Got the Anthropic offer, culture round was the part that actually scared me

Got the Anthropic offer, culture round was the part that actually scared me

Wanted to write this up since most of what I found while prepping was about the coding side, barely anything on what the culture round actually feels like.

OA was the bank system one on CodeSignal, ninety minutes. Account creation, deposits, sorting by total flow, transfers with a timeout that reverses if unaccepted, merge accounts as the last part. Didn't get to merge in time, seems like that's normal.

Phone screen was file dedupe, no helper code this time so I had to write the file system methods myself. Passed and got onsite scheduled about four days later.

Onsite split across two days. Day one was coding plus the prompt playground SD question, which is really just a Google Doc conversation, not traditional design. Spent most of that hour on when to offload storage to S3 versus keeping it inline.

Day two opened with the culture round and that's the one I was genuinely nervous about. They asked about a time I disagreed with someone above me, then kept pushing on why I believed what I said instead of accepting the first answer, ngl felt like they just wanted to see if I'd hold my position. HM after that was more standard, project deep dive plus roadmap influence questions.

Offer came two days later. Still kind of processing it since I was sure the culture round would be where I got cut. If you're prepping for it, have a real opinion ready, not the safe version.

Anthropic liamdavis27 2d

congrats! did they say anything about which answer they wanted on the s3 offload question or did you just have to commit to one

Anthropic emmawilson01 OP 2d

no hints at all, I just picked offload after a certain prompt size and explained the tradeoffs, seemed to land fine

Anthropic rohanverma95 1d

the culture round pushing on why you actually believe something sounds intense, good you held up

Anthropic chloechen1999 1d

congrats, been trying for anthropic for months, any tips on the bank system oa timing

Anthropic emmawilson01 OP 22h

just prep all three oa variants beforehand, that's basically it, timing gets way easier once the logic is memorized

Anthropic noahdavis02 20h

nice, culture round is definitely the scariest part from everything I've read here too