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Flunking my Anthropic interview again

(taylor.town)
369 points surprisetalk | 5 comments | 29 Aug 25 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 1.165s | source
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tibbar ◴[29 Aug 25 18:36 UTC] No.45067795[source]▶
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:-)

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iamcreasy ◴[30 Aug 25 05:54 UTC] No.45072206[source]▶
Hi, can you share more about the coding assistant interview? Was it a task you had to solve and you were allowed to LLM to speed things up?
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1. tibbar ◴[31 Aug 25 01:24 UTC] No.45079497[source]▶
Oh, what I meant was, this was an interview with a company that produces a coding assistant. Ironically, you really weren't supposed to use an LLM much for the interview, although I think you could use the company's product if you wanted. The restrictions were a bit unclear to me and I chose to try to code everything by hand, but in retrospect, that was probably not feasible.

The assignment was hard for me for a few reasons: There were many requirements; the requirements as stated were quite unclear to me; and it turned out that they were really referencing a certain standard solution to a standard problem that I was unfamiliar with. So we spent half the interview explaining the idea to me (bad!), and then the other half was me trying to code it up, and I just didn't get nearly far enough.

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2. iamcreasy ◴[31 Aug 25 18:10 UTC] No.45085443[source]▶
Thank you. Interesting. Can you share a mock example of the problem you had to solve?
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3. tibbar ◴[31 Aug 25 20:13 UTC] No.45086647[source]▶
I think a spiritually similar assignment would be: implement multiplayer Google Docs using a CRDT, server, and clients, supporting a certain class of documents that are shown to you during the interview.

And imagine that the CRDTs are not directly explained in the problem statement, but some supporting data structure of CRDTs is referenced, and like clearly there is some way to make all the pieces referenced work together to create a working system, but it's never made explicit.

And imagine that you need to actually implement CRDTs from scratch in the interview, but also integrate them into this client-server document-editing app, which you also need to code from scratch. All in an hour.

This is why I say the interview felt kind of insane to me. But plausibly if I'd previously studied that problem, so that the implementation details were all clear to me from the start, and if I had used the company's coding assistant to the extent allowed, and if I had been in much better coding-things-from-scratch form, I could have done OK. I don't know. It's fine. They were probably looking for a type of engineer that I'm not. :')

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4. iamcreasy ◴[01 Sep 25 06:37 UTC] No.45090078{3}[source]▶
This sounds like a take home assignment. Are these type of questions standard interview question today?
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5. tibbar ◴[02 Sep 25 21:15 UTC] No.45109160{4}[source]▶
Nope, it was a live coding interview, less than an hour. I personally did a double-take at the beginning of the interview. However, the long tail of people who can code up algorithms and apps quickly is very long indeed. There are certainly people I've worked with who are just multiples faster than me in this kind of situation, and I could imagine them passing the interview.