Anthropic Engineer Declares the Coding Interview Dead 30
An Anthropic engineering manager says he has stopped using traditional coding interviews because AI can now outperform candidates on the kinds of programming challenges they typically contain. "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," said Felix Rieseberg in a blog post. "Our most impactful builders are successful regardless of how good they are at these tests." The Register reports: "I don't think the coding interview is going to come back," said Rieseberg. "It's easy to get sentimental given how many copies of 'Algorithms and Data Structures' were bought in hopes of unlocking good jobs and a better future -- or how the death of the coding interview is another milestone in software engineering reaching a new level of abstraction."
At the same time, he's not certain what will replace it. "I'm probably not the only manager trying to figure out how to interview for people who build well with AI," Rieseberg wrote. "I haven't quite gotten there yet -- but I'm scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking. If you have figured out something better, I'd love to hear how." In a response posted to social media, Jaana Dogan, principal engineer at Google, said: "I'm not doing a ton of coding interviews nowadays but I'd be interested to interview how people use coding agents," she wrote. "That itself gives me more signals about candidates' coding skills."
"We are not seeing tech companies abandon skills assessments widely across the industry -- at least not yet," added Nicole Bachaud, labor economist at ZipRecruiter. "In fact, based on our October 2026 Employer Survey of 1,500 employers, we see the tech industry (Information sector specifically) is actually the most likely to test for skills, with 62.5 percent of employers requiring formal skill tests on initial applications."
"The change at Anthropic might be reflecting a shift away from technical skills towards more human, soft skills," said Bachaud. "As AI becomes fully capable of writing code, tech employers may be pivoting away from rote technical testing and heavily toward human-centric soft skills." She argues that while AI may be able to code well, it can't replace critical thinking. "A staggering 61.5 percent of Information employers now report that 'critical thinking' is a primary skill lacking in today's candidate pool," she said.
At the same time, he's not certain what will replace it. "I'm probably not the only manager trying to figure out how to interview for people who build well with AI," Rieseberg wrote. "I haven't quite gotten there yet -- but I'm scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking. If you have figured out something better, I'd love to hear how." In a response posted to social media, Jaana Dogan, principal engineer at Google, said: "I'm not doing a ton of coding interviews nowadays but I'd be interested to interview how people use coding agents," she wrote. "That itself gives me more signals about candidates' coding skills."
"We are not seeing tech companies abandon skills assessments widely across the industry -- at least not yet," added Nicole Bachaud, labor economist at ZipRecruiter. "In fact, based on our October 2026 Employer Survey of 1,500 employers, we see the tech industry (Information sector specifically) is actually the most likely to test for skills, with 62.5 percent of employers requiring formal skill tests on initial applications."
"The change at Anthropic might be reflecting a shift away from technical skills towards more human, soft skills," said Bachaud. "As AI becomes fully capable of writing code, tech employers may be pivoting away from rote technical testing and heavily toward human-centric soft skills." She argues that while AI may be able to code well, it can't replace critical thinking. "A staggering 61.5 percent of Information employers now report that 'critical thinking' is a primary skill lacking in today's candidate pool," she said.
From one dev manager to another (Score:4, Insightful)
Your process for interviewing should not change. You need engineers that can think well to judge the output of an LLM well.
Re: (Score:2)
I was gonna write that.
Interviews still make sense but the skills required are different. You need to know functions, data, data flow, language, communication, steering, prompting, AI investigation, software architecture, etc. You need to know what a state machine is and how it works, but knowing how to hand coding one is pointless.
Software engineers know what assembly code is, how instructions are compiled and packed for the CPU etc. BUt that doesn't mean that you should be expected to write a whole little
Re: (Score:2)
I would argue that, while you shouldn't expect someone to know a particular architectures assembly code by heart, or anything like that, if they can't - given a reference for a simple pseudo assemnbly - create a basic program they probably should be screened out.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:From one dev manager to another (Score:4, Insightful)
I have worked with junior level devs who just take a dev task's requirements, hand it straight to AI, put that through basic testing (only the main intended cases) and then offer that up as a finished solution. The solution was, of course, full of holes, some of them quite serious, just not obvious. The holes were in the edge cases and how it handles and recovers from errors. These were exactly the kinds of mistakes I would expect a junior level developer to make (in at least one case I am thinking of, the task shouldn't have even been handed to someone so inexperienced, but the people making that decision didn't really know how advanced the task was and anyway the dev wanted to get real experience).
So, our process worked because we had senior level human code review, which caught these. But the real risk here is that without such experienced senior level people to do that review this would have seemed like a "slam dunk" where AI saved a whole lot of time and eliminated the need for expensive veterans on the team (only to fail catastrophically in production as soon as something hiccupped). This is what I am most concerned about. Companies will fall for this. Especially new companies where leadership is just as inexperienced at running a tech business as the cheap vibe coders they hire.
So if we are hiring people who will be using AI to do most of the coding work, I think we need to test the thoroughness of their thinking, their ability to detect unspoken problematic edge cases and know to focus on them when reviewing the AIs output, and the ability to recognize dangerous vagueness in requirements and ask for clarity. Also, the ability to mentally translate between "business speak" and "tech speak" is extremely valuable.
Though I still don't feel right about skipping a proof of coding skills. I just don't think we are yet at the point where it is safe for someone who can't code to be relying on AI to get it right. The aforementioned senior developers doing the code review are all people who have been coding by hand for years, and in order for such people to continue being available to do code reviews in the future, we need to make sure we hire people who can do this.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone who has enough development experience and dealt with the client facing side of it knows that the client never has a clue about the requirements. An important part of the job is, in polite terms, telling them how stupid their original set of requirements is and hammering out with them exactly what they actually need (that or just ignoring them, intuiting all of that, then just making the specific changes they want after you hand them a prototype). Basically, what we seem to be talking about here is tu
Re: (Score:2)
Your process for interviewing should not change. You need engineers that can think well to judge the output of an LLM well.
Quite right. The logic the manager from the article is presenting is incomprehensible. They're arguing what? That you don't need coding problems in interviews because an AI can do them instead. Classically, they have been stock problems that are pretty much just mild variations of standard stuff from textbooks. So if you don't need to bother with them now because AI can do them, then you never should have needed to bother with them because the problems had already been done before, thousands of times, and w
Still an Extremely Good Signal for Senior Eng (Score:5, Insightful)
Basic understanding (Score:2)
React? (Score:2)
He's not talking about the coders doing real work, just the web monkeys.
If their engineers didn't grind algorithms (and math) how are they supposed to intuit the direction to point a LLM for proper software, even if it handles the coding.
How do they go about solving a problem... (Score:2)
The thing to look for is how they go about solving a problem. That's the key. Coding is easy. Figuring out what the problem is and how to go about solving it, that's the hard part. Especially given that the problem the user says they need solved is often not the problem they actually have.
Raw milk enthusiaist declares pasteurization dead (Score:1)
NT
Why bother then? (Score:2)
There are many less precarious ways to make a living.
I guess? (Score:3)
The engineers on my team have a tendency when I ask a question to look it answers on AI and them present them to me without any kind of fact checking. Often the content falls along the lines of "its best to drive a car backwards down a road!" style idiocy. The lack of basic compression becomes immediately apparent and I am slowly starting to slide into using the word "stupid", and "idiotic" a lot more than I used to.
If it works out for Anthropic great! But why does everything Anthropic do make my life worse? I'm not seeing these results yet, but I have had them screamed at me for years at this point.
The coding test has been dead for years (Score:1)
Skill issue (Score:2)
It is really not hard for a hands-on and capable hiring manager to find a good person. Coder or otherwise. 30 minutes per person is all a competent hiring manager needs.
The problem happens when the hiring becomes too hands-off and there is no ownership
dipshit says something stupid (Score:2)
so an AI apologist expresses an opinion on human talent evaluation and hiring practices? Why should anyone care? Nothing he claims about the abilities of Claude mean two shits when it comes to hiring a human to do work. If you only cared about the solution in the challenge you wouldn't be hiring.
Frankly, coding challenges during interviews are terrible, good riddance but not because of AI.
Coding interview is dead (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to write a lot of code and I was pretty decent at it. A couple of years ago the AI coding assistance just got so good it didn't make sense for me to do that manually anymore. It got so good that I had it analyzing previous projects and improve/harden them to the point where they are rock solid. I got it to build new structures based around my previous work, and break things out into services that could be useful in a lot of different ways I would never have had time to do in the past. My pace of development now is far, far more than I would ever be able to accomplish manually. I have a suite of resources that I can combine in many different ways.
So I agree with these statements about the worthlessness of the coding interview. Me and my preferred LLM coding assistant of the day can run rings around anything you can manually. Before you can even begin to figure out a solution to a problem and start writing a few lines out I can have the complete solution generated for me along with full documentation and some unit tests. No need to waste your time or mine on a manual coding test like this.
What would impress me is if you can do better with AI assistance than I can. Can you go from an initial idea to a crafted proposal to a phased implementation plan that would probably work in about 30 minutes if I give you access to any model you want to use? Can you describe your workflow to me and show that it generates good results and why (using AI for that of course with full markdown documentation)? Can you get AI to create a complete product workflow for the solution to a problem along with some kind of build and deployment cycle, and get it running on one of the free cloud servers? Without writing a line of code? What if we now changed the spec some, how would you work it in?
An ordinary Joe off the street with little-to-no programming experience may have quite a bit of trouble with this, at least for now. But a person who can do it today without even raising a sweat is potentially a valuable employee.
So this is what the skillset interview should evaluate. Can you use the modern tools to generate good product, and do it pretty quick. Do you seem mentally stable enough to work well with people remotely, and conscientious enough to spend the time on it you are being paid for.
Re: (Score:1)
Sounds like you suck like ordinary Joe off the street. Funny how shitty programmers don't know what good programming is.
"So this is what the skillset interview should evaluate. Can you use the modern tools to generate good product, and do it pretty quick."
How about do you know what a good product is? Because in your case, no.
Re: (Score:2)
"Sounds like you suck like ordinary Joe off the street". Personal attack all you got, asshole? You are pretty sure just from reading my post that I don't know what a good product is?
You are welcome to show examples of how a seasoned senior programmer plodding along manually can get more quality work done in a week than an average worker-bee with a good understanding modern AI assistance.
Not surprising to me (Score:5, Insightful)
"A staggering 61.5 percent of Information employers now report that 'critical thinking' is a primary skill lacking in today's candidate pool,"
I'm an old fart so I may be totally out to lunch on this one, but I get the impression that most of today's schools really don't teach students to think, question, analyze, and synthesize. I think this applies across all subjects, not just in technical ones.
Part of me thinks that the ones who DO know how to think and analyze are tilting the table against subsequent generations by under-funding education, healthcare, and nutrition. If you look at today's parasite class - many of whom are in the tech field - you see that their political attacks on taxpayers getting any of the benefit from the money they've paid are increasing. The broligarchs want it all for themselves, and I think they see AI as a stepping stone toward making the bulk of humans now living on Earth expendable. I think that it's in their plans to expend a whole lot of us.
Another day another Anthorpic PR disguised as news (Score:1)
Never Should Have Been So Nothing's Changed For Me (Score:2)
I always thought that coding questions during interviews were stupid anyways even before AI: it's information that one can simply look up with a simple internet search or programming book, so if someone's got those things memorized or not, in my experience, is not a good indicator of how well a person will perform in their job. The only reason to ask programming questions is to figure out if the person was "fibbing" on their resume about their skills.
Plus it shows absolutely nothing about their interpersona
And replace them with what? (Score:2)
If you don't know what to replace a coding interview with, then you aren't a "thought leader" as they like to call themselves on LinkedIn - you're just trying to make the rest of the industry dogfood your product for you while your company loses amounts of money equivalent to the GDP of small countries every year.
In the meantime, I still need to know if an applicant knows how to code, because if they get an LLM to write something for them and it's shit, I'm not yelling at their LLM, I'm yelling at them. So,
We lose insane amounts of money - listen to us :) (Score:2)
Critical thinking: how does one gauge that? (Score:2)
TBH I've only really seen anyone use this phrase in Reddit arguments over the debate of the day.
I can't figure out how one would use this in a technical interview. Would one ask the interviewee to vocalise their thought process?
Can't be arsed to use AI (Score:2)
Thankfully, the gent in question writes his own tosh, unbesmirched by nasty English idiom.
"I'm probably not the only manager trying to figure out how to interview for people who build well with AI," Rieseberg wrote. "I haven't quite gotten there yet -- but I'm scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking. If you have figured out something better, I'd love to hear how."
What exactly do you want?
People who seem to fiddle and piddle well with AIs or