In October 2026, Anthropic engineering manager Felix Rieseberg said he stopped asking candidates for his team to complete traditional coding interviews. He said Claude now handles small React challenges and assembly-language questions better, making the exercises less useful to him as a signal of candidates’ potential. The change he described applies to his team.
Why Rieseberg changed the exercise
Rieseberg had considered coding interviews a weak but useful predictor of success. He said Claude’s ability to handle the small challenges used in those interviews changed how much value he saw in them. That is his assessment of the exercises, not a measure of coding ability across all candidates.
What he reviews instead
Rieseberg says he has not settled on a replacement interview method. For now, he looks at résumés and portfolios for small prototypes that show taste, empathy and principled thinking.
The shift raises a practical question about evaluation: portfolios can show what someone has built, but candidates may need clear criteria to understand how their work will be judged. Commenters discussing the change raised concerns about standardization and suggested using a shared follow-up exercise with a clear rubric. One proposal was to change a requirement, add a regression test and ask the candidate to explain what needs revisiting.
His advice for engineers building a case for their work
Rieseberg’s career advice is separate from a hiring method. He recommends focusing on work with business impact, choosing an ambitious idea that fits organizational goals, and building a working prototype around one strong idea rather than bundling several together. He also advises engineers to use the fresh perspective that comes with being new to an organization.
As an example, Rieseberg said Anthropic engineers Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao built a working Claude Code graphical-interface prototype in one weekend. He said its first public version shipped roughly eight days later.
What the reported survey says about skills tests
Infobae reported that a ZipRecruiter survey of 1,500 employers, conducted in October 2026, found that 62.5% of information-sector employers required formal skills tests in initial applications. Separately, 61.5% identified critical thinking as the main skills gap among candidates. These figures describe different survey questions; they do not measure the same thing.
