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Flunking my Anthropic interview again

taylor.town

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Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#151

Post by MarcelOlsz »

bowsamic wrote: post #125
ilc wrote: post #20

You be you. You will find your people and your place. It may just be that Anthropic isn't it. I had a company that was like a white elephant for me for a long time. Got in there, and I will say: It was one of the worst experiences I had in my career. Not all that glitters is gold, and happiness is often only discovered when it is gone. If you can avoid those two pitfalls in life. You'll do well better than me.

I can’t imagine why someone would want to work for a specific company. Even team to team can go from terrible experience to great experience

RSU's. Nothing less, nothing more.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#152

Post by ivape »

spicyusername wrote: post #128
tibbar wrote: post #110

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…

your dream job will not make you whole In fact, they tend to do the exact opposite, unfortunately! Like the great Mike Tyson once said, "God punishes you by giving you everything you want... to see if you can handle it". For many, achieving your dreams usually comes with the hard lesson that you had the wrong dreams and that the real dreams you should have had were many of the things you already gave away to get ther…

Honestly, AI is far too creative to pick a job that cares about the wrong thing and you are dumped into a feature mill. It’d be the worst time to be at these large companies because the smaller more creative startups are what’s going to be really an adventure in this space, versus the same old run of the mill career treadmill SWE have been given after SWE ballooned in the 2010s.

You have much cooler opportunity in these new companies and product spaces versus the large ships. It really is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#153

Post by libraryofbabel »

jama211 wrote: post #141
tibbar wrote: post #110

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…

My career long experience with these types of interviews is you get hired by the company that, when they interview you, you get lucky and they happen to ask the questions you’ve just brushed up on or you get lucky and see the answer quickly for some reason. The content of the actual work I’ve done at these companies and how the work is done, is completely different to these interviews and I’d have done equally well a…

And unfortunately, from the point of view of the company, this is a feature not a bug:

* to the company the cost of a false positive (bad hire) is very very much higher than the cost of a false negative (passing on a good candidate).

* AI companies have a large pool of strong candidates to interview

* Therefore they are incentivized to make their interview process hard enough that a poor candidate almost never passes it

* but then it becomes something a strong candidate can only pass with a bit of good luck

This is not “fair”, but it’s a marketplace. The best approach is the one you propose: accept it and don’t take it personally if you miss, roll the dice again.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#154

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#155

Post by anigbrowl »

Dear Author,

the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated.

You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or several people helping you with different things, and finding the right person(s) is likely to involve several false starts and blind alleys. You should pursue this work in person. Parasocial relationships are a necessity in this day and age, but over-reliance on them is ver bad for your mental health.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#156

Post by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn »

constantly wrote: post #123
gwbas1c wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no information in a rejection Building on that: There's a few reasons why a company won't explain why they reject a candidate. One of the reasons is that they don't want candidates to "game" the system, because it makes it hard to screen for the people they want to hire. Another reason is that often rejections are highly subjective, and telling a candidate that "we didn't hire you because of X" could be hi…

I used to provide feedback but often got candidates who were argumentative about it rather that accepting that the decision was final. This turned me off on the whole concept.

but confirmed why you rejected the candidate - which is sort of a win

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#157

Post by danans »

tibbar wrote: post #110

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…

> 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:-)

I wholeheartedly agree.

That said, if you pursue jobs that are at least somewhat aligned with your personal convictions and desire for impact on the world and not strictly based on money, prestige, and power, you might be able to able to derive some greater sense of wholeness through the work. Not "make you whole", but "contribute to your wholeness".

If you only chase money, prestige and power - which if we're honest is central to a lot of the tech industry today - you probably won't experience any wholeness contribution from your work. That's fine, of course. Hopefully in that case you can find it through family, friendships, or community.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#158

Post by vjerancrnjak »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #153
jama211 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My career long experience with these types of interviews is you get hired by the company that, when they interview you, you get lucky and they happen to ask the questions you’ve just brushed up on or you get lucky and see the answer quickly for some reason. The content of the actual work I’ve done at these companies and how the work is done, is completely different to these interviews and I’d have done equally well a…

And unfortunately, from the point of view of the company, this is a feature not a bug: * to the company the cost of a false positive (bad hire) is very very much higher than the cost of a false negative (passing on a good candidate). * AI companies have a large pool of strong candidates to interview * Therefore they are incentivized to make their interview process hard enough that a poor candidate almost never passes…

They just have a pool that’s filled with bad candidates. They want to disable luck for them.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#160

Post by johanneskanybal »

I think a lot of these organizations are just really immature in their hiring because of growth. That’s my experience with Sweden’s Loveable at least.

That coupled with a high amount of candidates I wouldn’t think much of failing one (biased, I ”failed” one this summer :) )

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