Anthropic hiring manager Felix Rieseberg drops the coding interview: 'it no longer provides signal'

What happened? Felix RiesebergDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a hiring manager at Anthropic, says he removed the traditional coding interview from his team's hiring loops this month. "I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal," he wrote on X. In a blog post he argues that small coding challenges used to be a weak but useful predictor of success, but that Claude is now better than candidates at tasks like a React exercise, and that his most impactful builders succeed regardless of how they score on such tests.

His take for junior engineers: Rieseberg, who previously worked at Stripe and Notion, calls his view "spicily optimistic": because execution is no longer expensive, newcomers without status or tenure can win by building working prototypes instead of lobbying for resources. "Hunger beats tenure," he writes, saying he sees comparatively new engineers "fly past" more experienced coders. His advice: pick business impact over the backlog, pick a radical idea, build it over a weekend, focus on one good idea, and lean into a fresh perspective.

Why it matters: The post landed as AI coding tools reshape entry-level software hiring, a trend many commentators see as squeezing junior roles. Rieseberg's post drew close to 8,000 likes within hours.

Read more: Felix Rieseberg: Hunger beats tenure, Felix Rieseberg on X

Image credit: felixrieseberg.com (J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire)