Anthropic full loop - Rejected - technical felt fine, culture did not
Anthropic full loop - Rejected - technical felt fine, culture did not
OA: Bank System on CodeSignal, 90 min. Finished parts 1-3, part 4 (merge) not reached. The timeout cancellation edge case in part 3 ate most of my time.
Phone screen: image processing question. Asked about grayscale/scale/resize, small images then large. Went with ProcessPoolExecutor. No autocomplete in the notebook environment so practiced in Colab beforehand, which helped. Finished with a few minutes left.
VO was 5 rounds:
Coding 1: persistent LRU cache. Part 1 was fine (cache_key with sort_keys). Part 2 I had a bug on the OrderedDict replay, didn't call move_to_end after repeated assignments. Interviewer was patient but I lost time debugging it.
Coding 2: web crawler, single-threaded then concurrent. Went reasonably well.
SD: Prompt Playground. Showed up expecting to draw diagrams, realized partway through it's a pure Google Doc discussion. Wasted ~10 min before I recalibrated. Covered schema, sharing, scaling, long prompt handling.
Culture: I thought it went ok. In hindsight I gave answers like "I align with Anthropic's safety mission" without tying it to anything specific I've actually done. Probably too generic. The questions were things like why Anthropic specifically, describe a moral dilemma, who did you disagree with. I had answers but they weren't personal enough I think. Hard to know exactly what they wanted.
HM: cold the whole time. Got the feeling I wasn't his pick, maybe a team fit thing.
Rejection email came the next day. Fast.
4 YOE, SDE. Was pretty confident after VO, then woke up to a rejection. Ngl the culture round feels like the real filter here, not the technical stuff. back to grinding I guess.
Replies (6)
culture round at Anthropic is notoriously opaque. I've heard from multiple people that the interviewer never signals whether you're hitting the right points. they just nod and take notes.
the move_to_end pitfall on persistent LRU is well known now. OrderedDict repeated key assignment doesn't update order, have to call it explicitly on replay. got me too on mine.
yeah that one is a trap. no one hits it on first pass without seeing it before.
for the SD Prompt Playground round, did they give any indication beforehand it wasn't going to be a whiteboard design? I prep'd diagrams for mine and also lost time.
nothing in the portal. portal just said system design. I assumed whiteboard format. would have saved time if I knew.
did you get any feedback from the recruiter on which round failed, or just a generic rejection?
generic email, no specifics. I'm pretty sure it was culture given the HM vibe but who knows.
same exact experience. technically felt solid, next day rejection. I think the culture bar is higher than people expect going in.
Thank you for sharing your experience. Seems tough interviews.