I know, because I’ve been rejected and accepted to the same company before based on different interview questions, and did just fine in the role once I was in there.

In short, if you have decent skills the tech interviewers are mostly total random luck IMO, so just do a bunch of em and you’ll get lucky somewhere. It won’t make any rational sense at all later where you end up, but who cares.

* to the company the cost of a false positive (bad hire) is very very much higher than the cost of a false negative (passing on a good candidate).

* AI companies have a large pool of strong candidates to interview

* Therefore they are incentivized to make their interview process hard enough that a poor candidate almost never passes it

* but then it becomes something a strong candidate can only pass with a bit of good luck

This is not “fair”, but it’s a marketplace. The best approach is the one you propose: accept it and don’t take it personally if you miss, roll the dice again.

It’s a different ballgame when you can gamble $20k to make $1M.

Otoh, if you hire me to frame a house, it'll be objectively clear you need to get rid of me in the first hour, if not the first ten minutes. I don't know how I'd get past a screening for that either, but still.

Personally I don’t agree with the crazy tech interviews at all, no other job on the planet does it like this, even high skill jobs like doctors or professors. They hire based on your experience, your references, and a good chat to make sure you’d be a culture fit. If there’s a serious problem with a doctor once they start the job, they’d be let go, but they’re professionals so this isn’t a super common occurrence.

The exact same process could be taken with developers IMO. If I have a seasoned career, you should hire me based on that, not because I jumped through hoops you set up.

My experience exactly! I've been lucky in most of my interviews that I was asked about things I just happened to brush up on or had thought about deeply in some past project, so I was offered the job.

And like you say, the job rarely demanded any of the things I was asked about... which worked against me once, where I sailed through the interview process but struggled for the first year to get up to speed in my actual day-to-day job, although I did manage to get my act together before it became a big problem.

    your dream job will not make you whole

Like the great Mike Tyson once said, "God punishes you by giving you everything you want... to see if you can handle it".

For many, achieving your dreams usually comes with the hard lesson that you had the wrong dreams and that the real dreams you should have had were many of the things you already gave away to get there.

Then again, infinite AI-developer money isn't the worst outcome, either. Something something land among the clouds.

You have much cooler opportunity in these new companies and product spaces versus the large ships. It really is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

I wholeheartedly agree.

That said, if you pursue jobs that are at least somewhat aligned with your personal convictions and desire for impact on the world and not strictly based on money, prestige, and power, you might be able to able to derive some greater sense of wholeness through the work. Not "make you whole", but "contribute to your wholeness".

If you only chase money, prestige and power - which if we're honest is central to a lot of the tech industry today - you probably won't experience any wholeness contribution from your work. That's fine, of course. Hopefully in that case you can find it through family, friendships, or community.

Some people really do find a whole lot of personal meaning from their work. And that's okay. It's their life.

If someone is the sort of person who might find meaning working for Anthropic, they would find that meaning at a lot of other jobs as well. I think that's a better emssage; not that "you shall not find purpose in your work", but "the purpose you may find from work is not limited to a single or even small number of AI companies".

The greenfield projects arising from this leap look benign now, but I can almost guarantee that won't be the case in the next decade once these technologies optimize their revenue generation engines and enshittification takes hold. Humanity will be at the whim of the AI compute overlords much more so than we are now, and that's an inevitable nightmare dystopia that I'm not looking forward to. The gilded age will look like child's play by the time we figure this out as a society.

I suppose that if your ambition is to be on the winning end of that hellscape, then by all means, go for it.

They may find a candidate that succeeds, they may not. In the end, it’s up to you to decide whether that kind of environment is for you. I also interviewed at a few AI startups and while difficult, I wasn’t impressed with them. They seem to be too high maintenance with little to no experience.

Very critical difference in mindset and the reason a lot of these conversations end up talking past each other.

But I don't care about any particular company. I'm just as happy automating refineries as I am factories or chemical plants. I just want to be a valuable member of a team that gets stuff done.

I had a bunch of these my last round of interviews, and am not convinced most companies even know what they want from these or how to assess. In the majority of cases it was clear to me the interviewers never even read the code I had submitted.

As an example, one company wanted a full AI Question/Answer system for large code projects using RAG to work on an arbitrarily large code base with an eval suite to go with it and also an API endpoint that could be called to automate asking of questions. You only had 24 hours to complete the assignment from receipt.

It was clear even before this that the company was likely not a good match, but I wanted to implement it for fun anyway. I'd already built all of this in production at a previous job (though it took weeks, which still felt pretty fast) so I knew how to approach it. Got it all done in time, met all acceptance criteria, had it so the entire thing could be run with one line of code (including building the RAG system, running evaluations, starting the webserver for the running API endpoint)... and rejected with no feedback a week later.

The trouble with asking people to write massive amounts of code in short periods of time is that you actually have to review it. I also have to say, despite the competitiveness, I was pretty unimpressed with the technical skills of the people on these teams (mostly smaller AI startups for me). It takes a pretty skilled engineer to assess the quality of a code base in such a short period of time and these teams did not seem like that had a lot of extra time on their hands.

I know I'd be pissed if the work did go uncommented.

that is absolutely insane.

(Got where I wanted, the fact that I didn’t want enough and could re-set goals helped but still not great to reach the self imposed dream goal.)

The assignment was hard for me for a few reasons: There were many requirements; the requirements as stated were quite unclear to me; and it turned out that they were really referencing a certain standard solution to a standard problem that I was unfamiliar with. So we spent half the interview explaining the idea to me (bad!), and then the other half was me trying to code it up, and I just didn't get nearly far enough.

And imagine that the CRDTs are not directly explained in the problem statement, but some supporting data structure of CRDTs is referenced, and like clearly there is some way to make all the pieces referenced work together to create a working system, but it's never made explicit.

And imagine that you need to actually implement CRDTs from scratch in the interview, but also integrate them into this client-server document-editing app, which you also need to code from scratch. All in an hour.

This is why I say the interview felt kind of insane to me. But plausibly if I'd previously studied that problem, so that the implementation details were all clear to me from the start, and if I had used the company's coding assistant to the extent allowed, and if I had been in much better coding-things-from-scratch form, I could have done OK. I don't know. It's fine. They were probably looking for a type of engineer that I'm not. :')