Anthropic Manager Drops Coding Interviews, Reviews Portfolios for Prototypes

Anthropic engineering manager Felix Rieseberg has stopped using coding interviews to hire for his team, saying Claude now performs better than people on short React exercises and assembly-language questions. He sees those tests as a less useful hiring signal as a result.

He now reviews résumés and portfolios for small prototypes that show taste, empathy and principled thinking.

His advice is aimed at engineers who have little influence or authority inside an organization. He urges them to start with a business goal rather than a task list, and to consider what senior leaders want their company or department to accomplish. From there, he recommends picking one ambitious idea that could help meet that goal.

Rieseberg’s proposed approach is to build a working prototype over a weekend. A small demonstration can make an idea easier to evaluate while avoiding the time usually spent on product requirements, lining up internal support and securing help from design or product teams. He advises focusing on one strong idea so decision-makers can see both its potential and the builder’s judgment.

“Execution isn’t expensive anymore,” Rieseberg wrote. He also argues that people with less experience can bring a useful outside perspective: they may notice problems that longer-tenured colleagues have come to accept as normal. His advice centers on showing what an idea could do, rather than waiting for seniority to make others take it seriously.

Rieseberg pointed to a Claude Code project by Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, two relatively new engineers. They built a graphical-interface prototype over a weekend, and its first public version shipped about eight days later. Rieseberg described the interface as a popular product.