Anthropic onsite done, now the culture round has me spiraling
Anthropic onsite done, now the culture round has me spiraling
Just wrapped up onsite for Anthropic yesterday and now stuck in that horrible waiting phase, 4 rounds total including the phone screen. Wanted to get some outside perspective because honestly I can't tell if I bombed the last one or not.
For background, I'm about 5 YOE coming from a mid size fintech, so a lot of this felt like jumping into deep water fast. Phone screen was the file dedupe problem, no starter code given, had to write my own file system methods from scratch which ate into my time more than I expected. The followups went into distributed dedup which I only half answered.
Onsite had one coding round that started normal enough and then turned into this discussion only followup about reconstructing a trace when you only have the tail end of it. Felt like I was guessing out loud for most of that part. System design was the doc review format, they hand you an existing design and you're supposed to spot the flaws, I spent way too long marking issues instead of actually engaging on the followups and only realized halfway through what I was doing wrong.
Culture round is the one messing with my head though. Nothing went badly exactly, I just walked out with zero read on whether my answers landed. Anyone who's been through an Anthropic culture round know if that vague feeling usually means good or bad? Trying not to spiral but it's hard not to.
Replies (6)
Onsite days always feel like a fog after the fact, hope you hear back soon either way.
Wait the tail end trace question sounds rough, did they give you any hint at all or just let you flail? I've heard variations of that stack trace question come up a few times.
No hints at all honestly, felt like I was just talking out loud hoping I'd land somewhere close to what they wanted lol.
How much time did you actually get on the doc review round before they moved you to followups? Curious how much of that was on you versus just the format being weird.
When I had something similar it felt like there was no clean signal for how much time to spend marking versus discussing, kind of a trap either way tbh.
The culture round vagueness is so real, I went through mine a few months back and still didn't know if I passed until the offer came. Try not to read into the blank interviewer face too much.
Rooting for you, sounds like you handled the coding stuff okay even with the messy followup. Fingers crossed on the rest.
How long was the phone screen ? Seems like a lot to write, if you had to implement an in-memory filesystem, to test it out.