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Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

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Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#41

Post by ahussain »

tucnak wrote: post #25

The snarky writing of "if you beat our best solution, send us an email and MAYBE we think about interviewing you" is really something, innit?

They wrote:

> If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing.

That doesn’t seem snarky to me. They said if you beat Opus, not their best solution. Removing “perhaps” (i.e. MAYBE) would be worse since that assumes everyone wants to interview at Anthropic. I guess they could have been friendlier: “if you beat X, we’d love to chat!”

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#42

Post by 0x3f »

ahussain wrote: post #41
tucnak wrote: post #25

The snarky writing of "if you beat our best solution, send us an email and MAYBE we think about interviewing you" is really something, innit?

They wrote: > If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing. That doesn’t seem snarky to me. They said if you beat Opus, not their best solution. Removing “perhaps” (i.e. MAYBE) would be worse since that assumes everyone…

I suppose you could interpret it either way, but having dealt with their interview pipeline I'd choose the snark.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#43

Post by kristopolous »

tucnak wrote: post #25

The snarky writing of "if you beat our best solution, send us an email and MAYBE we think about interviewing you" is really something, innit?

If you're an asshole that wants millions of dollars...i mean there's still places to say no

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#44

Post by lovich »

ahussain wrote: post #41
tucnak wrote: post #25

The snarky writing of "if you beat our best solution, send us an email and MAYBE we think about interviewing you" is really something, innit?

They wrote: > If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing. That doesn’t seem snarky to me. They said if you beat Opus, not their best solution. Removing “perhaps” (i.e. MAYBE) would be worse since that assumes everyone…

That paraphrases to

"do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you"

It sounds incredibly condescending, if not snarky, but I would classify those adjectives as mostly synonymous.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#45

Post by 0x3f »

sealeck wrote: post #23
zeroCalories wrote: post #16

It shocks me that anyone supposedly good enough for anthropic would subject themselves to such a one sided waste of time.

Why is writing code to execute a program using the fewest instructions possible on a virtual machine a waste of time?

The expected time you spend on it is much less than the expected time they'll spend on it.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#46

Post by riffraff »

tucnak wrote: post #25

The snarky writing of "if you beat our best solution, send us an email and MAYBE we think about interviewing you" is really something, innit?

I feel that came out wrong but the "maybe" was intended to be a way of saying "no guarantees", to avoid giving people the idea "solve this, get hired".

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#47

Post by nice_byte »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #37
nice_byte wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 being cryptic and poorly specified is part of the assignment just like real code in fact, it's _still_ better documented an self contained than most of the problems you'd usually encounter in the wild. pulling on a thread to end up with a clear picture of what needs to be accomplished is like 90% of the job very often.

I didn't see much cryptic except having to click on "perf_takehome.py" without being told to. But, 2 hours didn't seem like much to bring the sample code into some kind of test environment, debug it enough to works out details of its behaviour, read through the reference kernel and get some idea of what the algorithm is doing, read through the simulator to understand the VM instruction set, understand the test harnes…

it's "cryptic" for an interview problem. e.g. the fact that you have to actually look at the vm implementation instead of having the full documentation of the instruction set from the get go.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#48

Post by PlanksVariable »

theptip wrote: post #38
heavyset_go wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't do take home assignments, but when I did, I would offer to do it at my hourly rate, even if it was just an hour. It's time I would otherwise spend making money. Anyone worth working with respected that and I landed several clients who forwent the assignment altogether. It's chump change in the grand scheme of things, and often a formality. Does help that I have a very public web presence and portfolio, though…

For many reasons, you’re not gonna get into Anthropic with that attitude.

And Anthropic will never land heavyset_go with their attitude. I guess we’re at an impasse.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#49

Post by [deleted] »

0x3f wrote: post #42
ahussain wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wrote: > If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing. That doesn’t seem snarky to me. They said if you beat Opus, not their best solution. Removing “perhaps” (i.e. MAYBE) would be worse since that assumes everyone…

I suppose you could interpret it either way, but having dealt with their interview pipeline I'd choose the snark.

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