Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flunking my Anthropic interview again

taylor.town

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 374 posts

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#61

Post by majormajor »

gk1 wrote: post #51
almostgotcaught wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the age of social media. This person has hit the front page of HN twice now. That's a commercially valuable skill. In general yes, wrt HN it's not; literally in this second post he bemoans that the first one didn't pay off for him.

As someone who’s hired many dev advocates, I definitely value the ability to turn mundane topics into posts that hit the HN front page. If they can do this about something as dull as failing interviews, imagine what they’d do with an actually interesting technical topic.

Failing interviews is a favorite topic for HN, not a "dull" one; this is not the only person who's made the front page about it, and certainly won't be the last. HN's audience contains a large group that believes "tech interviews are stupid and broken" and this is right up their alley.

I don't think it is a strong signal of an easy pivot to influencer-as-a-career.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#62

Post by joshdavham »

amarcheschi wrote: post #46
kashunstva wrote: post #12

I have no idea to what extent Anthropic or other employers delve into prospective candidates’ blogs; but this strikes me as too much self-disclosure for one’s own good. We all have idiosyncrasies; but calling oneself weird on a now widely published blog article seems like it risks defeating the goal of making oneself an ideal candidate for many job opportunities. Look, many of my own eccentricities have been (net) va…

I still have to meet a person in computer science who isn't weird

Most CS people I know aren’t weird and are actually pretty corporate and conformist. But at the same time, the people I know who do open source are some of the weirdest people I know haha

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#63

Post by busterarm »

lylejantzi3rd wrote: post #49
busterarm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> interviewers barely read resumes I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry. Do you, as an interviewer, not read resumes? I read loads of resumes and the truth is more like everyone are terrible communicators. Especially software engineers. Most resumes are badly formatted, badly typeset, full of errors and give me confusing/contradictory details about what your job responsibilities were rather…

> I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry. It's not. I've been in a number of interviews where the interviewer has told me straight up "I didn't read your resume. Mind giving me a second to give it a scan?" To be fair, as you mention, resumes are horrible tools. They should only be used as a place to start a conversation, so does it really matter if the interviewer reads it in depth before star…

It's starting to sound to me like on both sides of this conversation, up-front effort made can be strong positive signal...

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#64

Post by majormajor »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #48
amarcheschi wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have to meet a person in computer science who isn't weird

I've met a few. None in SV, all in "flyover" states/provinces.

SV/NY is pretty concentrated with "non-weird" SWEs these days unless you count "money-oriented" as weird. "CS degree from a top program followed by FAANG or NYC Fintech" was a common default path for reasonably-smart/reasonably-socially-skilled/highly-career-motivated high school students to aim at for a while.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#65

Post by majormajor »

lylejantzi3rd wrote: post #49
busterarm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> interviewers barely read resumes I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry. Do you, as an interviewer, not read resumes? I read loads of resumes and the truth is more like everyone are terrible communicators. Especially software engineers. Most resumes are badly formatted, badly typeset, full of errors and give me confusing/contradictory details about what your job responsibilities were rather…

> I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry. It's not. I've been in a number of interviews where the interviewer has told me straight up "I didn't read your resume. Mind giving me a second to give it a scan?" To be fair, as you mention, resumes are horrible tools. They should only be used as a place to start a conversation, so does it really matter if the interviewer reads it in depth before star…

Others in the loop (sourcer/screener/recruiter at minimum) almost certainly read your resume for you to even make it that far.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#67

Post by 4ndrewl »

> My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.

This is not how to understand this. They may have been hiring for say 50 positions.

They will just fill up those 50 positions with the people who reach a threshold, not stack-rank _everyone_ who reaches the threshold and pick the top 50.

There's little ROI in doing that, and potentially it reduces their list of candidates by taking longer.

You might have been mid way through the test just as person 50 was offered their role.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#68

Post by jp57 »

One great piece of advice an informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection.

That is to say that you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back. There are so many reasons that a candidate might get rejected that have nothing to do with one's individual performance in the interview or application process.

Having been on the hiring side of the interview table now many more times than on the seeking side, I can say that this is totally true.

One of the biggest misconceptions I see from job seekers, especially younger ones, is to equate a job interview to a test at school, assuming that there is some objective bar and if you pass it then you must be hired. It's simply not true. Frequently more than one good applicant applies for a single open role, and the hiring team has to choose among them. In that case, you could "pass" and still not get the job and the only reason is that the hiring team liked someone else better.

I can only think of one instance where we had two great candidates for one role and management found a way to open another role so we could hire both. In a few other cases, we had people whom we liked but didn't choose and we forwarded their resumes to other teams who had open roles we thought would fit, but most of the time it's just, "sorry."

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#69

Post by xenotux »

jp57 wrote: post #68

One great piece of advice an informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection . That is to say that you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back. There are so many reasons that a candidate might get rejected that have nothing to do with one's individual performance in th…

> One great piece of advice and informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection.

I mean, there might be, in two ways. Sometimes, you just mess up in some obvious way and can learn from that. But you also get a glimpse of the corporate culture. Maybe not for FAANG and the likes - the processes are homogenized and reviewed by a risk-averse employment lawyer - but for smaller organizations, it's fair game.

But as with layoffs, there's nothing you can win by begging, groveling, or asking for a second chance. The decision has been made, these decisions are always stochastic and unfair on some level, but you move on. You'll be fine.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#70

Post by xenotux »

pyzhianov wrote: post #5

The reasons why companies hire or don't hire someone usually have very little with the candidate themselves. From my experience, whenever this machine needs another cog, almost any will do - usually the first one within reach. And when it doesn't, not even the shiniest one will be of interest. So it's probably nothing personal OP

Nah. Every company has its lore about what makes a good candidate and they try to test for that. The lore is often rubbish (as in: there's often little correlation between interview performance and on-job performance), but there is still a process and that process rejects most applicants.
Post reply on HN