Announced 27 Oct 2026 · Sources checked
What Rieseberg said
Anthropic engineering manager Felix Rieseberg announced on 27 October 2026 that he had scrapped coding interviews for his team. '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,' he wrote in a post on X.
In a blog post, Rieseberg elaborated that there is 'no point' in giving candidates coding challenges or asking them about programming languages like assembly. He said coding challenges were once a 'weak but useful' predictor of success, but the most impactful builders on his teams are not necessarily the people who excel at such tests.
The hunger argument
Rieseberg's central claim is that motivation beats experience and test-taking ability. 'I'm seeing engineers who are comparatively new fly past people who are probably better coders and have been around much longer,' he wrote. 'Hunger beats tenure.'
The point is one Anthropic hires around explicitly: the company has said in recruiting material that it looks for people who can ship in an environment where AI tools amplify output, rather than people who can solve algorithmic puzzles on a whiteboard. Rieseberg's advice targets junior engineers and people without organizational status or power.
Advice for juniors
Rather than just clearing backlog tickets, Rieseberg advised junior engineers to identify the business problems their company is trying to solve and work on those. In an AI-heavy environment, the differentiating skill is figuring out what matters, not executing routine coding tasks.
He also cautioned that the message is not 'stop learning to code': the builders who fly past longer-tenured colleagues still need to understand systems deeply. What changes is the signal: an interview that tests rote programming is measuring something the job no longer requires.
The context: AI is taking over coding work
The shift tracks with wider changes at Anthropic and other big tech companies. Business Insider has reported that AI now writes most of the code at Anthropic, and Google is expanding pilots for software-engineering interviews that let candidates use Gemini to assess AI fluency and prompting skills.
For hiring broadly, the coding interview has been a standard gate for two decades, and its defenders argue it is a fair, consistent bar. The counter-argument, now being made by a hiring manager at one of the most AI-forward companies in the world, is that the bar measures the wrong thing when the tools candidates will use on the job are better at the test than the candidates are.
What to watch
Watch whether other Anthropic teams and other companies follow Rieseberg's lead, and whether the industry replaces coding interviews with something else, such as AI-fluency assessments or portfolio-based evaluation.
Watch how junior engineers respond to the advice, since the near-term labor market still hires through interview processes that include coding tests at many companies.
Why this matters beyond one team
Anthropic is a bellwether for how AI changes software work: the company has said AI writes most of its code, and its own products are built with heavy Claude assistance. When a hiring manager at that company says the coding interview no longer provides signal, it carries weight beyond a single team's process.
For the industry, the statement reframes hiring from 'can you code alone under time pressure' to 'can you direct and verify AI-produced code and choose what matters.' That is a different skill profile, and it will change how companies train, interview and evaluate engineers if the shift becomes general.
Reactions and counter-arguments
Rieseberg's post drew predictable pushback from engineers who argue coding interviews, despite their flaws, are one of the few standardized gates that let candidates demonstrate skill without credentials or connections. The counter-argument is that removing the gate makes hiring more subjective and harder for outsiders to navigate.
Rieseberg's own advice anticipates that concern: he is not saying candidates should skip technical depth, but that teams should assess builders on real work and business judgment. Whether that results in fairer hiring or simply different biases is an open empirical question that other companies will now be watching.
The Google parallel
Business Insider reported last week that Google is expanding pilots for software-engineering interviews that allow candidates to use Gemini, assessing AI fluency and prompting skills rather than only raw coding ability. That is the opposite direction from Anthropic in one sense — Google keeps the interview but makes it AI-assisted — but both changes accept the same premise: the test must adapt to a world where candidates use AI tools on the job.
Together, the two shifts suggest the industry is converging on a new question for engineering hiring: how effectively a person uses AI to build, rather than how well they write code from scratch in a sterile setting.
What this means for job seekers
For candidates, the practical takeaway is to build a portfolio of real work and to be able to talk about business impact, because AI-era engineering teams say they are looking for judgment, not test performance. Practicing whiteboard algorithms is still useful for companies that have not changed their process, but the balance is shifting.
For juniors specifically, Rieseberg's 'hunger beats tenure' line is an invitation: learn to use AI tools rigorously, take on problems that matter to the business, and make the case with shipped work. The companies that adopt his approach are betting that motivated builders outperform experienced test-takers.
Common questions
Who removed coding interviews at Anthropic?
Felix Rieseberg, an Anthropic engineering manager, who announced the change on X on 27 October 2026.
Why does he say interviews are dead?
Because Claude is now better than human candidates at typical coding-test tasks, so the tests no longer provide hiring signal.
Sources & further reading
How this story was made
Written by Kristian Kostov with AI assistance and checked against the linked sources. Company performance claims are attributed to the company. Analysis reflects AiLookout’s interpretation; we have not independently tested the products discussed. The cover is an AI-generated editorial illustration, not a photograph or evidence of an actual event.
Our editorial standards
