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Flunking my Anthropic interview again
231–240 of 374 posts
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#232To you and anyone else who's struggled with the roller coaster of rejection and not feeling good enough I highly recommend stopping what you're doing right now and watching Jonah Hill's incredible movie, "Stutz" https://www.netflix.com/title/81387962 . As someone who recently went through a barrage of rejections and self doubt this movie blew me away and offers practical "tools" that may help.
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Tell me more about this privacy request you submitted. I wasn’t aware this was a thing.
Not much to it really; took about a month round trip time to get the data; I had to authenticate myself but that was relatively straightforward since I could use my account with the organisation which I used to submit the job application to also perform the authentication (though the actual process is a bit bizarre).
Take Amazon for example that has a privacy query page: https://www.amazon.com/hz/contact-us/request-data
Send a message like this (have ChatGPT to tailor to your jurisdiction):
Dear Privacy Officer,
I am writing to formally request access to any and all personal information $FAANG holds about me under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), specifically pursuant to Australian Privacy Principle 12.
I interviewed for the $ROLE position with one of $FAANG's Australian offices between February and March 2025. While I understand that I was not selected for the role, I am seeking access to any evaluative records, interview notes, recruiter or hiring manager comments, assessments, and other personal information recorded or obtained during the recruitment process.
For the purposes of identifying my records, my name is $FULL_NAME, and I applied via $FAANG Job Portal.
Please provide this information in a commonly used electronic format. If you require any further details to verify my identity or locate my information, I am happy to provide them.
Thank you for your attention to this matter. I look forward to your response within a reasonable time, as required by the Act.
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is fair. I suppose what I meant is, the idea of working at one of these companies can be really exciting, almost a fantasy, but in practice: it might actually hurt you in many ways. 'Look what they make you give', as a certain character once said. With that said, obviously I think it's cool and worth doing, but there are significant and painful downsides, too.
If the past 25 years of tech companies is any indication of the future of these new AI endeavors, working there will be directly contributing to the enslavement of mankind in ways we can't even begin to imagine yet. The greenfield projects arising from this leap look benign now, but I can almost guarantee that won't be the case in the next decade once these technologies optimize their revenue generation engines and e…
I mean, if there's going to end up being a hellscape it'd be better to be on the winning end than the losing one, right?
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#235I 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 coding assistant interview focused on writing (what I felt was) an insane volume of code in a short period of time. I had a bunch of these my last round of interviews, and am not convinced most companies even know what they want from these or how to assess. In the majority of cases it was clear to me the interviewers never even read the code I had submitted. As an example, one company wanted a full AI Question/…
Did you get offended when they rejected your day of work without even commenting? I guess they could've at least flattered you a bit saying it was impressive, but they had to go with another candidate for reasons.
I know I'd be pissed if the work did go uncommented.
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#236One 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…
These are all likely enough to contribute, but there's one big one.
If you don't say anything at all, the applicant has nothing to go on for a lawsuit against you.
If you say anything, and the applicant is a malicious litigant, you just became a potential paycheck via settlement.
If you're hiring a dozen people a year, you can probably ignore this. If you're hiring hundreds or thousands, and thus many times that number of applicants, you're going to step on that landmine eventually. Better then to have a company-wide policy "no feedback ever"
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#237Earlier 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. 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…
You think too much of HN.
People think too much of it but also, somehow, far too little at the same time.
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#238I 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…
> Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-) Some people really do find a whole lot of personal meaning from their work. And that's okay. It's their life. If someone is the sort of person who might find meaning working for Anthropic, they would find that meaning at a lot of other jobs as well. I think that's a better emssage; not that "you shal…
The blue-collar version of this, which I think distills the essence well: "Does life start when you clock in, or clock out?"
Very critical difference in mindset and the reason a lot of these conversations end up talking past each other.
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#239Dear 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 feel you've misread me as objecting to the author's sincerity - I don't think there's anything wrong with that! What I meant was that the internet, where all communication is necessarily quasi-personal and heavily mediated, is really not the best place to reach toward for mental health help, and that it's tremendously important to maintain or pursue genuine interpersonal contact, unmediated by screens or abstractions.
Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again
#240I sent my application in a week ago. So what you’re saying is I still have a chance?