Anthropic engineer declares the coding interview dead

Why ask a human to complete a coding test when they can just use an AI to help them? Anthropic engineering manager Felix Rieseberg says he has stopped using traditional coding interviews for his team.

"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 explained in a blog post on Tuesday. "Small coding challenges in real code did tell us something meaningful about candidates."

No longer, he says. The coding interview is dead, as far as he's concerned.

"There’s no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both," he insisted. "Our most impactful builders are successful regardless of how good they are at these tests."

In a response posted to social media, Jaana Dogan, principal engineer at Google, said much the same. "I’m not doing a ton of coding interviews nowadays but I’d be interested to interview how people use coding agents," she wrote. "That itself gives me more signals about candidates' coding skills."

Several months ago, Google reportedly began reevaluating how it conducts coding interviews and what it looks for in candidates. And while it would be surprising if similar conversations haven't already occurred at other large technology companies where AI agents have demonstrated their coding capabilities, the rest of the tech industry appears to be moving more cautiously than the AI enthusiasts.

"We are not seeing tech companies abandon skills assessments widely across the industry—at least not yet," said Nicole Bachaud, labor economist at ZipRecruiter, in an email to The Register. "In fact, based on our October 2026 Employer Survey of 1,500 employers, we see the tech industry (Information sector specifically) is actually the most likely to test for skills, with 62.5 percent of employers requiring formal skill tests on initial applications."

Coding interviews at Microsoft, and later Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other tech giants, vary, depending on what the hiring organization aims to evaluate. They may probe technical knowledge related to a specific subject, coding ability in a particular language, general problem-solving skills, team-oriented behavior, or other skills.

Stripe's software engineer interview process, according to Educative, consists of a phone screening stage, a technical phone interview, and several further on-site interviews.

Rieseberg actually worked there and describes how founder Patrick Collison urged new hires to pay attention to things that seemed out of place. "His bet was that newcomers would spot friction and opportunities that old-timers had long stopped noticing," he said.

And Rieseberg appears to have absorbed that viewpoint based on his dismissal of experience: "Hunger beats tenure," he said, perhaps unaware that technology companies have gotten into legal trouble for jettisoning costly veteran employees so they can be replaced by hungry, less expensive young professionals.

Technical interviews are seldom just about technical mastery. There are after all many other ways that employees can add value to an organization beyond testable computer science skills. And when employees have access to AI models that can answer technical questions better than job candidates, it makes sense to look more closely at the creativity and social skills people bring to the table.

"The change at Anthropic might be reflecting a shift away from technical skills towards more human, soft skills," said Bachaud. "As AI becomes fully capable of writing code, tech employers may be pivoting away from rote technical testing and heavily toward human-centric soft skills."

She argues that while AI may be able to code well, it can't replace critical thinking. "A staggering 61.5 percent of Information employers now report that 'critical thinking' is a primary skill lacking in today's candidate pool," she said.

"I don’t think the coding interview is going to come back," said Rieseberg. "It's easy to get sentimental given how many copies of 'Algorithms and Data Structures' were bought in hopes of unlocking good jobs and a better future — or how the death of the coding interview is another milestone in software engineering reaching a new level of abstraction."

At the same time, he's not certain what will replace it.

"I’m probably not the only manager trying to figure out how to interview for people who build well with AI," Rieseberg wrote. "I haven't quite gotten there yet — but I’m scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking. If you have figured out something better, I’d love to hear how."

Bachaud sees technical evaluations changing instead of going away, noting that 70 percent of Information sector employers have switched to proctored or in-person skill assessments as a way to deter cheating with AI.

"Ultimately, tech companies aren't necessarily testing less, but the way they are testing is changing," she said. "As AI automates a lot of manual and technical components of jobs, work skills may become more universal. That could lead to an increase in job switching and turnover once economic conditions improve. In our recent survey of workers, we found that AI-related work concerns are causing a quarter of workers to start thinking about their next role. And as assessments and skills are changing, what roles are available to them might look more different than ever before." ®