An Anthropic engineering manager no longer gives coding tests because Claude beats people at them. He now looks for things candidates have actually built.
An engineering manager at Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, has stopped giving coding tests to job candidates. Felix Rieseberg says Claude now does small coding challenges better than people do, so the tests no longer tell him much about who will do well on his team.
Rieseberg explained the move in a blog post on Tuesday, 27 October, titled "Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers". According to his bio, he has led engineering for Claude.ai, Claude Code Desktop and Anthropic's Cowork tool. He previously worked at Notion, Stripe, Slack and Microsoft.
"There's no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both," he wrote. He called such challenges "a weak but useful predictor" of success on his teams. His most impactful builders now succeed whatever their scores on those tests, he added.
Rieseberg wrote that impact now depends less on years of built-up knowledge of frameworks and libraries, the ready-made tools programmers lean on. That gives newer engineers a chance to overtake colleagues with more experience. "I'm seeing engineers who are comparatively new fly past people who are probably better coders and have been around much longer. Hunger beats tenure," he wrote.
His advice is aimed at engineers "without social capital, status, or power". In short:
He gave an example from inside Anthropic. Two relatively new engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, built a prototype graphical interface for Claude Code over one weekend. The first public version shipped roughly eight days later, he wrote.
Rieseberg said he has not yet worked out how to interview for people who build well with AI. For now, he scans résumés and portfolios for small prototypes that show "taste, empathy, and principled thinking".
Other companies are also rethinking how they judge engineers. Google is expanding pilots of interviews that let candidates use its Gemini AI, Business Insider reported last week. Amazon this week warned its engineers against chasing AI usage metrics. Anthropic has said Claude writes 80% of its own code.
Proof of what someone has built may soon count for more than test scores or years on the job, so a small working project is worth having.
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