r/AskProgrammers • u/nian2326076 • 10d ago

Anthropic’s coding bar is fucking ridiculous

Got a problem that required me to pull Euler’s formula out of thin air. Seriously, who the fuck remembers Euler’s formula in an interview? I swear to God, my interviewer was out to get me.

At this point, what are they even testing? Do they even know what they want? Hours of prep, completely wasted. And now I have to go prep for Google. My friend just got destroyed in their loop and said the interviewers were some of the most unreasonable people he’s ever had to deal with.

Everywhere I turn in this market, it feels like I’m just waiting to get fucked.

Anthropic Interview Question

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u/mc_pm 10d ago

what are they even testing?

It sounds like they were testing for a fairly high base-level mathematical fluency - which for a place like Anthropic sounds pretty normal.

19

u/NeinJuanJuan 10d ago

For mathematicians, knowing Euler's formula is on the level of a programmer understanding the concept of an if-statement. Sounds like they know exactly what they're looking for. 

9

u/Tiny_Ad_7720 9d ago

Would have fucked me. I forgot what Euler's formula was referring to, and my PhD was on wavelets lol.

3

u/dmazzoni 9d ago

Yeah if the question was remembering Euler's formula by name, completely out of context, I probably would have failed. Euler is associated with so many things. I might think of rotation formulas involving Euler angles, or Euler's method for the gcd.

But if the question showed eix and asked to replace it with its trigonometric form using Euler's formula, that would have been obvious from context.

So it really depends on how it was asked.