The Curious Case of Flunking My Anthropic Interview (Again)

Summary

The Curious Case of Flunking My Anthropic Interview (Again) Here's a vague overview of what just happened: I recently applied for Anthropic's Developer Relations role. My friend who works there gave me a glowing recommendation (thanks again, dude!). I completed their secret take-home assignment. On top of their secret take-home assignment, I independently published diggit.dev and a companion blogpost about my [sincerely] positive experiences with Claude. I was hoping that some unsolicited "extra credit" would make me look like an exceptional/ambitious candidate. I posted diggit.dev to HackerNews and it hit the frontpage! I submitted my take-home assignment and my unsolicited extra credit. They sent me the "unfortunately" email. Anthropic obviously didn't do anything wrong. I'm just bummed. Claude Code truly is one of my favorite dev tools ever, and if you've suffered through my talks/interviews, you're probably sick of my enthusiasm for software. I was particularly excited to interview with Anthropic because I respect their approach to responsible AI adoption. This very blog is too often a crazed celebration of humans, of software, of AI, of progress, of sincerity -- I, I felt like I was a perfect fit. The first time I flunked an Anthropic interview (ca. 2022), I accidentally clicked a wrong button during their automated coding challenge. It was easy to swallow that failure. I made an honest mistake; I expect companies to reject candidates who make honest mistakes during interviews. This is different. I didn't misclick any buttons. My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough. This essay started as a fantasy: some hero at Anthropic reads this on HackerNews and vouches for me and I get the job and I help them guide humanity toward post-scarity AI abundance, forever and ever, amen. I'm ashamed of these thoughts. It's the same folly of explaining to an ex-girlfriend why she's wrong about her own experience. Dating was difficult for me. I don't mind feeling ugly or l...