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I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

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Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#261

Post by Workaccount2 »

vdupras wrote: post #240
TrackerFF wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair with Anthropic, they probably get unfathomably many applications for everything, on top of the cold calls/emails. They're one of the hottest companies in the world, so I'd expect tens of thousands of applicants. Media writing about $100m+ hiring deals in AI does not help, either.

Aren't they an AI company? Couldn't they sort it out? If Anthropic, of all companies, can't sort out incoming job applications, what exactly are their tools for?

Compute is a precious resource.

The world is also full of totally delusional people who dreamed up the idea of using winzip to compress VRAM on the GPU, and now Anthropic will definitely hire them for $1M year for this genius solution, so better write up a glammed up resume and auto-send it once a day for any open position.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#262

Post by ironman1478 »

I don't know if this is a good opinion, but I don't think it's a good idea for independent individuals to use highly permissive licenses on their open source software. Companies will just suck it up and might not contribute back. It distorts the market because if the software didn't exist, they'd have to hire people, contract it out, etc. somebody would get paid. you've saved a huge company from having to hire people to develop the software they need, which is good for them, but imo just gives the companies incentives to devalue engineers. I also think the value of somebody open sourcing their work as a means to getting a job is questionable and never really been backed up by any data.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#263

Post by tomrod »

wongarsu wrote: post #254
imtringued wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make the remaining 24% more clueful. Identifying a department by the gender of its workers seems pretty suspect.

I read the original comment as implying that the average HR person reviewing your resume will be a clueless woman. Not as implying that only women work there or that people of other genders working there are more clueful. The comment is open to interpretation, and you are free to interpret it in a less charitable way. The ambiguity is absolutely something we can and should criticize the comment for

Neat fact: statistical independence means that two factors are orthogonal.

My prior, expressed in my earlier comment, is that cluelessness and gender are orthogonal.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#264

Post by m-s-y »

motorest wrote: post #163
wiseowise wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew is “just” a package manager, not the core of part of Google. They could rip it out overnight and won’t even notice it. And Google gave him a fair shot. This guy got rejected by some automated system without even interview.

> Homebrew is “just” a package manager, not the core of part of Google. Yes, this. Sometimes I wonder if those coming up with the Homebrew example have any experience whatsoever with software development. I mean, sure the project is popular and surely doesn't hurt on a resume. But does it showcase any level of technical expertise or mastery? No, I'm afraid not. I would bet that the majority of software engineers woul…

>does it showcase any level of technical expertise or mastery? No, I'm afraid not.

But it does show that he can develop and ship a popular product, something outside the capability of so many “great engineers”. Good luck generating any revenue on the backs of smart engineers that have no stomach for understanding the nuance of development over and above writing and checking in code.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#265

Post by vdupras »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #261
vdupras wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't they an AI company? Couldn't they sort it out? If Anthropic, of all companies, can't sort out incoming job applications, what exactly are their tools for?

Compute is a precious resource. The world is also full of totally delusional people who dreamed up the idea of using winzip to compress VRAM on the GPU, and now Anthropic will definitely hire them for $1M year for this genius solution, so better write up a glammed up resume and auto-send it once a day for any open position.

Opportunity also is a precious resource. Redirecting resume to /dev/null is wasting it. I have a hard time believing that LLMs, with all their sophistication, aren't ideally suited for this task.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#266

Post by pentamassiv »

131012 wrote: post #257
pentamassiv wrote: post #27

Hey, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for submitting this. If you have any questions feel free to ask and please let me know how the writing was. It's one of my first posts so I'd like to improve

Since you're asking: I took a pause mid-reading and told myself: "Woah, I like their writing style."

Wow, what a great compliment. Thank you :-)

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#267

Post by jerf »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #124
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #41

I think that everyone should read this blog post "Overall I am overjoyed enigo is used in Claude Desktop and I tell everyone who listens to me about it :P. It's so cool to think that I metaphorically created the arms and legs for Claude AI, but I can't help but wonder if the rejection letter was written by a human or Claude AI. Did the very AI I helped equip with new capabilities just reject my application? On the br…

I think we need to compare our industry with other industries. No other industry relies on free labour from random people, which comes with no support or promises. I once told some non-techie folk about some code I wrote. It did something super simple and wasn't that big. They were all asking why I didn't sell it and thought it was crazy I would give it away for free with the BSD license. It was 900 lines of code...…

The problem is that 900 lines of code is also nothing for your potential customers as well. Non-programmers have a very poor ability to judge how difficult something is and how worth paying for it is. 900 lines is probably less effort for most organizations than it is to evaluate paying for the functionality.

Out on the super, super far end of the distribution you may have things like paying for what is essentially 900-ish lines of extremely, extremely carefully vetted code for things like encryption, but that is very, very exceptional.

I've got a few open source projects on my GitHub that are in the 900 line range, and I know they're used in a few "interesting" places but I'm not crying about it because the simple truth is the commercial value of that code is simply $0. If I tried to sell it to the people using it, they would perfectly rationally just say no. I am abundantly compensated for it by all the other open source software I get to use.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#268

Post by zoky »

andrepd wrote: post #182
pentamassiv wrote: post #27

Hey, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for submitting this. If you have any questions feel free to ask and please let me know how the writing was. It's one of my first posts so I'd like to improve

I'm disappointed about your resigned, almost subservient tone. This company is profiting immensely off of your work, and they don't even give you the courtesy of a job interview? ~~Have you considered a copyleft licence like LGPL?~~ Answered in a sibling comment

> This company is profiting immensely off of your work

I wouldn’t say that’s exactly the case. Not to denigrate the author or anything, but this library is a relatively minor part of what Anthropic is doing. It’s a UI manipulation library, specifically one that simulates keyboard and mouse inputs. While something like that is certainly necessary for the project in question, it’s not anything that couldn’t be rewritten in-house without too much difficulty, especially since they’re only using a subset of the platforms supported by the library.

I’m sure that working on this project has provided the author with expertise in this area that Anthropic could benefit from, and so in that sense it’s still a shame that they wouldn’t give him an interview, but that’s really all that can be said about it.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#269

Post by rpunkfu »

mijoharas wrote: post #185
rpunkfu wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got me, adding “using enigo” makes all the difference — I guess position is exclusively for working with this one library and that’s the position they got overloaded with applications on and couldn’t process one sent by OP.

It clearly does make a difference as to why he thought his experience was relevant to the job (i.e. what we were discussing before), and I think you agree with that hence your somewhat "selective" omission when you posted the quote.

I wasn't making a statement about whether his experience was relevant to the job. I don't know the author and don't automatically doubt his knowledge. I was simply sharing the opinion that being the author of that UI library alone does not fast-track someone for the "Software Engineer working on Claude Code" position at Anthropic.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#270

Post by planb »

Levitz wrote: post #251
planb wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - people in HR departments are often female and often clueless, but I don't see the parent denying this. The wording of OP connected both though, which is sexist and can be considered "evil".

Funny enough, I see this whole framing as sexist itself. Nobody would have bat an eye if he said "clueless guys" or "clueless gents", and given the prevalence of women in HR, that wording would actually have more chances of having a sexist background to it.

You‘re right, but that just reflects the structural sexism in our society while the wording by the op was intentional (I suppose. If not, I might as well be more sexist then he is).
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