An Anthropic Hiring Manager Drops the Coding Interview Because It "No Longer Provides Signal"

Felix Rieseberg, a hiring manager at Anthropic, removed the coding interview from his team's hiring loops in October, writing in a post on X on October 27 that it was dead at least for his team at Anthropic. In an accompanying essay, he explains that he stopped asking candidates to do them because Claude is now better at both a little React challenge and an assembly quiz. The change is Rieseberg's decision for his own team, not a blanket change to Anthropic's recruitment policy, and the company's own careers page still lists live coding tools like Colab and CodeSignal for technical roles. For Metaintro readers preparing for software interviews, this guide covers what he dropped, what he screens for instead, what Anthropic's official hiring pages still say, and what its own data shows about junior technical hiring.

What Exactly Did Felix Rieseberg Change, and Does It Cover All of Anthropic?

Rieseberg is an engineering manager at Anthropic, and he wrote on X that the change applies at least for his team at Anthropic. His key line was that he had seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal, which is where the phrase in the headline comes from.

The scope matters for anyone applying. He describes the change in the first person, writing this month, I laid the traditional coding interview to rest, and it does not announce a policy for every Anthropic team. Anthropic's interview process section for technical roles still names live coding tools.

The essay itself, titled Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers, is published on his personal site. He called it a spicy, optimistic take and sees an opportunity for junior engineers.

Why Does He Say the Coding Interview No Longer Works?

His case is that the test used to measure something real and now does not. Being able to quickly define problems and find elegant solutions was a weak but useful predictor for how successful you'd be on my teams, and small coding challenges in real code did tell us something meaningful about candidates.

In his view, that's no longer true. There is no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly, since the AI model can handle both tasks.

The other half of the argument is about results on the job. In his words, Anthropic's most impactful builders are successful regardless of how good they are at these tests.

He does not expect the coding interview to come back, and he points out that the format was never popular despite how common it was.

I'm probably not the only manager trying to figure out how to interview for people who build well with AI, Felix Rieseberg wrote, according to his Hunger beats tenure essay.

What Is He Looking for Instead?

He has not quite gotten there yet on a finished replacement. For now he is scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking.

That puts the weight on work candidates have already built. Instead of an artificial problem under interview conditions, he is looking for evidence of projects they have built independently, and he suggests small prototypes can reveal product judgement, empathy for users and the ability to think through a problem.

His example comes from inside Anthropic. Two relatively new engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, built a working prototype over one weekend of a graphical interface for Claude Code, and the first public version shipped roughly eight days later. He describes that interface as a very popular product.

He also invited readers to share better methods, writing that if you have figured out something better, I'd love to hear how.

What Does Anthropic's Own Hiring Page Still Say About Technical Interviews?

Anthropic sets out its company-wide process on its careers page. All interviews are conducted over Google Meet, and for technical roles, Anthropic uses live coding tools like Colab and CodeSignal.

Candidates get specific advice for that round. You can look things up, but you should be comfortable with basic syntax and standard libraries so it doesn't eat up your time. Interviewers will also ask about your experience and what motivates you.

Anthropic's hiring line is we care about what you can do, not where you learned to do it, and candidates who have done interesting independent research, written a thoughtful blog post, or contributed to open source are asked to put that at the top of the resume.

About half of Anthropic's technical staff had no prior ML experience, and people with an engineering background should apply as an engineer. Anthropic also answers a few practical questions in its careers FAQ.

• Anthropic does not currently offer internships.
• It is not able to provide feedback on resumes or interviews.
• You can re-apply after 12 months, or sooner if something materially changes about your experience or skills.
• It sponsors visas and green cards for eligible roles.

What Are the Rules on Using Claude During Anthropic's Interviews?

Anthropic publishes separate guidance on candidates' AI usage, last updated Jul 10, 2025, and it separates preparing from performing. Live interviews come with no AI assistance unless we indicate otherwise, because the company is curious to see how you think through problems in real time.

Take-home work follows the same default. Candidates should complete these without Claude unless Anthropic indicates otherwise, and the company promises to be clear when AI is allowed. Having Claude write your code when Anthropic hasn't explicitly allowed it is listed as not allowed.

Preparation is where AI use is welcome. Anthropic encourages candidates to use Claude to research Anthropic, practice your answers, and prepare questions for us, and for applications it asks you to create your first draft yourself, then use Claude to refine it.

Anthropic also lists how it uses Claude in hiring. It uses Claude to create job descriptions, develop interview questions, draft and refine candidate communications, analyze hiring metrics, transcribe interviews, and identify candidates to source, but it does not let Claude make hiring decisions.

Why Is This Landing Now, With Junior Hiring Down at Anthropic?

His announcement came just eleven days after Anthropic published How employment is changing at Anthropic, a study of its own workforce. The share of junior-level employees in technical departments at Anthropic slipped from 21% to 14% since early 2025, and the proportion of junior technical hires fell even faster, from 27% to 9%.

The timeline inside the company is specific. Discussion of a decline in demand for junior technical employees emerged in core technical functions in January 2026, and by April, engineering and research teams had deemphasized hiring for lower band technical positions. Postings for juniors have fallen particularly sharply since December 2025.

Managers linked part of this to AI directly, and in an April survey around a third of ML and a fifth of SWE managers described hiring less due to AI.

Anthropic has not frozen technical hiring, which has continued growing in absolute terms, even as the technical departments' share of total employment fell from 61% to 56% in the last year. The figures describe the company's own workforce and do not establish a similar trend across the entire technology industry, and the study draws on internal data alongside interviews with 17 employees.

What Do Anthropic's Hiring Managers Now Score Candidates On?

Anthropic also studied interview score cards. It coded hiring manager interview score cards for thousands of employees hired at Anthropic since 2024, and the clearest change was increased emphasis on whether candidates have demonstrated creative use of AI tools.

The numbers behind that are concrete. In 2024, managers mentioned a candidate's AI tooling record in around 5% of assessments for technical roles, and 7% for non-technical roles, and by 2026, these rates had tripled for technical roles and quadrupled for non-technical roles.

For technical candidates, the single biggest increases were in comments on applicants' autonomy and judgment, while discussion of domain expertise shrank as a share of overall assessment. One manager in the study wants a team that is fungible across domains.

Increasingly, hiring managers assess applicants based on their judgment and commitment, rather than the domain-specific skills and execution automated by AI tools, according to the Anthropic employment study.

Anthropic also measured AI agent use. By August, interactive AI agent hours outnumbered employees' six to one. Coding-focused AI agent sessions for non-technical employees leapt from 2 per month in August 2025 to 90 in May 2026, a shift that matters to anyone weighing programmer jobs as Claude writes more of Anthropic's code.

What Is His Advice for Junior Engineers?

Rieseberg aims the essay at newcomers, though he calls junior the wrong word and means engineers without social capital, status, or power. His hopeful point is that impact is less bounded by how many years of accumulated knowledge in frameworks and libraries you've gathered. He is seeing engineers who are comparatively new fly past people who are probably better coders and have been around much longer, and he sums that up in three words, hunger beats tenure.

His steps, in his order, are these.

• Pick business impact over backlog. Understand what your company is actually trying to accomplish, and look at the goals of your manager's manager, which he says is often a useful proxy. He quotes Patrick McKenzie's 2011 line that engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things.
• Pick a radical idea. Come up with a few ideas that would, if successful, dramatically improve the chances that your organization achieves those goals.
• Build it over a weekend. He has seen small groups and solo engineers fly past the usual process of writing product requirements documents by building a working prototype.
• Focus on one good idea. In his experience, junior people often cram too much into one prototype, hiding three excellent ideas among 20 bad ones.
• Lean into your fresh perspective. He argues that newcomers working on something user-facing have a unique amount of empathy for users, and that on infrastructure or tooling they have never learned all the reasons things are considered impossible.

The goal of the prototype, in his words, is to communicate an idea so well that leadership quickly understands both the opportunity and that you're the one who can run with it. McKenzie advised readers to be attached to Profit Centers in the same 2011 post.

What This Means for Job Seekers, and What Should You Prepare Next?

The take for candidates is that one team has dropped the coding round while the company process keeps it, so you need to be ready for both. One Anthropic manager removed it from his team's loops in October, while the company careers page still lists live coding for technical roles. Technical applicants should be ready for a live coding round and also have built work that shows judgment, since in an April survey a majority of managers described hiring for a different set of skills due to AI.

• Keep live coding sharp without AI. Practice solving problems on your own, since you can look things up during the round but slow recall of the basics costs time. Candidates also get time to ask about Anthropic, so bring a question or two.
• Ship one small, focused prototype. Rieseberg warns that a prototype involving a new programming language, a backend, and also somehow mobile apps is not going to succeed, so keep it to one idea.
• Put that work at the top of your resume. Lead with your strongest independent project when you write a software engineer resume for roles like these.
• Show how you use AI, honestly. Hiring managers increasingly focus on whether candidates effectively use AI, and Anthropic's guidance encourages using Claude to practice your answers as long as the experience itself is yours.

For junior candidates, the question of what happens to tech careers when companies stop hiring junior coders is no longer abstract at Anthropic.

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People Also Asked

Q: Has Anthropic stopped coding interviews for every role?

A: No. The change is Rieseberg's decision for his own team, and Anthropic's careers page still says technical roles use live coding tools like Colab and CodeSignal.

Q: What does Felix Rieseberg look for instead of a coding test?

A: He is scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking, and he says he has not yet settled on a full replacement.

Q: Can I use Claude during an Anthropic interview?

A: Not unless you are told you can. Live interviews involve no AI assistance unless Anthropic indicates otherwise, though candidates are encouraged to use Claude to strengthen your application and prepare for interviews.

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