yeah, as this is so often the case, many times good, relevant applications are missed. I hope that this Hacker News post will get to one of the key people at Anthropic and they change their minds.
At my firms I saw this happen often. HR would review, or a junior engineer and pass on very good candidates. It wasn't until I set up a review system with A-class engineers that we started to catch the best people. A-class engineers recognize themselves far better than anyone else. But they prefer to build than review resumes.
I ended up building my own head hunting firm specifically to address the whole pipeline. That helped somewhat but head hunting is its own very odd space. Full of inefficiencies and bias.
With any AI company, there are always limits you hit. Energy, compute, optimizations, inference, team resources, money, and all the flows to make it a company. HR is usually the one that gets the fewest resources.
I think the issue is that some applications are not even reviewed. HRs can also learn the expertise of identifying strong candidates if they build up the experience and frequently talk with engineers about pros and cons of resumes.
first of all because the key point is they didn't even look at his application, and by any objective criteria he should have easily got through a "worth a human looking at it" screen. but also, hiring the developer of an open source library that you want to use internally and paying them to both integrate the library and work further on it is an excellent way to have a sustainable open source ecosystem, which both anthropic and the developer will benefit from.
> first of all because the key point is they didn't even look at his application (...)
Apparently the only suggestion that OP's application might not have been considered was due to the fact it was filed already too late in the hiring process.
Do you think every hiring process should restart whenever a new applicant sends a resume?
> (...) and by any objective criteria he should have easily got through a "worth a human looking at it" screen.
...unless that stage of the process was closed already? I mean, companies are bound to time frames to fill a position. Do you think it is reasonable to delay a project just because another applicant applied to a position?
> but also, hiring the developer of an open source library that you want to use internally and paying them to both integrate the library and work further on it is an excellent way to have a sustainable open source ecosystem, which both anthropic and the developer will benefit from.
Are you sure about that? I mean, I'm yet to work at a company where a software engineer position is so reductive and constrained that a developer has a single very specialized responsibility. Taking your personal opinion at face value, do you believe a project team draws any value in hiring the maintainer of a whole tech stack if all they are looking for is someone to implement a dialog box here or there?
> I mean, I'm yet to work at a company where a software engineer position is so reductive and constrained that a developer has a single very specialized responsibility.
What's the largest company you've worked at that was a tech company?
