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Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

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Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#111

Post by rcarmo »

Anthropic is kind of positioning themselves as the "we want the cream of the crop" company (Dario himself said as much in his Davos interviews), and what I could understand was that they would a) prefer to pick people they already knew b) didn't really care about recruiting outside the US.

Maybe I read that wrong, but I suspect they are self-selecting themselves out of some pretty large talent pools, AI or not. But that application note is completely consistent with what they espouse as their core values.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#112

Post by Joel_Mckay »

Question 1:

Write a program that describes the number of SS's in "Slow Mississippi bass". Then multiply the result by hex number A & 2.

Question 2:

Do you think your peers will haze you week 1 of the evaluation period? [Yes|No]

There are a million reasons to exclude people, and most HR people will filter anything odd or extraordinary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRZAJY23xio&t=1765s

Hardly a new issue, =3

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#113

Post by TeMPOraL »

croes wrote: post #41
shipp02 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you use it to get unstuck from a problem? Then come back and learn more about what you got stuck on. That seems like responsible use.

But how likely is that?

Depends. Do they care about the problem? If so, they'll quickly hit diminishing returns on naive LLM use, and be forced to continue with primary sources.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#114

Post by elpocko »

hollowturtle wrote: post #46
sshine wrote: post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

Talent is innate. Proficiency requires practice.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#115

Post by radu_floricica »

I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying.

sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use AI and not be caught? Is it cheating? Does it matter if it's cheating?"

I think that's a bit like lying on your first date. If you're looking to score, sure, it's somewhat unethical but it works. But if you're looking for a long term collaboration, _and_ you expect to be interviewed by several rounds of very smart people, then you're much better off just going along.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#117

Post by a2128 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #6

This is quite a conundrum. These AI companies thrive on the idea that very soon people will not be replaced by AI, but by people who can effectively use AI to be 10x more productive. If AI turns a normal coder into a 10x dev, then why wouldn't you want to see that during an interview? Especially since cheating this whole interview system has become trivial in the past months. It's not the applicants that are the prob…

If the interview consists of the interviewer asking "Write (xyz)", the interviewee opening copilot and asking "Write (xyz)", and accepting the code. What was the point of the interview? Is the interviewee a genius productive 10x programmer because by using AI he just spent 1/10 the time to write the code?

Sure, maybe you can say that the tasks should be complex enough that AI can't do it, but AI systems are constantly changing, collecting user prompts and training to improve on them. And sometimes the candidates aren't deep enough in the hiring process yet to justify spending significant time giving a complex task. It's just easier and more effective to just say no AI please

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#118

Post by michaelt »

oytis wrote: post #13
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #9

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree. Exact opposite of our application process at my previous company. We said usage of ChatGPT was expected during the application and int…

Wow. I heavily rely on Google for work, wouldn't expect a candidate spend precious interview time googling though.

There are a bunch of subtly different ways to perform a coding interview.

If the interviewer points you at a whiteboard and asks you how to reverse an array, most likely they're checking you know what a for loop is and how to index into an array, and how to be careful of off-by-one errors. Even if your language has a built-in library function for doing this, they'd probably like you to not use it.

If the interviewer hands you a laptop with a realistic codebase on it and asks you to implement e-mail address validation, they're going for a more real-world test. Probably they'll be fine with you googling for an e-mail address validation regex, what they want to see is that you do things like add unit tests and whatnot.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#119

Post by jusomg »

I do lots of technical interviews in Big Tech, and I would be open to candidates using AI tools in the open. I don't know why most companies ban it. IMO we should embrace them, or at least try to and see how it goes (maybe as a pilot program?).

I believe it won't change the outcomes that much. For example, on coding, an AI can't teach someone to program or reason in the spot, and the purpose of the interview never was to just answer the coding puzzle anyway.

To me it's always been about how someone reasons, how someone communicates, people understanding the foundations (data structure theory, how things scale, etc). If I give you a puzzle and you paste the most optimized answer with no reasoning or comment you're not going to pass the interview, no matter if it's done with AI, from memory or with stack overflow.

So what are we afraid of? That people are going to copy paste from AI outputs and we won't notice the difference with someone that really knows their stuff inside out? I don't think that's realistic.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#120

Post by shafyy »

sshine wrote: post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

> In life there is no cheating

Oh, my sweet summer child

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