Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic who has worked on Claude.ai and Claude Code Desktop, said in an October 27, 2026 blog post that he stopped using traditional coding interviews on his hiring loops this month. He argues that small programming challenges no longer predict who succeeds on his teams, because Claude now solves those tasks better than candidates. The change is his team's practice. Neither his post nor the reports we checked describe a company-wide Anthropic hiring policy.
Key Facts
| Details | |
|---|---|
| Who | Felix Rieseberg, Anthropic engineering manager (Claude.ai / Claude Code Desktop) |
| What changed | He removed traditional coding interviews from his team's loops this month |
| Why (his view) | Claude outperforms candidates on small React-style and similar challenges; past test scores no longer track top builders on his teams |
| What he looks for now | Small portfolio prototypes that show taste, empathy, and principled thinking |
| Scope | His teams only; not confirmed as Anthropic company policy |
| Post date | October 27, 2026 (personal blog); same-day posts on X |
Background
Rieseberg writes that coding interviews were once a "weak but useful" signal for how people defined problems and found solutions in real code. That signal, he says, collapsed once AI coding tools could clear the same exercises. On X he put it bluntly: the coding interview is dead, "at least for my team at Anthropic," and he removed it from loops this month.
His longer post reframes "junior" as engineers without social capital, status, or power. He argues that cheaper execution with AI lets newcomers ship ambitious prototypes without waiting for PRDs and buy-in, and that hunger can beat tenure. As an in-house example, he says two relatively new Anthropic engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, built a working graphical interface for Claude Code over a weekend; the first public version shipped about eight days later.
Business Insider and THE DECODER both treat the story as a manager-level hiring shift, not a corporate mandate. Business Insider also notes parallel experiments elsewhere, such as Google expanding software-engineering interview pilots that allow Gemini, and Amazon telling staff to prioritize customer and business outcomes over raw AI generation. Those are separate company moves, reported as context rather than as Anthropic policy.
Reactions and Impact
Rieseberg says he has not finished redesigning how to interview people who build well with AI. For now he scans resumes and portfolios for small prototypes. Latent Space and THE DECODER framed the post as advice for early-career engineers in an AI-heavy shop: pick business impact, choose one ambitious idea, and build a focused weekend prototype instead of packing many ideas into one demo.
What We Don't Know Yet
- Whether other Anthropic teams will drop coding interviews, or whether any company-wide guideline exists
- How Rieseberg's loops now score AI-assisted take-home work versus live collaboration
- Whether hiring outcomes (pass rates, role levels, diversity of backgrounds) change after the switch
- How far Google's Gemini-allowed interview pilots and Amazon's "Renaissance Developer" guidance go in practice
Sources
- Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers — Felix Rieseberg, October 27, 2026 (primary)
- Anthropic manager says the coding interview is dead — Business Insider, October 28, 2026
- With AI writing the code, entrepreneurial thinking is now what counts most for newcomers at Anthropic — THE DECODER, October 28, 2026
- Anthropic ends Coding Interviews: "Hunger beats tenure" — Latent Space AINews, October 28, 2026