X discussion: Anthropic engineering manager Felix Rieseberg says he dropped coding interviews for his team, arguing "hunger beats tenure", and the post passes 1M views

What happened

On Oct 27 (US time), Felix Rieseberg posted on X: "The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I removed it from loops this month." His X bio says he builds things at Anthropic, and he is also a co-maintainer of Electron. The post links an essay on his personal blog titled "Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers." At the time of writing it had about 9,500 likes, more than 850 reposts, over 400 quotes, more than 1.07 million views and over 10,000 bookmarks, with practitioners including Vercel's CTO and many developers discussing it. To be clear, this is his personal view as a hiring manager and his team's practice, not a company-wide hiring policy announced by Anthropic.

His reasoning

According to the essay, small coding challenges that test how quickly you can define a problem and find an elegant solution used to be a weak but useful predictor, and that is no longer true: giving a candidate a little React challenge is as pointless as quizzing them on assembly, because Claude is now better at both, and the team's most impactful builders succeed regardless of how they do on such tests. He says he is seeing comparatively new engineers fly past people who are probably better coders and have been around longer, hence "hunger beats tenure."

Five pieces of advice for newcomers

The essay recommends: first, pick business impact over the backlog; second, pick a radical idea; third, build a working prototype over a weekend instead of going through the usual PRD, buy-in and design-resourcing process; fourth, keep each prototype to one good idea; and fifth, lean into a newcomer's fresh perspective to spot problems old-timers no longer notice. His example: people at Anthropic were so used to Claude Code as a command-line tool that it took two relatively new engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, to build a graphical prototype over one weekend, and the first public version shipped roughly eight days later.

What people are debating

The discussion on X splits roughly in two. One side agrees that AI coding has removed the ability to write code as the bottleneck, so hiring should weigh judgment, product sense and small prototypes in a portfolio. The other side worries that dropping coding interviews makes fundamentals hard to assess, and questions whether the approach only works at an AI company like Anthropic. These are opinions, and there is no data yet on outcomes.