[jackblemming]

Seems like they’re trying to hire nerds who know a lot about hardware or compiler optimizations. That will only get you so far. I guess hiring for creativity is a lot harder.

And before some smart aleck says you can be creative on these types of optimization problems: not in two hours, it’s far too risky vs regurgitating some standard set of tried and true algos.

[onion2k]

And before some smart aleck says you can be creative on these types of optimization problems: not in two hours, it’s far too risky vs regurgitating some standard set of tried and true algos.

You're both right and wrong. You're right in the sense that the sort of creativity the task is looking for isn't really possible in two hours. That's something that takes a lot of time and effort over years to be able to do. You're wrong because that's exactly the point. Being able to solve the problem takes experience. Literally. It's having tackled these sorts of problems over and over in the past until you can draw on that understanding and knowledge reasonably quickly. The test is meant to filter out people who can't do it.

I also think it's possible to interpret the README as saying humans can't do better than the optimizations that Claude does when Claude spends two hours of compute time, regardless of how long the human takes. It's not clear though. Maybe Claude didn't write the README.

[tmule]

Your comments history suggests you’re rather bitter about “nerds” who are likely a few standard deviations smarter than you (Anthropic OG team, Jeff Dean, proof nerds, Linus, …)

[jackblemming]

And they’re all dumber than John von Neumann, who cares?

[margalabargala]

Transitively, you haven't thought the most thoughts or cared the most about anything, therefore we should disregard what you think and care about?

[jackblemming]

The person replying was trying to turn the conversation into some sort of IQ pissing contest. Not sure why, that seems like their own problem. I was reminding them that there is always someone smarter.

[wiseowise]

Your comment history is littered with “nerds”, “elite”, “better” and all sorts of comparisons.

> I was reminding them that there is always someone smarter.

And even with this comment you literally do not understand that you have some skewed view of the world. Do you have some high school trauma?

[efilife]

> Do you have some high school trauma?

I am not sure ad personam is appropriate here

[jackblemming]

Where I come from, nerd is a term of endearment buddy.

> And even with this comment you literally do not understand that you have some skewed view of the world.

I’m well aware I don’t have a perfect view of reality and the map isn’t the territory. Do you?

[muglug]

If they're hiring performance engineers then they're hiring for exactly these sets of skills.

It's a take-home test, which means some people will spend more than a couple of hours on it to get the answer really good. They would have gone after those people in particular.

[Analemma_]

This would be an inappropriate assignment for a web dev position, but I'm willing to bet that a 1% improvement in cycles per byte in inference (or whatever) saves Anthropic many millions of dollars. This is one case where the whiteboard assignment is clearly related to the actual job duties.

[rvz]

> Seems like they’re trying to hire nerds who know a lot about hardware or compiler optimizations. That will only get you so far. I guess hiring for creativity is a lot harder.

Good. That should be the minimum requirement.

Not another Next.js web app take home project.

[saagarjha]

The solution was explicitly graded on creativity fwiw