With AI writing the code, entrepreneurial thinking is now what counts most for newcomers at Anthropic

Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, has scrapped the classic coding interview. He argues that AI makes the tests pointless and that ambitious young developers can use it to overtake more experienced colleagues.

Rieseberg, who has led development of Claude.ai and Claude Code Desktop at Anthropic, says there’s no longer any reason to give candidates small programming tasks. Claude now handles them better than the candidates do, he says. In his view, handing someone a little React challenge makes as little sense today as quizzing them on Assembly. On his teams, good test scores no longer predict who turns out to be a top developer. Instead, he’s watching relatively new engineers overtake more experienced colleagues. “Hunger beats tenure,” he says. Rieseberg aims his post at “junior” developers, though he deliberately redefines the term. He doesn’t necessarily mean people just starting out. He means any engineer without social status, power, or a network inside their company. Why newcomers spot the problems veterans stopped seeing Rieseberg argues that newcomers have a structural advantage because they notice problems that long-time employees accepted as givens years ago. He points to organizational researcher James March, who wrote in 1991 that organizations depend on a steady stream of naive and uninformed newcomers. Stripe founder Patrick Collison has also explicitly urged new hires to flag anything that seems strange to them. Veterans, he noted, stopped noticing those friction points long ago. Rieseberg cites his time at Notion as an example. He was asked to design an offline architecture that people inside the company considered impossible.