the inbound, but usually there a technical phone screen, hiring manager screen, or both.

FWIW this is what I assumed to be true when I said what I said.

Normal people are just weird people you don't know very well.

I think software should be weirder. If people have ever used the MRI analysis software afni, I think it’s just the best kind of weird.

Perhaps the blogs of the candidates yes. On the other hand, perhaps OP will find a perfect fit this way.

And yet still that screening almost always has less technical depth than further interviews. It should not carry the most weight in the process, but because of practices like this it does.

They're in devrel. If they're not publicly visible devrel isn't for them.

I'll take an eclectic bunch of weirdos who all do and like cool shit over the corpo conformist normies any day. Super easy to suss out who is who when you first meet them. Just ask what they like to do when they aren't laboring under the thumb of capitalism. The cool people will talk your ear off about some esoteric whatever.

I expect many tech employers also think too much of HN, which is exactly the point being made here.

On one hand I agree with you, but on the other... I don't really want to live in a world where being oneself (a perfectly fine, good self) is a liability.

I know I have privilege in being able to say this, but I'd rather get rejected by potential employers who don't get me, than have to pretend to be someone I'm not.

Sorry, can't agree with this. The hiring manager's decision carries the most weight yes, but saying it's biased towards the screen is over-generalizing. I'm sure sometimes it is, but as someone who interviewed thousands and hired hundreds over a quarter century career at many organizations large and small, I can tell you unequivocally that technical feedback can and does regularly override my screening signal.

I would actively avoid hiring someone with a major social media presence. Too risky.

Being oneself is fine. Being too online may not be.

This field, and especially AI, are so full of autism. I unironically buy the extreme male brain hypothesis for autism because of my experiences in SV.

People think too much of it but also, somehow, far too little at the same time.

Agree. Tough crowd overall. And tougher comment section.

The phrase “too online” has a connotation that situates it in the 2020s or at worst the late 2010s to an extent that I don’t think really fits a degree of “online” you could have been literally before the invention of the Web.

I had a post here sit at #1 once for a day, I had 200k views from it. I think an ad would have been $2k? Not to bad I think

I believe part of the post is referring to that idea (self disclosure and weirdness) itself, and the idea that the author usually does try to limit it. Even without this specific post, the "weirdness" can come across in an in-person interview and other ways. Some people are normal, some can pretend to be, and others either can't manage to pretend or its too difficult/painful to do for long periods of time.

Its not always bad to expose it and not always bad to get rejected because of it. Personality mismatch can make any job miserable.

Regardless, it feels bad to get rejected and that, I think, is what the article is making a point about.

As a hiring manager, I've read blogs. Heck when reviewing a stack of resumes, "has a technical blog" almost certainly moves a candidate to a consider pile and they are probably getting a callback in the very least.

The ratio changed after software engineering became a way to make a lot of money. It used to be there were a handful of well paying gigs and a bunch of "pretty good" jobs, but SE wasn't a huge outlier.

Once people flooded the field to make money, things changed. Used to be if I met another software engineer they'd 100% geek out over technology, CPU architectures, programming languages, etc. It wasn't ever just a job.

Or to put it another way, Microsoft used to be filled with people rocking back and forth in their chairs avoiding eye contact discussing cool tech things. When I went on my interview loop at MSFT I discussed the mornings Slashdot headlines with every person who interviewed me.

I’ve hit #1 multiple times. HN views are low-value and non-sticky, IME.

Sure I don't think you'll build a following just here if that's what you mean, but there is an audience. If you have the skill and technical knowledge to have articles hit the front page you will get a decent amount of views. Which is what i think this comment chain is talking about

Truth. There's a reason that people say to never read the comments section of HN or YouTube.

Okay, what I said was definitely over exaggerating. Let's say, much more weird people here than weird people I met in other environments