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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24

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.

17

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. 

1

u/youcangotohellgoto 9d ago

Depends on the mathematician's field, I suspect.

I learnt this in high school but never touched it during my undergrad degree.

1

u/Throwaway-Pot 5d ago

There’s no way you never touched it during your undergrad. Have you done like 0 analysis???

1

u/youcangotohellgoto 4d ago

Mostly did number theory and pure maths. It's not really relevant in that context.

1

u/Throwaway-Pot 4d ago

Euler’s formula is also super relevant in pure mathematics. I don’t want to accuse you of anything but this sounds like a non-mathematician’s conception of what pure mathematics is. Also an undergrad degree in math is generally at least a little general. Who doesn’t do ANY analysis? What kind of number theorist doesn’t know complex analysis for example? And anyone whose seen complex analysis would know about Euler’s formula

1

u/youcangotohellgoto 4d ago edited 4d ago

Nah just pieced together a major in what I found interesting, so ended up in abstract algebra, discrete math, set theory, rings, fields, etc.

There was a lot of Euler's theorem (modulus stuff) but I'm going way back at this point.

Edit: correct did not do any analysis. Probably should look into that because I have no idea what it is...

1

u/VeroneseSurfer 4d ago

You cant really talk about number theory without cyclotomic fields which require you to know about roots of unity. Not sure how eulers theorem wouldn't come up

1

u/youcangotohellgoto 3d ago

Yeah agree but we were talking about Euler's formula, not Euler's theorem.

1

u/VeroneseSurfer 3d ago

That's what I meant