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Flunking my Anthropic interview again

taylor.town

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Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#211

Post by redfloatplane »

JimmyBuckets wrote: post #203
anigbrowl wrote: post #155

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 sever…

This makes me sad. Please don't speak to people like this. The small pieces of humanity that people sincerely share are about the only thing that it is worth living for. What a dark world we would live in when our public sphere is filled with insincerity. I can't infer anything about you from a single comment but it must be incredibly isolating and lonely to talk to you when you are in this mindset. I can see your go…

I agree. We all have thoughts and feelings and emotions; denying that, making that invisible, hiding the mere fact of your humanity is surely a difficult and sad way to exist. It is OK to feel things; it is OK to write about your feelings; it is OK to publish those writings wherever you like.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#212

Post by CodinM »

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…

The last bit - don’t tell people. Statistically most won’t reach their end goals, the few that do have reasonable chances of mental breakdowns and or other mental anguishes since - as the philosphers nailed a long time ago - the journey is actually what matters, the destination isn’t.

(Got where I wanted, the fact that I didn’t want enough and could re-set goals helped but still not great to reach the self imposed dream goal.)

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#213

Post by theteapot »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #135

Anthropic from a technology perspective does interesting work, but from a business perspective its long-term viability is unclear. LLM generated slop will unlikely make it through the valley of despair in the Gartner hype cycle. Rule #3: popularity is not an indication of utility. Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win. The fact is all employees that produce intangible assets look…

Where are these rules from (I asked Claude but it doesn't know either)?

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#215

Post by byryan »

julianeon wrote: post #33
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…

This is the age of social media. This person has hit the front page of HN twice now. That's a commercially valuable skill. At this point, having proved that can do something commercially valuable a couple times now, I think they should run with it. Start a YouTube channel. Keep racking up views. Then, eventually, do partnerships and sponsorships, in addition to collecting AdSense money. If you like to write or perfor…

[dead]

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#216

Post by commandersaki »

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…

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.

Best to ask for feedback but of course they won't give it to you. I thought I did really well after 6 interviews with a FAANG company. They let me down by saying that another candidate was preferred. I pressed for feedback a month or so later and was ghosted. So I submitted a privacy request to the privacy and legal team about all and any data pertaining to the hiring process and interview, and was given a massive dump of their talent management system, plaintext notes of the interviews, group chat messages discussing me, etc.

It turns out I had a pretty bad read of the situation; there was some things that I had said that were misconstrued, some bad traits that I wasn't aware of, and then the key reason I was rejected (lack of domain exertise and relevant experience).

Anyways glad I went down this route, I still need to process the data and translate it to improving myself, but as my buddy GI Joe says, knowing is half the battle.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#217

Post by commandersaki »

gwbas1c wrote: post #112
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 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…

Another reason is that often rejections are highly subjective, and telling a candidate that "we didn't hire you because of X" could be highly insulting.

If they've written down notes or a stance/defence in a talent management system, all they need to do is regurgitate that in my opinion. I wrote about it upthread but having done a data request under my country's privacy act, I was able to get a raw dump of all the data (PII redacted). Recommend that as best course of action if they're unwilling to provide feedback.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#218

Post by wtbdbrrr »

wow.

there's only info in a rejection if the company that is rejecting cares about their field ..., meaning so rare almost no professional has ever witnessed anything like it ... ever ...

anyway, ... dude ... if any of the shit you write is true, you are applying at a submissive company while having zero submissive traits except those you fake ...

And here's my dating advice: you want someone you can fight with all the time and chill the next second and then fight again, while knowing you don't want anyone else ... and vice versa ... it's quite likely something along the unwritten but equally sarcastic, cynic, ironic reversed (inversed?) lines of Tim 'The Wannabe-Leprechaun' Munchkins (Minchin) "If I didn't have you" ... good luck

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#219

Post by Atreiden »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #176
libraryofbabel wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is it that most other jobs especially low skill take the opposite approach? You screw up or demonstrate your incompetence on your first day on a construction job site you are let go right then.

I think it's trickier to gauge in knowledge work because there's a ramp-up period, even for top performers. Just understanding the institutional context that led to the current ecosystem - essentially understanding every Chesterton's Fence you encounter - takes a substantial amount of time.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#220

Post by cornel_io »

ip26 wrote: post #192
eszed wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Of course. But I've screened far more out because I was in a rush and got 40 resumes in that day and they just didn't pique my interest as much as the next one over.
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