Anthropic drops the coding interview. What small teams do next
A hiring manager at Anthropic says data-structures-and-algorithms questions now produce no useful signal, and has cut them from the loop. What replaces them has not been spelled out publicly.
Felix Rieseberg, a hiring manager at Anthropic who has led work on Claude Cowork and Claude Desktop, has stopped asking coding questions of software engineering candidates.
That is reported by the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, which says the team was getting zero signal from the standard data-structures-and-algorithms exercise and removed it from the recruitment process.
The newsletter's reading is that the Leetcode-style interview has been rendered pointless by AI, and that the rest of Anthropic, plus other AI-native startups, could follow.
What Anthropic uses in its place has not been published. Rieseberg's account of the change sits behind a paywall, so the replacement format is not on the record.
For a founder running a five-person engineering team, the useful part is not the format Anthropic picked. It is the test it applied.
The question asked was whether the exercise still separated candidates. When it stopped doing that, it went. Most small companies never run that check at all; they inherit an interview loop from the last place they worked and keep it for years.
So run the check. Take your last ten technical interviews and ask which ones changed your mind about a candidate. If the answer is none, the stage is costing you two hours of engineering time per candidate and buying nothing.
Assume the candidate has a model open. Any exercise whose answer exists in a public repository or a textbook is now a typing test. That is the whole of the Anthropic signal problem, restated at your scale.
The cheaper redesigns are the ones you already have material for: a problem from your own backlog, a code review of a real pull request from your own codebase, a debugging session in your own repository. None of these require you to police tool use, because the context is yours and the candidate's reasoning is the thing on display.
Be honest with candidates about what is allowed. An interview where the rules are unstated is one where the confident cheat and the scrupulous lose.
And set a review date. The reason Anthropic's loop changed is that someone looked at it. A hiring process that nobody has questioned in two years is not a standard, it is a habit.
The wider point for anyone hiring engineers this year: the frontier labs are not just shipping the tools that broke the coding interview, they are the first to admit in public that it is broken.
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