Anthropic hiring manager says coding interviews are dead, team scraps traditional coding questions
Felix Rieseberg, Anthropic's hiring manager and head of engineering for Claude-related products, said he has removed traditional coding-question interviews from his team's hiring process, on the grounds that Claude can now easily handle small React challenges and even low-level assembly problems, so coding questions measure AI's abilities more than a candidate's judgment, product taste, and collaboration skills. He also advised junior engineers not to wait for complete requirements documents and cross-department approvals, but instead to target a specific business goal and spend a weekend building a working single-point prototype to win organizational support, summing up this logic as "hunger beats seniority."
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Anthropic's head of hiring explains why coding-question interviews were scrapped, and offers junior engineers an alternative path: win resources with a prototype.
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"Programming Interviews Are Dead": Anthropic Says Coding Problems Can No Longer Screen Programmers in the AI Era
2026-10-28 12:10 IT Home - Guyuan
IT Home, October 28 news: Felix Rieseberg, a hiring manager at Anthropic and the engineering lead for Claude-related products, said this month that he has removed traditional coding-problem interviews from his team's hiring process. In a post on a social platform, he said: "Programming interviews are dead, at least for my team."
Rieseberg believes that now that Claude can easily complete small React challenges and even handle low-level assembly problems, continuing to use coding problems to screen engineers is as meaningless as continuing to quiz people on assembly language. The interview results measure more of AI's capabilities than the judgment, product taste, and collaboration skills a candidate might demonstrate in real work.
He also offered a rather bold suggestion to junior engineers: in the AI era, where the "cost of execution" has dropped sharply, seniority no longer naturally determines influence. Rather than waiting for a complete product requirements document, cross-departmental approval, or resource support from designers and product managers, it is better to target a specific business goal, use a newcomer's perspective and AI tools, and build a working single-point prototype over a weekend, using the results to win organizational support. He summed up this logic as "hunger beats seniority."
Related reading:
"Stop Learning to Code! Anthropic CEO Says Bluntly: Coding Jobs Are Disappearing Fast, Humans Should Learn to Play the Piano"