Anthropic eliminated coding interviews for engineering hires: how do you actually judge a developer now?
Anthropic has reportedly eliminated coding interviews for engineering hires and is shifting toward judging architectural judgment instead. I hire for a small team and our whiteboard-style interviews feel broken too: they filter for people who grind LeetCode, not people who ship reliable systems. If you dropped the coding interview tomorrow, what would you actually use instead? A take-home system design exercise, pairing on a real codebase, a portfolio review? What signal has actually predicted good hires for you?
1 answer
- Judge the system design, not the syntax
We stopped doing whiteboard puzzles last year and the thing that actually worked was a small design review: hand the candidate a real, messy feature request from our backlog and ask them to sketch the system on a whiteboard with you, tradeoffs included. You learn more in 30 minutes of that than in an hour of sorting algorithms, because you see how they think about failure modes, data shape, and what they would cut when the deadline bites. The code can be taught. The judgment about what to build is the hard part.