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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

#51

Post by throwaway743 »

lovich wrote: post #44
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…

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.

I took the "perhaps" as a decision to be considered by the applicant, considering they'd be competent enough to get in at a place of their choice, not just anthropic.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#52

Post by lovich »

throwaway743 wrote: post #51
lovich wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I took the "perhaps" as a decision to be considered by the applicant, considering they'd be competent enough to get in at a place of their choice, not just anthropic.

Does the applicant or the employer decide if an interview happens in your experience?

Do you think if the applicants are really in that level of demand that they would be getting a take home test instead of being actively recruited?

Legitimately lay out your understanding of a world where an employer is chasing after employees who are high in demand, give them a test that is expected to take hours, and have a hedged bet in their wording, instead of saying we will absolutely hire you if you pass X bar?

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#53

Post by ryanjshaw »

whateveracct wrote: post #30
pclmulqdq wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally have a policy of "over 4 hours and I charge for my time." I did this in the 4-hour window, and it was a lot of fun. Much better than many other take-home assignments.

4 hours continuous or no? I can't imagine finding 4 hours of straight focus.

These kinds of roles are for youngsters with minimal commitments who are looking for their shot to break into a wild industry. It’s not for the middle aged single parent with FTE and just enough free time to do an extra load of laundry.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#54

Post by tayo42 »

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…

2 hours does seem short. It took me a half hour to get through all you listed and figure out how to get the valu instruction working.

I suspect it would take me another hour to get it implemented. Leaving 30 minutes to figure out something clever?

Idk maybe I'm slow or really not qualified.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#56

Post by benreesman »

greesil wrote: post #14

This is a knowledge test of GPU architecture?

It's a test of polyhedral layout algebra, what NVIDIA calls CuTe and the forthcoming C++ standard calls std::mdspan.

This is the general framework for reasoning about correct memory addressing in the presence of arbitrary constraints like those of hardware.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#57

Post by afro88 »

kristianpaul wrote: post #29

“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.”

> at launch

Does this confirm they actually do knee cap models after the launch period to save money, without telling users?

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#58

Post by dheera »

heavyset_go wrote: post #33
pclmulqdq wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally have a policy of "over 4 hours and I charge for my time." I did this in the 4-hour window, and it was a lot of fun. Much better than many other take-home assignments.

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…

Time is the issue, not money.

I couldn't care less about getting paid for a few hours, what's truly annoying when you're job hunting is the company having an extremely high rejection rate even at the take-home stage. That's an inordinate waste of time multiplied by a lot of companies.

If you have a >50% chance of rejecting, don't even give the candidate a take-home. Be at least 90% sure you want them before you get to that stage.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#59

Post by Bootvis »

riffraff wrote: post #46
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".

Should have asked Claude how to write it better.
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