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.

>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

My experience exactly! I've been lucky in most of my interviews that I was asked about things I just happened to brush up on or had thought about deeply in some past project, so I was offered the job.

And like you say, the job rarely demanded any of the things I was asked about... which worked against me once, where I sailed through the interview process but struggled for the first year to get up to speed in my actual day-to-day job, although I did manage to get my act together before it became a big problem.