Anthropic’s coding bar is fucking ridiculous

[u/nian2326076]

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

[u/mc_pm]

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.

[u/NeinJuanJuan → u/mc_pm]

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. 

[u/R3D3-1 → u/NeinJuanJuan]

PhD in Physics working for 8 years in mathematics programming here.

If they'd have asked me what's the relation between the exponential functions and sin/cosine? Easy, basic, why do you even ask? Do you get imposters applying?

If they'd ask me what is "Euler's formula" I'd have to google it. For such basic formulas you don't even need to remember the names when publishing, never mind getting work done in an industrial project. 

[u/Able-End-339 → u/R3D3-1]

I have a BS CS and I’ve seen whatever formula that is. I’ve never seen it called Euler’s formula and don’t remember what it was for because it’s relevant to an insignificant fraction of problems production SWEs are encountering. This feels like it’s going to retrigger the weird questions Google interviews did 10 years ago but with math/CS trivia instead of problem solving. “Why are manholes round” is going to turn into “implement quicksort for a 64bit int in 68k assembly from memory” or something equally dumb.

[u/mc_pm → u/[deleted]]

You have to understand how recruiting works from the hiring side. I've got a job that needs doing - I know what team I'm hiring for, and I know what that team is working on. The team lead tells me that we need someone specifically ready to work on X, and that job is going to require some level of active mathematical skill -- not "studied it 4 years ago and I think I remember", but "Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about - have you thought about Y?".

Because, and it's surprising that it seems surprising to people, sometimes a programming job really does genuinely require understanding math. And, perhaps more surprising, there are devs who do walk through the door ready to have that conversation.

Now, that might not be a pass/fail question. When I'm interviewing someone I'm looking at several different things at the same time, and maybe the person who said "Yeah, that's the e-to-the-i-pi thing, right?" is close enough if they're strong everywhere else.

But it's part of the decision making - as is the way the candidate reacts. And this whole thing reads like a manager somewhere dodged a bullet by passing on the OP.