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

101–110 of 374 posts

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#101

Post by WalterBright »

jimmar wrote: post #98
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…

> there is no information in a rejection. The most helpful job interview I had was when the interviewer broke script and just leveled with me about how I wasn't presenting myself well. There was a shared connection (our alma mater) that must have convinced him to be straight with me instead of hiding how poorly I was doing behind a mask. The HR handbooks say that you should never let a candidate know why they were no…

The HR handbooks say that for good reason. Telling a candidate why they were rejected means they'll argue with you, or worse, file a lawsuit.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#103

Post by corytheboyd »

dasil003 wrote: post #88
busterarm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where someone at the front (is supposed to have) vetted the person already. I think that's a mistake, personally. Each interviewer needs to make an independent decision and relying on the judgement of a screener early in the process is giving that person disproportionate weight towards hiring for your team. Usually that resume screener is someone in HR. Would you trust them to decide who your team hires? Your posts…

If it’s truly only HR and then direct to full interview panel then I agree with you, but I’ve never worked somewhere where a technical person wasn’t involved in screening. Yes recruiters will winnow the inbound, but usually there a technical phone screen, hiring manager screen, or both.

FWIW this is what I assumed to be true when I said what I said.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#104

Post by surprisetalk »

bradhe wrote: post #95

Not sure how I feel about “front-paging hackernews” as part of a devrel take home test. Obviously, I understand how important it is—I want my devrels to write content that drives front page traffic. But as a HN user…

Author here! Just want to be extra crystal clear that Anthropic gave me a boring/standard coding project. I decided to post a parallel project to HN to demonstrate that I was able to quickly create engaging software. They in no way asked or insinuated that I share anything online

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#105

Post by Bukhmanizer »

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…

I would also guess that in at least >50% of cases your application is never given a fair shot for random reasons. I remember when a company that I was working at was doing intern interviews, they would almost always run out of time to do interviews (this was back when interviews were in person), so they would pick 2-3 schools that they had time to get to (proximity * prestige was the factor there) and everyone else got a blanket rejection.

Maybe it’s because my school wasn't on that list, but I remember feeling like if I got rejected like that I would very much feel like I wasn’t good enough. But it was essentially random.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#106

Post by campbel »

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

Normal people are just weird people you don't know very well.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#107

Post by matusp »

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…

Especially true in today's hiring environment. They probably have hundreds of qualified people lined up for that position. One company recently reached out to me asking me to submit a CV, considering me a good fit for their position. In the end, they rejected me, but they mentioned that they got 1400 applications. If you don't have a personal connection to get you in, it's basically a lottery.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#108

Post by xattt »

WalterBright wrote: post #101
jimmar wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no information in a rejection. The most helpful job interview I had was when the interviewer broke script and just leveled with me about how I wasn't presenting myself well. There was a shared connection (our alma mater) that must have convinced him to be straight with me instead of hiding how poorly I was doing behind a mask. The HR handbooks say that you should never let a candidate know why they were no…

The HR handbooks say that for good reason. Telling a candidate why they were rejected means they'll argue with you, or worse, file a lawsuit.

Yeah… the common connection thing is what’s at play here. This is why high-stakes introductions are done through people you know, to show that you can be trusted lest you be a social outcast.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#110

Post by tibbar »

I recently did a round of interviews at various AI companies, including model labs, coding assistants, and data vendors. My first takeaway is that, wow! the interviews are very hard, and the bar is high. Second, these companies are all selecting for the top 0.1% of some metric - but they use different metrics. For example, the coding assistant interview focused on writing (what I felt was) an insane volume of code in a short period of time. I did not do well. By contrast, another company asked me to spend a day working on a particular niche optimization problem; that was the entire interview loop. I happened to stumble on some neat idea, and therefore did well, but I don't think I could reliably repeat that performance.

To reiterate - wow! the interviews are hard, every company is selecting for the top of a different metric, and there's really no shame in not passing one of these loops. Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-)

Post reply on HN