Anthropic used to have a take-home that helped it hire most of its performance engineering team. Then Claude Opus 4 outperformed most of the people taking it. They made it harder, but then Opus 4.5 matched the best poeople on that one too.
To test whether someone could do real engineering work, they had to make the test less like real engineering work.
Other companies are doing the opposite and letting candidates use AI.
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See you in the next one,
~ Stephane