Anthropic Manager Drops Coding Interviews, Seeks Alternatives

Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, says he has stopped using traditional coding interviews for his team because Claude can outperform candidates on the brief programming challenges they contain. He has not settled on a replacement assessment method, and his comments describe his own team’s approach rather than a company-wide policy. In a blog post published October 27, Rieseberg argued that small coding tests have become less useful for judging candidates. He said such challenges had once been a weak but useful predictor of success on his teams, but that the strongest builders can succeed regardless of their scores. In his view, Claude now handles tasks such as short React and assembly-language exercises better than candidates do. For now, Rieseberg says he reviews résumés and portfolios for small projects that demonstrate taste, empathy and principled thinking. He has not described this as a finalized hiring rubric. He said he is still working out how to assess people who build effectively with AI. Rieseberg’s blog post also offers advice to employees who have little status or influence at work. He recommends identifying a company objective, choosing one...