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Flunking my Anthropic interview again

taylor.town

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Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#361

Post by ameixaseca »

JimmyBuckets wrote: post #203
anigbrowl wrote: post #155

Dear 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 see the opposite: OP's post sounds like a cry for help, and paints a picture of someone that is not in a good place mentally.

anigbrowl might have been too direct and harsh (I would say the first paragraph of his comment could be worded differently), but he was very clear in the second paragraph about where to go from here.

If this is truly how OP thinks and this post is how they feel about everything that happened, I strongly recommend for OP to look for professional help (with emphasis on "professional").

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#362

Post by tibbar »

iamcreasy wrote: post #360
tibbar wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, what I meant was, this was an interview with a company that produces a coding assistant. Ironically, you really weren't supposed to use an LLM much for the interview, although I think you could use the company's product if you wanted. The restrictions were a bit unclear to me and I chose to try to code everything by hand, but in retrospect, that was probably not feasible. The assignment was hard for me for a few…

Thank you. Interesting. Can you share a mock example of the problem you had to solve?

I think a spiritually similar assignment would be: implement multiplayer Google Docs using a CRDT, server, and clients, supporting a certain class of documents that are shown to you during the interview.

And imagine that the CRDTs are not directly explained in the problem statement, but some supporting data structure of CRDTs is referenced, and like clearly there is some way to make all the pieces referenced work together to create a working system, but it's never made explicit.

And imagine that you need to actually implement CRDTs from scratch in the interview, but also integrate them into this client-server document-editing app, which you also need to code from scratch. All in an hour.

This is why I say the interview felt kind of insane to me. But plausibly if I'd previously studied that problem, so that the implementation details were all clear to me from the start, and if I had used the company's coding assistant to the extent allowed, and if I had been in much better coding-things-from-scratch form, I could have done OK. I don't know. It's fine. They were probably looking for a type of engineer that I'm not. :')

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#363

Post by toast0 »

user_7832 wrote: post #335
anktor wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without any context of culture or country, just trying to be helpful: in my limited ( Meaning, what you ask for (or how expensive you are perceived, if you have that strong resumee) for the industry you apply, may be too different and leading to limited access. Sometimes I feel junior people have it easier (I felt like I did, personally) since the expense in salary is pretty limited compared to either other roles or…

Thanks! However... I am very junior right now lol ( (I have applied to both competitive as well as more niche firms fwiw, I expect there have been stronger resumes I've "lost to". Though, my degree isn't a "common" one even though it's actually very suitable.)

It's not you. As a junior, there are going to be so many candidates for anything you feel qualified to apply for. It's a numbers game. IMHO, you should still tailor your resume to fit the position. I'd put together a too long resume with everything, and trim off irrelevant stuff so it's down to one page (maybe two, if that's the standard locally) of mostly relevant things for each position; when your resume does get looked at, you want it to pass muster.

Do your best to network. Think about the people you went to school with: who among them would you like to work with.

Every week, send 2-5 of them an email, remind them of what you did in school together, ask them how their summer/etc was, how are they doing at job hunting/if they like the job they found. If you don't mind looking a little desperate, in that email write something like I'm having a hard time getting interviews, have you found anything that works? If you don't wait for their reply... if they got hired, ask if their company is hiring; if they're still looking ask for tips.

Check in with your school's career center. Check in with your favorite professors.

Check in with your parents' friends and your friends' parents.

A personal connection is likely to get your resume looked at closely and not just ignored because there were 1000 applicants and 10 candidates seemed worth interviewing in the first 100, so they didn't look at the rest. It might not get you an interview, but it helps your chances; also, a personal connection might get a referral to an unrelated opening which is unlikely for an unconnected application. I would definitely send a friend's kid to another friend at a different company if I thought that was a potential match, but I wouldn't consider it for a resume that just came in.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#364

Post by toast0 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #176
libraryofbabel wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And unfortunately, from the point of view of the company, this is a feature not a bug: * to the company the cost of a false positive (bad hire) is very very much higher than the cost of a false negative (passing on a good candidate). * AI companies have a large pool of strong candidates to interview * Therefore they are incentivized to make their interview process hard enough that a poor candidate almost never passes…

Why is it that most other jobs especially low skill take the opposite approach? You screw up or demonstrate your incompetence on your first day on a construction job site you are let go right then.

Typically there's a lot of onboarding, and even a good candidate might not get a lot done in the first month or three... By the time you realize the new hire isn't a good fit, you've spent a ton of time on training.

Otoh, if you hire me to frame a house, it'll be objectively clear you need to get rid of me in the first hour, if not the first ten minutes. I don't know how I'd get past a screening for that either, but still.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#366

Post by iamcreasy »

tibbar wrote: post #362
iamcreasy wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. Interesting. Can you share a mock example of the problem you had to solve?

I think a spiritually similar assignment would be: implement multiplayer Google Docs using a CRDT, server, and clients, supporting a certain class of documents that are shown to you during the interview. And imagine that the CRDTs are not directly explained in the problem statement, but some supporting data structure of CRDTs is referenced, and like clearly there is some way to make all the pieces referenced work tog…

This sounds like a take home assignment. Are these type of questions standard interview question today?

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#368

Post by sceptic123 »

3shv wrote: post #350
markerz wrote: post #244

Overall, I enjoyed the essay and agree with the messaging. However, there were a few sentences that threw me off. I personally struggle with self-esteem issues, and I found these words extremely triggering, despite being sandwiched between words of self-affirmation. > My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough. > I don't mind feeling ugly or low-status or whatever -- I know my place. > I don't need (or deserve)…

So what would the therapist convince him of? That his work was brilliant irrespective of the outcome? That's just gaslighting. (Not to say that the interview evaluation was fair)

You would hope that it would help him come to an acceptance of himself in such a way that he was less likely to engage in this kind of negative self talk.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#369

Post by amarcheschi »

joshdavham wrote: post #62
amarcheschi wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have to meet a person in computer science who isn't weird

Most CS people I know aren’t weird and are actually pretty corporate and conformist. But at the same time, the people I know who do open source are some of the weirdest people I know haha

Okay, what I said was definitely over exaggerating. Let's say, much more weird people here than weird people I met in other environments

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#370

Post by gwbas1c »

dijit wrote: post #305
huhkerrf wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this about lawsuits a lot, but it doesn't really track for me. If a hiring manager says, "we decided to pass on you because you didn't go in depth as much as we hoped on how you would handle latency," why does that open the company up to a lawsuit anymore than no answer? I could see if the feedback was "we wanted someone who better fit the culture," but giving a specific answer on a core hiring criteria doesn'…

I've been hiring people for a while and I use my "common sense" to violate conventions because of humanity, but I think you'd be surprised how defensive it becomes. I always tell people why they didn't pass the interview, or why we didn't select them. Usually in a reasonably detailed way. A plurality of individuals have tried to argue with me, that I didn't understand them (which, if true, could be a communication is…

> A plurality of individuals have tried to argue with me... A minority of those will go out of their way to hound me on social media.

Which just reinforces why a rejection transitions to "no contact" most of the time. I try to make sure candidates have no contact information for this specific reason.

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