Anthropic manager drops coding interviews because Claude is better at them

An engineer applying to Anthropic no longer gets asked to write a small React component on a call. Felix Rieseberg wrote this on his own site on 27 October. He is an engineering manager at Anthropic. His reason: Claude is now better at a small React challenge than almost any candidate. He said the test no longer tells him anything useful.

Rieseberg leads engineering for Claude.ai, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code Desktop. He wrote the post on his personal site. He said small coding challenges in real code had been a weak but useful predictor. They told him how a candidate would do on his teams. That is no longer true. He compared the React test to quizzing a candidate about assembly. Claude is better at both.

He said he does not think the coding interview is coming back. He said his best builders succeed whether they do well on these tests or not.

What he is looking at instead

Rieseberg wrote that he scans resumes and portfolios for small prototypes. He is checking for taste, empathy, and principled thinking. He said he has not fully figured out how to interview for people who build well with AI. He asked other hiring managers to say what they are using.

The rest of the post is advice for engineers he calls "without social capital, status, or power". He lists five things. Pick business impact over the backlog. Pick a radical idea. Build it over a weekend. Focus on one good idea. Use your fresh perspective. He credits the first point to Patrick McKenzie's 2011 line. Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things.

The post's title is "Hunger beats tenure". Rieseberg's claim is that new engineers now move past more experienced ones on his teams. The reason: execution is cheap now. A working prototype can replace a long buy-in process. He gives one example. Two new Anthropic engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, built a graphical interface for Claude Code in one weekend. The first public version was released about eight days later.

The limits of this story

This is one engineering manager at one company, writing on his own site. He describes his own hiring practice on his own teams. He did not quote any Anthropic-wide hiring data. Latent Space picked the piece up on 28 October and gave it that day's headline.

Dropping the coding interview is still a direct statement about his own product. Anthropic builds coding agents. The test he dropped is one Claude now passes. For a candidate, that changes what to prepare. A Leetcode set is less likely to be the gate. A small prototype that shows an idea is the thing worth building instead.

Source

Felix Rieseberg, "Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers". Latent Space's write-up.