[ahussain]

They wrote:

> If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at [e-mail] with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing.

That doesn’t seem snarky to me. They said if you beat Opus, not their best solution. Removing “perhaps” (i.e. MAYBE) would be worse since that assumes everyone wants to interview at Anthropic. I guess they could have been friendlier: “if you beat X, we’d love to chat!”

[0x3f]

I suppose you could interpret it either way, but having dealt with their interview pipeline I'd choose the snark.

[dude250711]

Yeah, a nerd bypassed HR and showed their true character. They are swimming in easy money.

[lovich]

That paraphrases to

"do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you"

It sounds incredibly condescending, if not snarky, but I would classify those adjectives as mostly synonymous.

[miki123211]

I suspect this is partially legal CYA.

There's more to employees than their raw ability to go below some performance threshold. If somebody passes the test, but lives in an US sanctioned country with no plans to move, is well known for using the n-word on social media or has previously broken an NDA, Anthropic probably doesn't want to interview them.

[andruby]

I understand how it can be interpreted as snarky, but how could it have been written better? It's a hard path to walk and recruiting/interviewing is inherently sensitive it seems.

[Aurornis]

> It's a hard path to walk and recruiting/interviewing is inherently sensitive it seems.

Hiring and interviewing is in a weird place right now. We’re coming off of a period where tech jobs were easy to get and companies were competing for candidates. A lot of candidates quickly got used to the idea of companies working hard to charm and almost beg them to join. When those candidates encounter what it’s like to apply for highly competitive companies who have 1000x more applicants than they’d ever consider, the resulting straightforwardness can be shocking.

[lovich]

The original

>If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at [e-mail] with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing.

Not condescending

> If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at [e-mail] with your code so we can schedule an interview.

[entrox]

But now the meaning is different: you went from a potential interview to a guaranteed one.

[lovich]

No fucking shit, I paraphrased Anthropic's comments as

> do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you

If you think telling someone that after passing a test that 99.999% of humanity cannot pass, that they _may_ get an interview, you are being snarky/condescending.

[retsibsi]

That's not how paraphrasing works. They probably intentionally held back from guaranteeing an interview, for various reasons. One that seems obvious to me is that with the bar set at "Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch", it's plausible that someone could meet it by feeding the problem into an LLM. If a bunch of people do that, they won't want to waste time interviewing them all.

[Nevermark]

Or honest?

You may want to consider the distribution and quantity of replies before stating that you WILL do something that might just waste more people’s time or not be practical.

The classy thing to do would be responding to every qualifying submission, even if it’s just to thank everyone and let some people know the field was very competitive if an interview won’t be happening.

[YetAnotherNick]

So I like these public challenges, but as someone who set some public questions, ask any company who ran any public contest for their opinion. The pool is filled with scammers who either bought the solutions through sites like Chegg or sometimes even just stackoverflow.

[andruby]

pedantic: 0.001% of humanity is still 80K humans which might be a lot.

(yes, yes, not every human will try this test)

[throwaway743]

I took the "perhaps" as a decision to be considered by the applicant, considering they'd be competent enough to get in at a place of their choice, not just anthropic.

[lovich]

Does the applicant or the employer decide if an interview happens in your experience?

Do you think if the applicants are really in that level of demand that they would be getting a take home test instead of being actively recruited?

Legitimately lay out your understanding of a world where an employer is chasing after employees who are high in demand, give them a test that is expected to take hours, and have a hedged bet in their wording, instead of saying we will absolutely hire you if you pass X bar?