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.

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, …)

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.

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.

The solution was explicitly graded on creativity fwiw

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.

> 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.