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Flunking my Anthropic interview again

taylor.town

141–150 of 374 posts

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#141
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 at all the places that didn’t hire me because they happened to ask the wrong questions.

I know, because I’ve been rejected and accepted to the same company before based on different interview questions, and did just fine in the role once I was in there.

In short, if you have decent skills the tech interviewers are mostly total random luck IMO, so just do a bunch of em and you’ll get lucky somewhere. It won’t make any rational sense at all later where you end up, but who cares.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#142
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…

Fantastically well said. I’ve also seen people literally flip a coin when unable to decide between some equally skilled candidates.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a good point, but honestly, interviewers barely read resumes, they’re very, very likely not going to read your blog, or remember “hey it’s the person from that blog post I ready 7 weeks ago.”

I expect that for a Developer Relations role, someone read the blogs.

Perhaps the blogs of the candidates yes. On the other hand, perhaps OP will find a perfect fit this way.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#144
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…

There's people whose entire job is to list houses at 50% over the market pricing. And there's people whose entire job it is to offer 50% market price for houses. They only need to be successful once every couple of month. They flood the market with buying and selling signals, that's just the way the market works. I wouldn't be discouraged if my fair market offer were rejected by most bidders in a market, statistically they are professional over/under bidders, that's fine.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#145
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…

Yeah I think this is a great mental framework. Getting rejected hurts, it's natural to want to find a reason, and with some self-reflection it definitely can help one grow. But you gotta be very careful about over-indexing on any one interview where the reasons for rejection may or may not have anything to do with what you did and said during the interview (let alone your personhood).

Frankly, if you want to get better at interviewing, it's better to do more general research on what hiring managers and companies want, and then do more interviews to practice communicating that you have the skills and temperament to deliver value.

One specific piece of advice to the OA: this kind of post might feel cathartic, but it doesn't get you closer to your goal. Sure, it will resonate, people will commiserate, and you'll get some dopamine and internet points—but if your goal is to work at a top tier company like Anthropic then such a post can only hurt you. The reality in fast-growing, ambitious companies at the forefront of the AI bubble is that expectations are sky high, and getting things done to attempt to meet those expectations is incredibly difficult for a hundred different reasons. In this type of environment, whatever technical skills you have are not enough. To be successful you need a sustained and resourceful effort to solve whatever problems come your way. One of the most toxic traits is having a victim mentality. Unfortunately it's a common affliction due to the low agency that individuals have in big companies and late stage capitalism in general, but you've got to tamp it down and focus on what you can control (which in practice is often more than you might think). While this post doesn't directly demonstrate a victim mentality, it suggests internalizing the rejection ("My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.") in a way that is adjacent and something that would give me significant pause if I was a hiring manager evaluating for a role in a chaotic company.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#146

I recently interviewed for Anthropic, 6 rounds, recruiter was great, said they were putting together an offer letter. I met one of the managers, then another came back from vacation... and then they decided not to give me an offer. I asked for feedback, and the recruiter sounded frustrated (about the internal process), because they had a moving bar on what was wanted from the hiring managers. I know I hadn't complete…

Probably not even about whether it was good enough at all, just random managers making random decisions by how they were feeling the day they interviewed you. Any time a company has a LOT of applicants, like any big tech company does, the less you should take any info at all from a given rejection or even an offer. It’s kinda random.

You’ll typically get better info only when a company is small and has a role in low demand and they only had a couple of people apply. This situation is pretty rare.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#147
post #115
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…

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…

Hey, my first "career" was also in theater!

Strong agreement. I can confirm for other readers that the day I realized this --- "Oh, rejection means nothing!" --- was a weird day. It takes a weight off.

And it is true across every other field. There are way more factors external to the "you" of the decision, and they're given more weight than the "you" of the decision. This is one of those cases where you only need to experience the "other side of the table" once for it to click.

Companies that are more humane in their hiring practices (even just actually send a rejection email vs. ghosting) deserve a bit of credit, because caring for the applicant is not a KPI.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#148
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

It shouldn’t surprise you that people like the work or products specific companies work on and have a dream to work on those too. The actual experience of working there though is hard to know in advance.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#149
heh i got rejected from google about 15 years ago. I remember exactly where i was standing (outside on the sidewalk), color and placement of leaves on the grass, even the specific joints and cracks on the sidewalk i was standing on when i got the news. I don't hold a grudge or have any regrets but i remember that moment vividly.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#150
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

In my case, it was more: It was a company where we just kept near missing, and it was a very logical fit.

But it was a bad team fit. 100%.

That said, sometimes one has to have a few bad experiences to actually know what good is.

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