Flunking my Anthropic interview again

I recently did a round of interviews at various AI companies, including model labs, coding assistants, and data vendors. My first takeaway is that, wow! the interviews are very hard, and the bar is high. Second, these companies are all selecting for the top 0.1% of some metric - but they use different metrics. For example, the coding assistant interview focused on writing (what I felt was) an insane volume of code in a short period of time. I did not do well. By contrast, another company asked me to spend a day working on a particular niche optimization problem; that was the entire interview loop. I happened to stumble on some neat idea, and therefore did well, but I don't think I could reliably repeat that performance.

To reiterate - wow! the interviews are hard, every company is selecting for the top of a different metric, and there's really no shame in not passing one of these loops. Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-)

My career long experience with these types of interviews is you get hired by the company that, when they interview you, you get lucky and they happen to ask the questions you’ve just brushed up on or you get lucky and see the answer quickly for some reason. The content of the actual work I’ve done at these companies and how the work is done, is completely different to these interviews and I’d have done equally well at all the places that didn’t hire me because they happened to ask the wrong questions.

I know, because I’ve been rejected and accepted to the same company before based on different interview questions, and did just fine in the role once I was in there.

In short, if you have decent skills the tech interviewers are mostly total random luck IMO, so just do a bunch of em and you’ll get lucky somewhere. It won’t make any rational sense at all later where you end up, but who cares.

And unfortunately, from the point of view of the company, this is a feature not a bug:

* to the company the cost of a false positive (bad hire) is very very much higher than the cost of a false negative (passing on a good candidate).

* AI companies have a large pool of strong candidates to interview

* Therefore they are incentivized to make their interview process hard enough that a poor candidate almost never passes it

* but then it becomes something a strong candidate can only pass with a bit of good luck

This is not “fair”, but it’s a marketplace. The best approach is the one you propose: accept it and don’t take it personally if you miss, roll the dice again.

They just have a pool that’s filled with bad candidates. They want to disable luck for them.