Anthropic hiring manager Felix Rieseberg has made a bold statement, saying he “laid the traditional coding interview to rest.”
Coding interviews have been a long-standing and popular way to test a programmer or software engineer’s general skill level. Beyond basic skills, it gives the hiring manager a window into how the developer thinks. Do they write concise, efficient code? Do they write verbose code that is more visually appealing? Do they document their code clearly? While certainly not foolproof, the coding interview gave a hiring manager at least some glimpse into what kind of programmer a candidate might be.
According to Rieseberg, however, the rise of AI-assisted coding has made the coding interview obsolete.
There’s no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both. Our most impactful builders are successful regardless of how good they are at these tests.
The coding interview was, despite its ubiquity, never popular. I suspect that established engineers will still have strong reactions to its disappearance — if only for what it says about the evolution of our roles. Plenty of ink has been spilled to describe how AI is a challenge for junior developers, especially those trying to land a job. Now that I’ve seen junior people work with AI for a bit, I have a more hopeful take: Impact is less bounded by how many years of accumulated knowledge in frameworks and libraries you’ve gathered.
Interestingly, Rieseberg says AI has helped newer software engineers surpass more experienced ones.
I’m seeing engineers who are comparatively new fly past people who are probably better coders and have been around much longer. Hunger beats tenure.
Rieseberg believes that the coding interview is dead and not coming back.
I don’t think the coding interview is going to come back. It’s easy to get sentimental given how many copies of “Algorithms and Data Structures” were bought in hopes of unlocking good jobs and a better future — or how the death of the coding interview is another milestone in software engineering reaching a new level of abstraction.
At the same time, as a longtime hater of promotions by tenure, I can’t help but be optimistic. I’ve already seen my fair share of popular apps and products made this way.
Rieseberg’s entire blog post is a fascinating read and underscores the issues that software developers and tech companies are facing.