Anthropic manager dropped the coding interview from his hiring loops, saying Claude now beats candidates
Felix Rieseberg says small coding tests no longer give useful signal, and he now looks for weekend prototypes that show taste and empathy.
In brief
Claude beat the coding test, so one team dropped it
Anthropic manager Felix Rieseberg removed coding interviews from his hiring loops this month. He now wants weekend prototypes showing taste and empathy. It covers his teams, not all of Anthropic.
Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, said on X on October 27, 2026 that he removed the coding interview from his hiring loops this month. He wrote that it is dead, at least for his team. We know this from his own X post, his blog essay and reports by Business Insider Taiwan and 36Kr.
Why he dropped it
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic.
His reason is simple. Small coding challenges used to be a weak but useful predictor of success on his teams. Now, he says, Claude is better than candidates at them. He compares a little React challenge to quizzing people on assembly language: there is no point.
He also says the most impactful builders on his teams succeed whatever their score on such tests.
What he looks at instead
Rieseberg says he now scans résumés and portfolios for small prototypes. He wants to see taste, empathy and principled thinking.
He admits he has not solved how to assess candidates who use AI well to build.
Advice for newer engineers
The same day he published an essay called "Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers". He says he sees comparatively new engineers fly past older, probably better coders. He notes the advice is really for people without status or power.
The steps, as reported: find a business problem the company is trying to solve, pick one bold idea, and build a working prototype over a weekend. Do not bury a few good ideas inside an overambitious product.
He also tells newcomers to use their outsider's eyes. They may spot bad user experiences or question what everyone assumes is impossible. He tells a story from Notion, where an offline mode was thought impossible, yet nobody had checked whether the founder really objected.
One example
As proof, he points to two relatively new engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao. They built a graphical interface for Claude Code over a weekend. A first public version came about eight days later, according to 36Kr.
What the sources disagree on
36Kr's headline says Anthropic cancels programming interviews. Latent Space and the essay itself describe one manager's team loop, and the essay says "my teams". No company-wide Anthropic announcement appears in these sources.
The label of entrepreneurial thinking or hustle is one outlet's reading. The essay itself is about business impact and fresh eyes.
The limits are clear. Rieseberg gives no data on hiring outcomes, and he says he has not worked out how to judge AI-assisted builders. The change is described for his teams, not for all of Anthropic.