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I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

grell.dev

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Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#71

> Unfortunately they thanked me for my application but said the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications. It seems like they didn't even look at his application.

yeah, as this is so often the case, many times good, relevant applications are missed. I hope that this Hacker News post will get to one of the key people at Anthropic and they change their minds.

At my firms I saw this happen often. HR would review, or a junior engineer and pass on very good candidates. It wasn't until I set up a review system with A-class engineers that we started to catch the best people. A-class engineers recognize themselves far better than anyone else. But they prefer to build than review resumes.

I ended up building my own head hunting firm specifically to address the whole pipeline. That helped somewhat but head hunting is its own very odd space. Full of inefficiencies and bias.

With any AI company, there are always limits you hit. Energy, compute, optimizations, inference, team resources, money, and all the flows to make it a company. HR is usually the one that gets the fewest resources.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#73

> Unfortunately they thanked me for my application but said the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications. It seems like they didn't even look at his application.

Maybe Anthropic uses Workday for its HR, which is being sued for possible systematic discrimination by AI. (See links below) https://www.insidetechlaw.com/blog/2025/06/workday-ai-lawsui... https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2025/06/23/what-th...

I hate workday.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#74

I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV? Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.

That's like having someone say gives you free tractor blueprint but you can hire its inventor to come and put it together, or some other engineer.

An FOSS project is rarely production ready that is really free as in beer considering TCO. Especially for a tech company.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#75

Hey, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for submitting this. If you have any questions feel free to ask and please let me know how the writing was. It's one of my first posts so I'd like to improve

Do you think that making your product AGPL would being you more money/recognition/jobs for your effort?

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#76
post #33
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is not something that happened, even according to Max Howell himself: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... > I feel bad about my tweet, I don’t feel it was fair, and it fed the current era of outragism-driven-reading that is the modern Internet, and thus went viral, and for that I am truly sorry.

it kind of happened, he went through seven interviews. from the same post: > But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.

> I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.

This line could apply to millions of people around the globe.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#77
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implementing the features they would want to prioritize. Just like most companies hiring OSS maintainers.

That is also a good point, but I worry that the power has shifted. I worry that companies might get away with no compensation for such efforts.

Only through trickery. E.g. "you might get a job if you work for free for us". In other news see many tech job ads these days :)

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#78
post #47

There is some dirty secret i learned in my time as a eng. manager: Working in open source / Being the maintainer of a popular library / Blogging about software: All this things won't give you necessarily a competitive edge but can work against you. It's counterintuitive but sometimes teams are looking for a more low-profile hire.

This is cope and propaganda to discourage people from developing their own brand. Better for the corporation if the workers have no support structure or reputation that might lead them to quit

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#80
post #18

I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV? Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.

Because - They can decide more easily what he works on - They know he loves this work and is very capable of doing it - They can own his output, a competitive advantage - He will likely cost them ~nothing anyway

They probably already have someone working on top of it but it's just closed source because of the license.
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