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Flunking my Anthropic interview again

taylor.town

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Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#371
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no information in a rejection Building on that: There's a few reasons why a company won't explain why they reject a candidate. One of the reasons is that they don't want candidates to "game" the system, because it makes it hard to screen for the people they want to hire. Another reason is that often rejections are highly subjective, and telling a candidate that "we didn't hire you because of X" could be hi…

These are all likely enough to contribute, but there's one big one. If you don't say anything at all, the applicant has nothing to go on for a lawsuit against you. If you say anything, and the applicant is a malicious litigant, you just became a potential paycheck via settlement. If you're hiring a dozen people a year, you can probably ignore this. If you're hiring hundreds or thousands, and thus many times that numb…

> If you say anything, and the applicant is a malicious litigant, you just became a potential paycheck via settlement.

Do you have examples? I know this is a real fear, but I've never heard any examples of lawsuits except for issues of discrimination due to age, gender, and ethnicity.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#372
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all likely enough to contribute, but there's one big one. If you don't say anything at all, the applicant has nothing to go on for a lawsuit against you. If you say anything, and the applicant is a malicious litigant, you just became a potential paycheck via settlement. If you're hiring a dozen people a year, you can probably ignore this. If you're hiring hundreds or thousands, and thus many times that numb…

> If you say anything, and the applicant is a malicious litigant, you just became a potential paycheck via settlement. Do you have examples? I know this is a real fear, but I've never heard any examples of lawsuits except for issues of discrimination due to age, gender, and ethnicity.

Right, and a malicious litigant will argue that the feedback they received represents discrimination against a protected class. It doesn't matter if they're wrong so long as you're still forced to come to court to defend it. They just offer to settle for less than what you winning in court will cost you.

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#373
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you say anything, and the applicant is a malicious litigant, you just became a potential paycheck via settlement. Do you have examples? I know this is a real fear, but I've never heard any examples of lawsuits except for issues of discrimination due to age, gender, and ethnicity.

Right, and a malicious litigant will argue that the feedback they received represents discrimination against a protected class. It doesn't matter if they're wrong so long as you're still forced to come to court to defend it. They just offer to settle for less than what you winning in court will cost you.

The article linked in this thread claims no one has ever sued based on constructive feedback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22258113

(Not that I give it when rejecting most candidates, because I don't want to deal with an argument. In practice, I only gave constructive feedback once, and then posted it on my blog: https://blog.andrewrondeau.com/software/careers/interviewing...)

Re: Flunking my Anthropic interview again

#374
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nope, it was a live coding interview, less than an hour. I personally did a double-take at the beginning of the interview. However, the long tail of people who can code up algorithms and apps quickly is very long indeed. There are certainly people I've worked with who are just multiples faster than me in this kind of situation, and I could imagine them passing the interview.
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