An engineering manager at Anthropic has stopped giving candidates traditional coding interviews, arguing that the company’s own AI model, Claude, now solves those puzzles better than most applicants — a move that has reignited the debate over whether the tech industry’s most famous hiring ritual is dead.
Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager who has led work on Claude.ai, Cowork and Claude Code Desktop, laid out his reasoning in a blog post published on 27 October, titled “Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers”. “The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic,” he wrote. “I’ve seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I removed it from loops this month.”
“No more point” in the React challenge
Rieseberg wrote that there is “no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly”, adding that Claude is now better at both. He said AI has made execution cheap, shifting the bottleneck from implementation to idea selection and business alignment, and that the impact of senior engineers is no longer proportional to hand-written coding ability.
He has not found a full replacement for the coding round. Instead, he looks for small prototypes in candidates’ portfolios that demonstrate taste, empathy, collaboration and principled thinking, and he invites better suggestions. He does not expect the coding interview to return, comparing its demise to software engineering reaching a new abstraction layer.
One team — not the whole company
The decision applies to Rieseberg’s own team, not to Anthropic as a whole, and applicants elsewhere at the company will likely still face a coding round. Anthropic still asks candidates not to use Claude in live interviews or take-home tests, unless told otherwise. Coverage by The Register and The Next Web noted that coding tests remain common elsewhere, and Interview Query data shows LeetCode-style questions still appear in about 30% of technical interview reports.
But Rieseberg is not alone. Canva, Cerebras and Shopify are among employers replacing the puzzle with rounds that test judgment: deciding what to build, directing AI to build it, and checking the result. Junior technical jobs at Anthropic fell from 27% to 9% of all new hires in a year, according to reporting on the company’s hiring figures.
Related coverage: Canva Cuts 22% of Workforce as Growth Slows in Hardest Year | Voters Rebuke AI Data Centres 44 to 1 at Midterm Ballot Box
Sources: Felix Rieseberg blog post “Hunger beats tenure” (27 Oct 2026) via PBX Science (1 Nov 2026); The Register/The Next Web via Tech Insider (1 Nov 2026); WareData (31 Oct 2026); Vithushan Sylvester/Interview Query data (3 Nov 2026).
