As AI rapidly changes software development work, coding interviews, a key hurdle in hiring developers, are also being reconsidered. An engineering manager at AI company Anthropic scrapped them in his team interviews, saying traditional coding tests make it hard to judge candidates' practical abilities.

Business Insider reported on Oct. 28 that Felix Rieseberg (펠릭스 리제버그), an engineering manager at Anthropic, said in a recent blog post and on X that his team has excluded traditional coding interviews from its hiring process starting this month.

Rieseberg argued that giving a simple React coding assignment or asking about assembly language is no longer valid. He said Anthropic's AI model Claude performs both tasks better, and top scores on coding tests do not necessarily translate into strong job performance.

The move is a decision by Rieseberg's team and does not mean Anthropic as a whole is scrapping coding interviews. The company's official hiring guidance states that it conducts interviews using real-time coding tools for technical roles.

Rieseberg stressed that in the AI era, drive to identify problems and turn solutions into reality has become more important than experience. He said developers with shorter careers can outperform seasoned veterans if they understand business goals and create tangible change.

He advised junior developers not to focus only on clearing backlogged development tasks, but to find a problem the company needs to solve and turn one bold idea into a working prototype. He said it is more effective to show a compelling core idea than to force in multiple features.

Two engineers who joined Anthropic relatively recently built a prototype graphical interface for Claude Code over a weekend, and the first public version was released about 8 days later.

Rieseberg said he still has not found an answer to how to evaluate people who deliver results using AI. For now, he said he pays close attention to prototypes in candidates' resumes and portfolios that show empathy for users, product sense and principled thinking.