With AI writing the code, entrepreneurial thinking is now what counts most for newcomers at Anthropic

Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, has scrapped the classic coding interview. He argues that AI makes the tests pointless and that ambitious young developers can use it to overtake more experienced colleagues.

Rieseberg, who has led development of Claude.ai and Claude Code Desktop at Anthropic, says there's no longer any reason to give candidates small programming tasks. Claude now handles them better than the candidates do, he says. In his view, handing someone a little React challenge makes as little sense today as quizzing them on Assembly.

On his teams, good test scores no longer predict who turns out to be a top developer. Instead, he's watching relatively new engineers overtake more experienced colleagues. "Hunger beats tenure," he says. Rieseberg aims his post at "junior" developers, though he deliberately redefines the term. He doesn't necessarily mean people just starting out. He means any engineer without social status, power, or a network inside their company.

Why newcomers spot the problems veterans stopped seeing

Rieseberg argues that newcomers have a structural advantage because they notice problems that long-time employees accepted as givens years ago. He points to organizational researcher James March, who wrote in 1991 that organizations depend on a steady stream of naive and uninformed newcomers. Stripe founder Patrick Collison has also explicitly urged new hires to flag anything that seems strange to them. Veterans, he noted, stopped noticing those friction points long ago.

Rieseberg cites his time at Notion as an example. He was asked to design an offline architecture that people inside the company considered impossible. The data model was too complex, and CEO Ivan Zhao would supposedly never accept the only workable solution. The technical hurdle was real, but the founder's resistance wasn't. Nobody had asked him, because everyone treated it as common knowledge.

Cheap execution weakens the old hierarchy

The core problem for newcomers, Rieseberg says, is that nobody in the company listens to them. Because execution used to be expensive, organizations were built so that a few decision-makers could approve or block ideas. You had to work your way up a rigid hierarchy before management trusted you to actually build something. AI changes that equation because execution is no longer expensive, Rieseberg writes.

His first piece of advice builds on a 2011 quote from Patrick McKenzie, who wrote that "engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things." Developers should understand what their company is really trying to achieve and attach themselves to the parts that make money. A useful starting point is knowing your manager's manager's goals.

From there, he suggests picking an ambitious idea that would dramatically advance those goals and building a working prototype over a weekend. That skips the usual cycle of product specs, approvals, and lobbying designers or product managers. The key is to focus on one good idea instead of hiding three good ones among 20 bad ones. Anyone who builds a prototype that includes a new programming language, a backend, and mobile apps all at once will fail. The prototype should get the idea across so clearly that leadership immediately sees both the opportunity and the right person to run with it.

Newcomers have the edge on empathy

Rieseberg distinguishes between two types of engineers. Newcomers working on user-facing products bring a natural empathy for outside users. Long-tenured colleagues at Slack or Notion had a hard time seeing things from an outside user's perspective. Engineers working on infrastructure or internal tools, on the other hand, benefit from not knowing why something is supposed to be impossible.

He backs this up with an example from his own company. Two Anthropic engineers who were relatively new at the time, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, built the graphical interface for Claude Code over a weekend. The first public version shipped about eight days later.

Rieseberg now looks for small prototypes in job applications that show taste, empathy, and principled thinking. The classic coding interview isn't coming back, he says.

On one hand, Rieseberg's advice reads as a message of empowerment. AI becomes an equalizer that lets newcomers get past gatekeepers who've gone blind to their own company's problems. On the other hand, it moves the bar for entry-level jobs away from diligence and craft toward entrepreneurial thinking, product sense, and taste. Most universities barely teach those skills, and companies have traditionally expected them from experienced product managers or founders.

The engineers he holds up as models also build prototypes on weekends without being asked. "Hunger beats tenure" sounds motivating, but it assumes a hustle mentality that not every new developer can bring to the job.

AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans

Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.

Subscribe nowRead on for the full picture.

Subscribe for hype-free coverage.

- Full access to every article on THE DECODER

- No ads

- Join the comments and community discussions

- A weekly AI news recap via mail

- 6x/year: "AI Radar" — deep dives on the AI topics that matter most

- Daily AI news, always up to date

- Our full ten-year archive

- Covered by a team with 10+ years in AI