Felix Rieseberg, a recruiting manager at Anthropic and head of Claude-related product engineering, recently said that traditional coding-question interviews have been removed from his team's hiring process, stating that "coding interviews are dead, at least for my team."
Rieseberg believes that as AI tools like Claude can easily complete small React coding challenges and even handle low-level assembly problems, the screening value of traditional coding questions is declining. Such tests increasingly fail to distinguish candidates' real engineering ability, and interview results may reflect the capabilities of AI tools more than candidates' judgment, product taste, and collaboration skills in actual work.
For junior engineers, Rieseberg recommends proactively using AI to lower development costs and quickly build runnable prototypes around specific business goals, rather than waiting for complete product requirement documents or cross-departmental resource support. He believes that with AI drastically lowering the cost of execution, seniority is no longer the only factor determining impact; initiative and delivered results will become more important—a philosophy he sums up as "hunger over seniority."
This viewpoint reflects how AI coding tools are driving changes in software engineering hiring and talent evaluation. In the future, companies may focus more on candidates' ability to solve real problems, as well as their overall capability to turn technology into product value.