Anthropic engineering manager Felix Rieseberg has ended coding interviews for his team, saying Claude now outperforms people on brief React and assembly-language tasks, making the tests less useful for assessing candidates.
In a blog post, Rieseberg said he now looks through résumés and portfolios for small projects. He said they can show how an applicant makes choices, considers users and applies principles to a problem. Rieseberg wrote, “Execution isn’t expensive anymore.”
His advice also speaks to employees with little influence over decisions. He recommends tying a proposal to a business objective, including what the company or department is trying to accomplish. Staff should then pitch one ambitious idea and turn it into a working demo, he said. A demonstration gives decision-makers something concrete to evaluate before they spend time on requirements, internal backing or help from product and design colleagues.
Rieseberg argues that one focused project can show leaders both what an idea might offer and how its builder thinks. He also says less experienced employees may spot problems that people with longer tenure have come to see as ordinary. He favors making a proposal visible over waiting for seniority to lend it weight.
As an example, he described Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao spending a weekend creating a graphical interface for Claude Code. Rieseberg said the project reached the public roughly eight days later. He described the interface as popular.
The approach comes as Anthropic has said it kept adding technical staff while hiring in sales, finance and recruiting grew faster. The company has also said coding tools may let nontechnical employees build software, according to EconoTimes’ earlier coverage of Anthropic’s hiring. Anthropic attributed part of that hiring pattern to business expansion.
