Business · 2026-10-29

Anthropic Engineering Manager Says Coding Interviews Are "Dead" and Offers Advice to Juniors

Felix Rieseberg of Anthropic removed coding tests from hiring on his team and explained what newcomers should focus on instead.

✨ Why coding tests were dropped

Anthropic engineering manager Felix Rieseberg said traditional programming tests no longer show whether a candidate will succeed on the job. He wrote on X that he has removed this stage from hiring on his team.

The reason is simple: Claude, the AI model made by Anthropic, writes code better than people do on such tasks, so the task itself reveals little about the person. Such tests used to be a "weak but useful" signal, but now the most productive developers on his team are not necessarily those who ace them.

📌 Why this worries newcomers

AI coding tools are taking over basic tasks such as finding bugs and writing simple features. Newcomers used to learn from exactly these tasks. As a result, junior developers may find it harder to land their first job.

🔹 Rieseberg's three tips

Focus on business problems. Don't just close backlog tickets; figure out which business problems the company is trying to solve.

Bold ideas and prototypes. Come up with an ambitious idea that could significantly move the business toward its goals, and build a working prototype, for example over a weekend.

Clear focus. A project should express one compelling idea, not hide several decent ones inside an overly complex product.

🔸 The value of a fresh perspective

According to Rieseberg, junior engineers are more likely to notice awkward user experiences and to question long-held assumptions about what is possible. As an example, he cited two relatively new engineers at Anthropic who built a graphical interface for Claude Code over a weekend. The first public version came out about eight days later.

Rieseberg admitted he has not yet found a final way to evaluate candidates who build products effectively with AI. For now, he looks in resumes and portfolios for small prototypes that show "taste, empathy, and principled thinking."

Sources: 🔗 DOU/dev.ua