Anthropic engineering manager Felix Rieseberg has dropped the coding interview from his team’s hiring. He explained the change in a blog post on Tuesday, 27 October, titled “Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers”.
Rieseberg has led engineering for Claude.ai, Claude Code Desktop and Anthropic’s Cowork tool, according to his bio. He previously worked at Notion, Stripe, Slack and Microsoft.
“There’s no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both,” Rieseberg wrote.
He wrote that small coding challenges had been “a weak but useful predictor” of success on his teams. His most impactful builders now succeed whatever their scores on those tests, he added.
Why he says newcomers gain
Rieseberg wrote that impact now depends less on years of accumulated knowledge of frameworks and libraries. That gives newer engineers a chance to overtake colleagues with more experience.
“I’m seeing engineers who are comparatively new fly past people who are probably better coders and have been around much longer. Hunger beats tenure,” he wrote.
His advice is for engineers “without social capital, status, or power”. They should find out what their company is trying to achieve and pick one ambitious idea that would help. Then they should build a working prototype over a weekend. He warned against cramming several ideas into one prototype.
He gave an example from Anthropic. Two relatively new engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, built a prototype graphical interface for Claude Code over one weekend. The first public version shipped roughly eight days later, he wrote.
What he looks for instead
Rieseberg said he has not yet worked out how to interview for people who build well with AI. For now, he scans résumés and portfolios for small prototypes that show “taste, empathy, and principled thinking”.
Other companies are changing how they hire and judge engineers too. Google is expanding pilots of engineering interviews that let candidates use Gemini, Hugh Langley reported for Business Insider last week. Amazon this week warned its engineers against chasing AI usage metrics.
Anthropic itself has said that Claude writes 80% of its own code.