The Pulse: Anthropic kills the coding interview

The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups.

Today, we cover:

1. Anthropic kills its coding interview. A team at the leading frontier AI company gets zero signal from DSA interviews and so has removed it from the engineering recruitment process. The rest of the company, and other AI-native startups, could follow.
2. Details on incident.io’s AI spend and ROI. The resiliency startup has slashed the amount it spends on AI; down from $4,500 per dev, per month, in August, to $1,600 now.
3. Amazon formally incorporates AI usage into SDE and SDM expectations. AI has been placed at the heart of software engineering after the company found a correlation between AI usage and productivity. Also, software development engineers (SDEs) and managers (SDMs) must be close to customers.
4. Microsoft issues new exit offers to engineers. The tech giant has offered 60,000 employees the opportunity to quit by the end of the year. But the exit package is not particularly tempting, and so the number of people who take it will surely be in the thousands, not tens of thousands.
5. Security incidents continue. Since last week, incidents have continued to be reported, and that may not change for the foreseeable future.

1. Anthropic kills its coding interview

A hiring manager at Anthropic who has led Claude Cowork and Claude Desktop, revealed that they have stopped asking coding questions to candidates for software engineering jobs. From Felix Rieseberg’s blog post (emphasis mine):