Anthropic engineer declares the coding interview dead

Why ask a person to take a coding test when they can use AI to help them? Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, 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 way to predict how successful someone would be on my teams," Rieseberg explained in a blog post on Tuesday. "Small coding challenges using real code did tell us something meaningful about candidates."

He says these tests are no longer useful in the same way. As far as he is concerned, the coding interview is dead.

"There is no more point in giving someone a small React coding challenge than in asking them questions about assembly language. Claude is now better at both," he said. "The people who build the most important things on our teams succeed regardless of how well they do on these tests."

Jaana Dogan, a principal engineer at Google, shared a similar view in a social media post. "I'm not doing many coding interviews these days, but I'd be interested in interviewing people about how they use coding agents," she wrote. "That alone gives me more information about candidates' coding skills."

Several months ago, Google reportedly began reviewing how it runs coding interviews and what it looks for in job candidates. Since AI agents have shown that they can write code, other large technology companies have probably discussed these questions too. But the wider tech industry seems to be moving more carefully than people who are enthusiastic about AI.

"We are not seeing tech companies widely abandon skills tests across the industry—not yet, at least," Nicole Bachaud, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter, told The Register in an email. "In fact, our October 2026 survey of 1,500 employers shows that the tech industry—specifically the Information sector—is the most likely to test skills. Some 62.5 percent of employers require formal skills tests when people first apply for jobs."

Coding interviews at Microsoft, and later at Google, Amazon, Facebook and other major technology companies, vary depending on what the hiring team wants to measure. They may test knowledge of a particular technical subject, the ability to write code in a certain language, general problem-solving skills, how well someone works with a team, or other abilities.

According to Educative, Stripe's interview process for software engineers includes an initial phone screening, a technical phone interview and several more interviews at the company's offices.

Rieseberg worked at Stripe himself. He explained that its founder, Patrick Collison, encouraged new employees to notice things that seemed wrong or out of place. "His idea was that newcomers would spot problems and chances to improve things that long-time employees had stopped noticing," Rieseberg said.

Rieseberg seems to have taken this idea to heart, judging by his views on work experience. "Hunger beats tenure," he said. He may not have considered that technology companies have faced legal trouble over claims that they pushed out experienced workers who cost more and replaced them with younger professionals who were eager to prove themselves and cost less.

Technical interviews are rarely just about how much technical knowledge someone has. Workers can help a company in many ways beyond the computer science skills that a test can measure. And when workers can use AI models that answer technical questions better than job candidates can, it makes sense to pay closer attention to people's creativity and social skills.

"The change at Anthropic may reflect a move away from technical skills and toward more human skills, often called soft skills," Bachaud said. "As AI becomes fully capable of writing code, tech employers may be moving away from basic technical tests and putting much more weight on human skills."

She argues that even if AI can write code well, it cannot replace critical thinking. "A striking 61.5 percent of employers in the Information sector now say that critical thinking is a key skill missing from today's pool of job candidates," she said.

"I don't think the coding interview is going to come back," Rieseberg said. "It's easy to feel sentimental about how many copies of 'Algorithms and Data Structures' people bought in the hope of getting a good job and a better future—or to see the death of the coding interview as another step toward software engineering working at a higher level of abstraction."

At the same time, he is not sure what will take the place of coding interviews.

"I'm probably not the only manager trying to work out how to interview people who build things well with AI," Rieseberg wrote. "I haven't figured it out yet, but I'm looking through resumes and portfolios for small prototypes that show good judgment, empathy and clear principles. If you've found a better way, I'd love to hear about it."

Bachaud believes technical tests will change rather than disappear. She noted that 70 percent of employers in the Information sector have switched to supervised tests or in-person skills assessments to make it harder for candidates to cheat with AI.

"In the end, tech companies are not necessarily testing less, but the way they test is changing," she said. "As AI automates many of the routine and technical parts of jobs, work skills may become more similar across roles. That could lead to more people changing jobs and more staff turnover when economic conditions improve. In our recent survey of workers, we found that worries about AI at work are causing one in four workers to start thinking about their next job. As tests and required skills change, the jobs available to them may also look very different from before." ®