Anthropic Engineering Lead Stops Giving Candidates Coding Tasks

Felix Rieseberg, who leads development at Anthropic and built Claude.ai, Cowork, and the desktop Claude Code app, wrote in a blog post that he stopped giving job candidates coding exercises in October. A small practical task used to be a weak but useful signal of fit; it no longer is, he says, because Claude solves such tasks better than the candidates do, which makes a React frontend assignment about as informative as asking about assembly language.

He admits he has no replacement for the mechanic yet and is asking readers for ideas. For now he reads CVs and portfolios looking for small prototypes that show taste, an understanding of the user, and reasoning from principles.

Rieseberg’s broader argument is “hunger beats tenure”: once execution is cheap, an engineer’s impact depends less on framework and library experience, and he sees relatively new engineers outpace stronger coders. He advises engineers to take work that moves company goals rather than tickets from the queue, pick a sharper idea, build a working prototype over a weekend instead of a requirements document, stick to one idea, and use a fresh perspective, including not knowing why something is considered impossible. His example is the graphical interface for Claude Code, prototyped in a weekend by two recent hires, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, with a first public version about eight days later.

Advice for junior engineers