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Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

simonwillison.net

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

#271

Post by BlarfMcFlarf »

radu_floricica wrote: post #115

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…

Can I request that they not use AI when evaluating my application, and expect them to respect my wishes? Highly doubtful. Respect is a 2-way street. This is not a collaboration, but a hierarchical mandate in one direction, for protecting themselves from the harms of the very tools they peddle.

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

#272

Post by dimitri-vs »

eknkc wrote: post #162
hollowturtle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I drove cars before the sat nav systems and when I visited somewhere, I'd learn how to drive to there. The second drive would be from memory. However, as soon as I started relying on sat navs, I became dependent on them. I can not drive to a lot of places that I visited more than once without a sat nav these days (and I'm getting older, that's a part of it too). I wonder if the same thing will happen with coding and…

Progress is built on top of an infinite number of dependences.

In many ways people that don't use sat nav are at a disadvantage: real time traffic and redirection, high precision ETA, trip logging, etc.

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

#273

Post by gosub100 »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #224
jack_pp wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making your comms friendlier or whatever is one of the myriad ways to use LLMs. Maybe you personally have "LLMs shoved down your throat" by your corporate overlords. No one in their right mind can say that LLMs were created for such a purpose, it just so happens you can use it in this way.

LLMs aren’t making your comms friendlier; they’re just making them more vapid. When I see the language that ChatGPT spits out when you tell it to be friendly, I immediately think ‘okay, what is this person trying to sell me?’

Now imagine a world where most kids were raised with this bullshit and it's normal to them.

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

#274

Post by davely »

nejsjsjsbsb wrote: post #24

Not new they had that 5 years ago at least. Anthropic interview is nebulous. You get a coding interview. Fast paced, little time, 100% pass mark. Then they chat to you for half an hour to gauge your ethics. Maybe I was too honest :) I'm really bad at the "essay" subjects vsm the "hard" subjects so at that point I was dumped.

I recently took their CodeSignal assessment, which is part of their initial screening process.

Oh, wow. I really believe they are missing out on great engineers due to the nature of it.

90 minutes to implement a series of increasingly difficult specs and pass all the unit tests.

There is zero consideration for quality of code. My email from the recruiter said (verbatim), “the CodeSignal screen is intended to test your ability to quickly and correctly write and refactor working code. You will not be evaluated on code quality.”

It was my first time ever taking a CodeSignal assessment and there was really no way to prepare for it ahead of time.

Apparently, I can apply again in 6 months.

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

#275

Post by 63stack »

reshlo wrote: post #124
logicchains wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We don’t want to work with AI, we are going to pay the person for the persons time If your interview problems are representative of the work that you actually do, and an AI can do it as well as a qualified candidate, then that means that eventually you'll be out-competed by a competitor that does want to work with AI, because it's much cheaper to hire an AI. If an AI could do great at your interview problems but sti…

Interview problems are never representative of the work that software developers do.

Sounds like the interview process needs to be improved then?

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

#276

Post by donohoe »

_heimdall wrote: post #249

The irony here is obvious, but what's interesting is that Anthropic is basically asking to not give then a realistic preview of how you will work. This feels similar to asking devs to only use vim during a coding challenge and please refrain from using VS Code or another full featured IDE. If you know, and even encourage, your employees to use LLMs at work you should want to see how well candidates present themselves…

It’s hardly that. This is one component of an interview process - not all of it!

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

#277

Post by DrNosferatu »

gcanyon wrote: post #248

Everyone arguing for LLMs as a corrupting crutch needs to explain why this time is different: why the grammar-checkers-are-crutches, don't-use-wikipedia, spell-check-is-a-crutch, etc. etc. people were all wrong, but this time the tool really is somehow unacceptable.

You forgot calculators ;)

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

#278

Post by michaelt »

oytis wrote: post #160
michaelt wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Makes sense. I've never been asked to make such an exercise in real time, most of the time that would be a take home task - but I understand if someone wants to do that. Still it would be weird to demand that a candidate uses Google, wouldn't it?

I picked e-mail validation as an example precisely because it's something even experienced developers would be well advised to google if they want to get it right :)

Of course, if someone can get it right off the top of their head, more power to them!

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

#279

Post by SiempreViernes »

muzani wrote: post #190
latexr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't find anything wrong with this It’s not about being wrong, it’s about being ironic. We have LLMs shoved down our throats as this new way to communicate—we are encouraged to ask them to make our writing “friendlier” or “more professional”—and then one of the companies creating such a tool asks the very people most interested in it to not use it for the exact purpose we’ve been told it’s good at. They are aski…

The LLM companies have always been against this kind of thing. Sam Altman (2023): "something very strange about people writing bullet points, having ChatGPT expand it to a polite email, sending it, and the sender using ChatGPT to condense it into the key bullet points" 3 years ago people were poking fun about how restrictive the terms were - you could get your API key blocked if you used it to pretend to be a human.…

Google running the "Dear Sydney" ad is in strong disagreement with that claim.

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

#280

Post by tmnvdb »

exitb wrote: post #156
radu_floricica wrote: post #115

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…

It's not that there's anything wrong with this in particular. It's just that the general market seems much more optimistic about AI impact, than the AI companies themselves.

They don't want a motivation letter to be written by an LLM (because it's specifically about the personal motivation of the human candidate) - as far as I can see this not reflect either positively or negatively on their level of optimism about AI impact in general.
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