Anthropic engineering manager stops using coding interviews, has no replacement yet

Felix Rieseberg says AI has hollowed out the classic technical test and wants to hire for hunger and taste instead The whiteboard coding interview has outlived many tech fads. At one corner of Anthropic, it has now been retired. Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at the AI company, says he no longer uses traditional coding interviews when hiring for his team. The catch is that he hasn’t settled on what replaces them. Why the test stopped working Rieseberg laid out his reasoning in a blog post published on Tuesday, October 27, 2026. His core argument is that AI models such as Anthropic’s own Claude now outperform humans at coding tasks. If a machine can ace the exam, the exam stops separating strong candidates from weak ones. He was candid that the old interview was never a crystal ball. It was, in his framing, a modest signal that happened to be worth something. “Being able to quickly define problems and find elegant solutions was a weak but useful predictor for how successful you’d be on my teams,” Rieseberg wrote. Note the past tense. A weak but useful predictor has become, in his view, a predictor that no longer does much predicting. Rieseberg’s position carries extra weigh...