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Flunking my Anthropic interview again
191–200 of 374 posts
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#192One 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…
This. I've hired in a number of roles, in several industries, and what they've all had in common is that rejection is never personal. My first career was in theatre, which a) is (or at least was, back in the day?) much more competitive than tech - par was one callback (ie, second screening) per 100 auditions, and one casting per 10 callbacks; and b) is genuinely, deeply vulnerable - you have to bring your whole self…
It's never personal
You never screened candidates who couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag?
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#193> I can't turn my weird off That might be your problem right there. Deciding you can't do something is always a self-fulfilling prophecy. How hard have you tried? I learned to turn my weird off a long time ago. It wasn't easy. It took many years. It was painful at times. But I did it. If I can do it, you probably can too. P.S. You might want to think about whether or not turning your weird off is something you actual…
Faking normalcy can often make you more unattractive than being yourself. I suspect that people can sense when someone isn't being genuine about themselves.
Not true, and why "be yourself" has died as dating advice.
Do not "be yourself" unless being yourself is attractive. Even "be the best version of yourself" doesn't work if you're a brony or some other socially unacceptable group
This kind of shitty blue pill advice is why MAGA, the manosphere, etc are bigger than ever. The rise of fascism is walking on a grave of blue pills.
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's time theft? Why would I spend 4 hours (in the best case scenario, otherwise days) on the very first step of the application process, where, regardless of my resume, I have an extremely high chance to be rejected, while the company puts literally no time in?
Well, that's different. If it's a super challenging take-home, with requirements that exceed 1 page, then yeah, I'd agree. Most take-homes that I've received have been super simple, though. And they're usually not the first step, but the final step, in my experience.
A take home should come with a project already set up that you're asked to modify.
Most don't and they waste your time setting up all the boilerplate.
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#195Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#196> I can't turn my weird off Why not? If you have conscious insight into what behaviour is or isn't "weird" in a specific situation or environment, you absolutely can choose to turn it off, or at least damp it down. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, and there's no judgement. But if you can identify it, you can choose.
Because sometimes having been "weird" is only recognized in hindsight. Attempting to project a persona, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistic_masking, is already difficult at the best of times. It's especially difficult under stress, like being in an interview.
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#197Your site makes me think I have to wipe off my screen
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#198Do I need to clean my screen or is it just your site
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#199I 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…
Arrrgh I remember an interview where I got this lucky... and I ended up failing it miserably. It was a python-heavy position, and I had been watching some Peter Norvig videos in the weeks beforehand to prepare. They asked me to implement some basic functionality of a poker game, which was EXACTLY what one of the videos was about. I was trying so hard not to copy his approach, and my own 'natural' approach would have been fairly similar (but not nearly as elegant), so by trying to avoid both of those approaches I made a complete mess, haha
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#200One 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…
This is such an insightful take. As someone who has interviewed many candidates, I wholeheartedly agree. While it's important to reflect on how you can improve, it's also critical to maintain morale and become comfortable with rejection during the job hunt. One of the biggest obstacles I've seen; whether with friends, family, or candidates; is the tendency to internalize rejection as a sense of being inherently 'bad.…
> Of course, once you internalize this belief, any motivation to study is gone
This is definitely not a universal truth.
I know that if I had done better in every interview then I would’ve moved ahead and gotten the job. I guess that’s a different way of saying I was “bad” (not good enough). And it doesn’t affect my motivation in a negative way. I find that it actually helps me want to improve more.