16 ms·

I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

• BoredPositron 1y ago
  I wonder if he writes cover letters to every company that uses his library.
  • romanovcode 1y ago
    Why not? This is second easiest way to get a great paying job, second only to nepotism.
  • ninetyninenine 1y ago
    He can probably use Claude to write is for him.
• physicsguy 1y ago
  Reminds me of the guy who created Homebrew being rejected by Google for failing some silly Leetcode puzzle.
  • rkomorn 1y ago
    Or the FastAPI creator not having enough years of experience with FastAPI according to a job posting.
    • Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      That is the most absolutely absurd wild damn story that I have written. Care to provide links... How can interviewers be such stupid, the fastapi creator had the MOST experience with it, he created it..
      • rkomorn 1y ago
        https://x.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830 https://x.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830 Edit: note that I wrote "according to a job posting". It's not the same as the situation in the parent comment.
      • RMPR 1y ago
        https://x.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830?lang=en https://x.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830?lang=en
  • delroth 1y ago
    Which is not something that happened, even according to Max Howell himself: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree/answer/Max-Howell?share=100e0bb6&srid=unBJ9 https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... > I feel bad about my tweet, I don’t feel it was fair, and it fed the current era of outragism-driven-reading that is the modern Internet, and thus went viral, and for that I am truly sorry.
    • outlore 1y ago
      it kind of happened, he went through seven interviews. from the same post: > But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.
      • forrestthewoods 1y ago
        The #1 way to not get hired is to be a dick. The brilliant asshole is the most toxic person you can have on your team. Don’t be an asshole.
        • UK-AL 1y ago
          Founders of a lot of companies also tend to be dicks. But seems to do alright. Seems to be a double standard there
        • itsalotoffun 1y ago
          Exactly this. No amount of cred, smarts, and genius that ends with "and I'm a bit of dick" will save you from my automatic red-line veto when hiring. I'm far from alone in this.
          • wiseowise 1y ago
            > will save you from my automatic red-line veto when hiring You're literally a power tripping dick hiding behind "I'm not letting other dicks in" facade.
  • RMPR 1y ago
    Iirc the homebrew guy did at least get an interview
  • wiseowise 1y ago
    Homebrew is “just” a package manager, not the core of part of Google. They could rip it out overnight and won’t even notice it. And Google gave him a fair shot. This guy got rejected by some automated system without even interview.
    • kunley 1y ago
      So, was he rejected by an automated system or did he go thru seven interviews, as other commenters say?
      • alias_neo 1y ago
        You might have missed the subtle wording; _That_ guy (Howell) got several rounds of interviews, _this_ guy (OP) got rejected by an automated system.
        • kunley 1y ago
          Not the "subtle" but simply, inaccurate wording then
          • alias_neo 1y ago
            Not inaccurate; it's perfectly understandable to a native English speaker, the nuance is subtle, "this guy", "him/that guy", but it is clear and commonly used language. "I just spoke to a guy about X, his opinion was different to the guy I spoke to about it last week. This guy said Y, but that guy insisted it was Z."
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • kaffekaka 1y ago
        GP is talking about two different people. "Him" is the creator of Homebrew. Seven interviews at Google. "This guy" is the creator of enigo (discussed in this thread). Automatic rejection by Anthropic. (Edit: upon page reload i saw the quicker answer.)
  • siva7 1y ago
    This story feels after all the years still awkward. Many people at Google don't have anything that impressive on their resume like being the creator of homebrew. Commentary like "Google looks only for computer scientists, so you need to have studied CS" is so out of touch that i sometimes questions if these people ever worked in a big corporation. There are thousands of different roles, many multiple times suited for that guy. I suspect the people who vetoed didn't like that guy for some other reasons.
  • cprecioso 1y ago
    I was thinking about this the other day. I think it might just be a thing of Google looking for a different thing than what made his open source project famous. Without no knowledge of the details further than mxcl's tweet; probably any performance issues even on simple code, get infinitely multiplied when running at Google's scale, slogging the thing, on Google's dime. From what I've seen of him, mxcl is good at designing a really approachable product, and on running an open source project. But homebrew is really slow, even on the latests Macs, even for basic cases. To me it seems then that he'd be more fit for a product owner/manager position than an engineering one, and that could be the root of his not-hiring.
  • tacker2000 1y ago
    This guy is so full of himself, no wonder he didnt get hired. Just read the homebrew github issues / forum and you will see what i mean…
• dash2 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • serhack_ 1y ago
    Not for any job: > Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo. I wrote a cover letter and sent out my application.
    • ajb 1y ago
      It's quite likely (and not necessarily bad) that they didn't really read the application. Most obviously, if they already chose someone but didn't close the deal yet, it's common for listings to still be up, but no-one will look at new applications unless their choice falls through. Never assume a rejection is about you personally.
  • bdavbdav 1y ago
    The nuance is it’s a job building with the tool he’s created. It’s like turning down the inventor of (insert DBMS here) to build a CRUD app.
  • imbusy111 1y ago
    They didn't even consider him, cause Anthropic received too many applications.
    • Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      I may be wrong but They didn't even interview him I suppose let alone, consider him.
  • scotty79 1y ago
    It's not that they didn't accept him. They just didn't read his application and told him as much. Basically "tl;dr" is what they responded with to his job application.
• bkolobara 1y ago
  > Unfortunately they thanked me for my application but said the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications. It seems like they didn't even look at his application.
  • bravetraveler 1y ago
    Nor their tech. For shame! Where's the enablement?! I was promised productivity.
  • sigmoid10 1y ago
    Even if someone from HR who screens for first rounds read it, they probably wouldn't understand why this might be an interesting candidate.
  • BenGosub 1y ago
    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.
    • freddealmeida 1y ago
      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.
      • BenGosub 1y ago
        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.
• ArcHound 1y ago
  I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV? Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.
  • RMPR 1y ago
    Implementing the features they would want to prioritize. Just like most companies hiring OSS maintainers.
    • ArcHound 1y ago
      That is also a good point, but I worry that the power has shifted. I worry that companies might get away with no compensation for such efforts.
      • bravesoul2 1y ago
        Only through trickery. E.g. "you might get a job if you work for free for us". In other news see many tech job ads these days :)
  • jaccola 1y ago
    Because - They can decide more easily what he works on - They know he loves this work and is very capable of doing it - They can own his output, a competitive advantage - He will likely cost them ~nothing anyway
    • ArcHound 1y ago
      While that sounds rational, I worry that the same reasoning is not applied in the HR department. But that might be just my frustration from experiences. To continue the devil's advocate: why bother with all of this, if the company doesn't have to and the OSS version is enough anyway?
      • ManlyBread 1y ago
• csomar 1y ago
  In my opinion, lots of open source was developed as a sort of portfolio to get hired. From 2019 onward, my impression is that your open source projects (regardless of how much they are used) matters less and less and it’s about HR mysteriously picking you up in their process than anything else. I think, now, your open source portfolio matters exactly nothing in the decision to get hired. I remember back in 2014-2019, it was hard and competitive to contribute to open source projects as they were tightly guarded. There are many projects that I use now in package.json that are looking for a maintainer. A complete 180 flip. My guess is that real free open source will disappear in a few years and what will remain are open source projects monetized by some business somehow. It’s a sad reality but that’s what the current people at the top have decided today.
• stog 1y ago
  Ah, it seems their AI powered cover letter review system isn't up to scratch.
• Shorel 1y ago
  Wait for the Meta offer, it could be a few millions.
• latexr 1y ago
  I’d be curious to see the outcome of changing the license to a Fair Source License or explicitly “You are not allowed to use this software if you are Anthropic, otherwise MIT”. They could still use the current version, but for any in the future they’d be forced to fork it or be prepared to face yet another legal battle (I can imagine some lawyers already salivating at the thought). It’s also curious the author is looking inside the app for proof their software is being used. If it’s MIT, mustn’t the license be included and available somewhere easier to verify?
• pentamassiv 1y ago
  Hey, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for submitting this. If you have any questions feel free to ask and please let me know how the writing was. It's one of my first posts so I'd like to improve
  • 4gotunameagain 1y ago
    Hey mate, I would just like to say that I wish they at least find it in their hearts to reward you for the value you have provided to them. Knowing cut throat american corps, I'm afraid the chances are nil. Even if a good amount for you is peanuts to them. Which is why my position is GPL > MIT..
    • mnmalst 1y ago
      They could literally give him 100k, 1mil or even 10mil which would still be a rounding error in their books.
      • eptcyka 1y ago
        Are they even profitable?
        • incone123 1y ago
          Profitable schmofitable! But seriously, that is orthogonal to whether those figures are rounding errors at anthropic's financial level.
      • pmontra 1y ago
        Don't know. A company can have a huge valuation on the stock market but that does not necessarily mean that they have cash to pay wages or can afford to pay a large team. If all they have are stocks they have to find somebody that buys those stocks with cash, then find a way not to run out of those money before selling more stocks. Eventually do an exit and stop worrying or become profitable.
• admissionsguy 1y ago
  [flagged]
• hleszek 1y ago
  I would guess like him that no human engineer ever read his application. The less they would have done in that case would be to at least thank him for his work, even if they don't plan to hire him for some reason. Automated systems, AI screening, and incompetent HR people are the bane of modern recruiting practices.
  • 4ndrewl 1y ago
    Perhaps, but just like vibe-coding being good-enough for some purposes they think vibe-hiring will get good-enough candidates? I guess at least they're dogfooding it?
• exitb 1y ago
  It's inherently risky to blog about your professional relationships under your own name and this is a weirdly small hill to die on.
  • snowfield 1y ago
    He was very courteous, no deaths on a hill to be found
    • SalariedSlave 1y ago
      Publishing anything about it, regardless of content, is already a hill. I like that people blog about these experiences and enjoy the insights, but I think it's never good for the authors..
      • lores 1y ago
        Everyone should. The only way to balance corporate power is collective action by individuals, and sharing information is a requirement for that. Corporations can't get away with quite as much brazen sociopathy if their actions are transparent and reported without - or a different - spin.
• forrestthewoods 1y ago
  Anthropic probably gets tens of thousands of applications. They seem to have filled their queue before even reviewing this particular candidate. Unfortunate but just reality. Always always always try to get into direct contact with the actual hiring manager. Blog author had a friend of a friend let them know a relevant role was open. The correct move is NOT to blindly apply. It’s to ask for an intro to the engineering manager responsible for the role.
• benzible 1y ago
  A friend of mine is maintainer of an open source service used (at least, at one time) by all of the major social media platforms as a load-bearing piece of their infrastructure (intentionally keeping it vague). My friend was invited to interview at one of the biggest and was rejected after having a bad whiteboard session. Of course they immediately replaced my friend's service (ha!)
• Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  I think that everyone should read this blog post "Overall I am overjoyed enigo is used in Claude Desktop and I tell everyone who listens to me about it :P. It's so cool to think that I metaphorically created the arms and legs for Claude AI, but I can't help but wonder if the rejection letter was written by a human or Claude AI. Did the very AI I helped equip with new capabilities just reject my application? On the bright side, I should now be safe from Roko's Basilisk. " I also felt like this way that did they just AI in their interviewing process? And I have a special love towards open source. And I personally might be happy too that a company is using my work ,but in the name of the holy licenses, Companies are just exploiting the free nature of this and the fact that it seems like not even a human looked at the person for such job, who created a library that they are using it for free... I was thinking of creating some code in MIT license, but I am going to create a code of AGPL except if you sponsor me on github or a special one time license which can grant you MIT. People might say that I am not fostering the open source community, but I am not giving corporations free labour so that they can be billionaires. I once saw someone write a software with the exact same idea (AGPL + gh sponsor me to get MIT) and the people in HN were pitchforking him, that's the harsh reality of the world. People want absolutely free labour. I think open source needs to ask, Have we become the modern peasants in the name of our altruism?
  • that_guy_iain 1y ago
    I think we need to compare our industry with other industries. No other industry relies on free labour from random people, which comes with no support or promises. I once told some non-techie folk about some code I wrote. It did something super simple and wasn't that big. They were all asking why I didn't sell it and thought it was crazy I would give it away for free with the BSD license. It was 900 lines of code... For us, that's nothing but for an average person they just think "I built it, I'll sell it"
    • Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      Ya I also believe it this way, Mostly I like to build stuff for my own problems or something that I just find fascinating. I am still in high school, so I was doing some question sheet that our teachers provided and there was an answer key but it had answers of everything. Now I don't know how other people approached it but I am really impatient and so I just open up answer key side by side but it reveals every answer. So I firstly created an AI to ocr to card generator but it was an hit or miss and so I discussed it with my friend and he said that he used to use paint and somehow in his convuluted manner basically have a slider which would reveal answer... I found it incredible and so I just created a single index.html that can do it. (Although vibe coded), Now I can't even think of monetizing such ideas when I realize that there are creators of some really incredible stuff and long convulated stuff and even they aren't sponsored so I have always felt that the scripts that I write or projects around such ~.5-3k loc. I just don't think of monetization. I just don't know.. I like hacking stuff, I just feel more comfortable rebuilding stuff even if its mediocre if I feel like I can change it to suit my purpose better I think that the only other industry that is gives as much completely free stuff might be research/science related, but maybe its due to the fact that computer are computer science too and thus related to academics. I really just love tinkering with software and just the aspect of freedom that it can provide , but sadly, I find it just hard to really make money without being a job and such stories on which we are discussing, just makes me feel like I am kinda right. On one hand we have 100 million payouts to researchers and on the other we have this, such disparity is kinda sad I suppose.
• nicksbg 1y ago
  As someone that works in HR, the incompetent HR combined with using AI for ATS ( or not knowing how to use ATS at all) is one of the core problems when it comes to losing quality candidates and is to blame for this. It should be illegal to hire HR from any education other than law, psychology, management and economy background. That way the responsibility would be larger, the ROI on HR would be higher (because the retention of the candidates and the quality of the candidates). Simply paying and promoting people with any educational background in a HR role is a waste of money which also creates problem for the company and not just employees.
  • graemep 1y ago
    > It should be illegal to hire HR from any education other than law, psychology, management and economy background. A lot of people with education in management/business do go into HR, at least in countries I know, and it does not help. People with extensive management experience would help but they will only take more senior roles. The other qualifications open opportunities interesting and well paid careers. How would you attract those people into HR? I am not even sure it would help if you could. I think the suggestion in the old management book by the guy who turned around Avis that you should have an old style personnel department to do admin and advice, and managers should have more involvement might be a way forward, but I am not sure it would work given the current level of regulation (in the UK anyway - I imagine most wester countries are the same). A lot of the function of HR is to avoid legal risk (e.g. fire people according to the rules, so go through the motions of warnings etc).
    • nicksbg 1y ago
      I think that old departments (personnel departments) should have been just modernized in reality. To be frank, in some cases a mix of HR/Legal department is cost saving too. What it really comes to is that a lot of people love to micromanage everything. If you hire someone that has integrity and educational background in subject, he/she will warn you if the decision you are making will have consequences in the long run. If you have someone that does not have relevant education, that simply does not happen. The managers micromanage, those people receive salaries and if they step out of the line even when they are right, they are reminded that they do not have relevant knowledge in said department (law/economy). This in turn leads to a lot of people gaining something called shallow experience which then in turns leads those people to hire someone that des not pose the risk to their position further down the line. The problem being in this case is that there are a lot of misses that happen when the HR is organized like that; from illegal hirings, not knowing key economic factors, not having a clue about the business itself, no clue about laws and procedures and so on. Which in turn does not really protect the company because the company loses both the money and employees.
• renewiltord 1y ago
  > Unfortunately they thanked me for my application but said the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications. Okay, they were just busy doing work and didn't have any time to look at applications so they shuttered the JD and auto-rejected anyone in the pipeline. Seems reasonable
• siva7 1y ago
  There is some dirty secret i learned in my time as a eng. manager: Working in open source / Being the maintainer of a popular library / Blogging about software: All this things won't give you necessarily a competitive edge but can work against you. It's counterintuitive but sometimes teams are looking for a more low-profile hire.
  • krzkaczor 1y ago
    How so? Care to elaborate? I get that bloggers/educators can sometimes be not the best fit for IC roles but doing open source seems like a huge advantage.
    • zero_shift 1y ago
      It might be similar to how employers dislike hiring entrepreneurs. People who already have a career bigger than their job
      • marcus_holmes 1y ago
        This is kinda fair, though. People who have run their own business make for really, really, awkward employees. It takes a really skilled manager to deal with them properly
      • BSVogler 1y ago
        It does not even have to be successful. After getting repeated feedback about my strengths as an entrepreneur and how it is not a good fit for that position, I am now toning that down a lot. YC advertises that funding a company is always good career choice because even if you fail it will be good in your CV. But my experience so far is that many companies see it as a red flag.
    • ozim 1y ago
      IF you have a side gig it is easy to think you won’t be 100% invested in company success. If you monetize you most likely will jump ship. There are other risks like burn out as you may read a lot of OSS contributors have — so when someone is hit by burn out it will be across the board not that they somehow will perform at their peak at job while burned out by coding on side.
• davidgomes 1y ago
  I wonder if it was geolocation? Anthropic is based in SF, the author seems to be based in Munich, and maybe they're not open to hiring people who aren't based in the US right now? Given the state of US visas right now, this wouldn't shock me.
  • zamalek 1y ago
    My company, which is significantly smaller, hires people in multiple countries across the world. You don't need an office to hire (I am sure there so exist countries where you do, but I expect they are the minority).
    • rgavuliak 1y ago
      Having worked in such companies, switching to that mode requires very different processes.
  • bravesoul2 1y ago
    London too.
    • Milpotel 1y ago
      After Brexit that's still quite a hassle.
• oytis 1y ago
  Doesn't look like he was rejected, rather not considered at all.
• captain_coffee 1y ago
  Unfortunately, this seems on par with recruitment practices in the summer of 2025. I can almost guarantee that they didn't even read that application / cover letter and auto-magically rejected it. "the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications" Zero effort. They probably didn't even realize the relevance of that specific application for that role. Unbelievable, I swear!
  • bootsmann 1y ago
    Tbf, I'd rather get a "we didn't review your CV" response than a template "we are continuing with other candidates :)" response. It softens the blow considerably and helps me as an applicant better keep track on which variation of the CV is working best because I can just remove this datapoint.
    • motorest 1y ago
      > Tbf, I'd rather get a "we didn't review your CV" response than a template "we are continuing with other candidates :)" response. Idk it sounds plausible that OP might just have been late to the party, and applied when the recruitment process was at the final stages.
      • pojzon 1y ago
        Its a perpetum mobile. Hiring managers use automation to filter candidates, coz its too many. Candidates see they dont even pass automatic filtering, so they apply with tailored CVs x10. This means even more CVs and more filtering and more CVs and more filtering and more CVs etc etc etc Im curious at which point ppl will understand its counter productive.
        • thatguy0900 1y ago
          Never, because they already know it is but fixing it requires both sides to deescalate in lockstep while individuals on both sides would benefit from not descalating
      • 1y ago
• nikolayasdf123 1y ago
  reminds be of the time creator of Homebrew was rejected by Google in coding rounds. but this is even worse, they would not even interview this guy. shame on Anthropic... (or is it Misanthropic?)
• gamblor956 1y ago
  Anthropic also rejected me for a job... that I never even applied for... This sort of silliness is what you get when you run crucial business processes using AI instead of humans.
• senko 1y ago
  The author should have just asked the friend of a friend for a warm intro instead of trying to go through the main gate. Sucks, but that's the reality of hiring (and getting hired) in tech in general.
  • Onewildgamer 1y ago
    Was wondering something similar, if OP had blogged it earlier when he found claude was using it and re-posted it in HN/reddit it in a sensational way to capture eyes. Maybe through one of the forums he could have got an introduction and a job doing what he loves. OP still has a chance now, maybe not anthropic, even other competitors can come knocking.
  • fnordpiglet 1y ago
    My experience with Anthropic and OpenAI is they’re not super interested in experience and don’t take internal references very seriously. Most of who I know that was hired were fairly junior folks and they have an early weed out that’s a fairly rudimentary but very specific Python programming quiz typically administered by very junior (like 1-2 years out of school) - even when interviewing extremely senior and experienced people of some substantial success and renown. This isn’t uncommon - meta and others do this too. But the programming quiz at Anthropic is sudden death and the first round, and the people administering it are looking for a very specific implementation that if you don’t see it immediately they just Gen Z stare and don’t discuss etc. It’s one of the more amateur selection processes designed with an extreme bias against more senior folks (frankly it felt unintentional just naive). (Meta etc scale the programming weight to seniority and the administrators scale as well - asking for depth of understanding of concepts as seniority grows with the expectation experience brings more to the table than syntactic knowledge). So getting an internal reference and being highly qualified for something they need done isn’t enough. You need to also make it past the 20 years old gate keepers and their amateur hour hiring process.
    • senko 1y ago
      Yikes this sounds awful.
    • 1y ago
• randomNumber7 1y ago
  He already works for them without pay in a way. Why would they hire him?
  • _giorgio_ 1y ago
    To close the source. To drive the development. To prioritize some bug fixes.
• LAC-Tech 1y ago
  I'm very much starting to re-consider open source. It mainly seems to be a way for already incredibly wealthy companies to get things for free, or to strategically release things to crush their competitors. Maybe we ought to go back to paying for proprietary software. A lot of people used to make money that way, ie by selling their own desktop app.
• rpunkfu 1y ago
  I don't mean to downplay the author's skills, but I don't see how creating an input simulation library fast-tracks someone for consideration in an AI-related engineering role.
  • pentamassiv 1y ago
    The role I applied to was not really AI related
    • rpunkfu 1y ago
      I wasn't aware of that; it wasn't clearly specified. It only mentioned a "secret" feature, but I assumed it was AI-related rather than UI-related. Additionally, Anthropic's Claude Code position on their website states that they expect their developers to work across the stack, including both front-end and back-end.
  • mijoharas 1y ago
    Didn't he say it was for the team integrating his input library into claude desktop? Seems pretty relevant experience.
    • rpunkfu 1y ago
      It mentioned an "open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop," which doesn't specify whether the "secret" feature is AI-related or UI-related. My guess leans towards the former.
      • mijoharas 1y ago
        To give the full quote, it says: > I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo. where enigo is his input library. It's quite interesting that you chose to end your quote a few words before the end of the sentence.
• UK-AL 1y ago
  Being able to get hired at a company is often unrelated to being able to generate viable products. If you want to get hired don't focus on skills to build useful things. Focus on psychology and charisma.
  • toptierdev 1y ago
    or just lie
  • SJC_Hacker 1y ago
    Yeah, no. You have to pass tech interviews and generally know your shit
    • dogleash 1y ago
      The tech interview still doesn’t fall into parent posters categories of “able to generate viable products” or “skills to build useful things” either.
    • lan321 1y ago
      Not too often tbh. You either get dogshit LeetCode or, more often, just a general chat about what you've done and know. There, social skills play a massive role. Make simple projects sound like state-of-the-art, present everything cool that happened as something you were directly involved in, present the 2 most obscure bugs in the project as something you fixed every other Tuesday when you get bored...
      • lo_zamoyski 1y ago
        Social skills are not a substitute for technical skills, but they are still important. You have to work with people.
    • motorest 1y ago
      > Yeah, no. You have to pass tech interviews and generally know your shit You don't understand. You need to meet the hard skills bar, but there are far more bars than the hard skills one. I think a hefty share of people here fail to understand the fact that there is way more to hiring a candidate than leetcode.
• toptierdev 1y ago
  bro probably didn't even go to Stanford or another "top tier CS program" (yes people literally post job ads with that requirement) smh
• globular-toast 1y ago
  Another reminder that if you write software under an MIT licence or similar then you're just working for companies like Anthropic for free. Use GPL or AGPL. It's the best thing we have. Remember that companies like Microsoft spend billions on PR and their goal is to make you think what's good for them is good for you. This is rarely the case.
• hotpotato17 1y ago
  Why is no one talking about how they had an indirect contact at Anthropic but didn’t use that connection? Your chance of getting hired is way higher with a referral.
• ipaddr 1y ago
  Just change the license. The company probably won't notice and keep pulling the new changes. Now you have a legal case.
  • motorest 1y ago
    > Just change the license. The company probably won't notice and keep pulling the new changes. Now you have a legal case. I think the world already grew tired of rug pull tactics. If you want your reputation to go down the crapper with a lame attempt to shake down an end user, go right ahead.
• lesser-shadow 1y ago
  AI companies try not to be evil challenge (impossible)
• lesser-shadow 1y ago
  Also I low how the IT hiring has a become a paradox: Companies won't hire you if you don't have enough projects in your portfolio, but by the time you will have enough stars on your github projects they have already used you to their own goals and are "not interested".
  • charcircuit 1y ago
    I don't think is true. I had more success removing my portfolio and letting my work history speak for itself.
  • motorest 1y ago
    I think you are making up scenarios in your head to try to rationalize away why you have a bad time at job interviews.
    • OldfieldFund 1y ago
      exactly. there is a reason companies are paying through their noses for some people
    • lesser-shadow 1y ago
      HR hands typed this post
    • gessha 1y ago
      What interviews?
• 0xpgm 1y ago
  I'm with Luke Smith [1] when it comes to non-copyleft licenses like MIT. Andrew Tanenbaum of the MINIX fame was similarly surprised to find that Intel had quietly included the OS he wrote in Intel chips, making it perhaps the most widely used OS in the world. He seemed disappointed no one ever reached out to him to tell him about it [2] [1]: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuck-licenses/ https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc... [2]: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/ https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
  • atommclain 1y ago
    To intentionally mix metaphors, I can't believe I'm about to knowingly kick this well worn hornets nest. It seems obvious that if Tanenbaum, or any open source project used a GP license in lieu of a permissive legally familiar license like MIT or BSD, the likelihood of the project being used in a commercial product would reduce to nearly zero. Intel would have used a different OS for their management engine. I'm glad the GPL exists and believe the world is a better place because of it, but it feels like more and more it's salad days are in the past and the world has moved on. The ops experience reminds me of the story of the maintainer of homebrew that despite widely being used at google was not able to be hired for a job there. It's disappointing and feels unjust, and I wish it was different.
    • ipaddr 1y ago
      Unless there was no MIT version.
    • tukantje 1y ago
      "GPL or pay" could very well be an option as well.
• exe34 1y ago
  The next version should have a feature where the first thing it types into any text box is "Anthropic, I wrote this library! Please look at my CV!" and then deletes it.
• stopthe 1y ago
  Unfortunately, the choice of license likely won't matter in the nearest future (if not already so). If a tech giant wants you open-source library, they will just point their agent to it and ask "to rewrite in the style of War and Peace". And more unscrupulous players won't even bother with a rewrite, as we've seen recently in the case of Cheatingdaddy/Pickle.
  • roenxi 1y ago
    The flip side is that if they can technically pull that off then the cost of writing the library has dropped so low that an OSS maintainer probably wouldn't have to work too hard to write it anyway.
    • pimterry 1y ago
      Being able to rewrite existing working code sufficient to copyright-launder it isn't the same as being able to write it from scratch, unfortunately, especially since LLMs seem to be allowed to ignore quite a bit of copyright law with complete impunity. Imo it's totally plausible that something will be expensive & time consuming to create, even with LLMs, but still easy to fork outside current licensing restrictions with LLMs.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • layer8 1y ago
        Rewriting it with a guarantee of not introducing any errors is still beyond current LLM capabilities, and there might be a certain correlation between that capability and the capability of writing it from scratch.
  • rcxdude 1y ago
    >If a tech giant wants you open-source library, they will just point their agent to it and ask "to rewrite in the style of War and Peace" Is there any evidence of this happening? And any legal theory behind how it might have the intended effect? Training being fair use does not make AI a magical copyright-removal box.
• eric-burel 1y ago
  On the electron part, it's common to (ironically) not support Linux. There are pretty annoying bugs with windows management (window will stay stuck in the background), build process are always OS specific, etc. So often not worth the maintainance.
  • pimterry 1y ago
    For generic consumer products, sure, but for dev & technical power user tools the audience is big enough that these arguments doesn't hold water. Stack Overflow's latest survey shows nearly 30% of professional devs using Ubuntu specifically (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#1-computer-operating-systems https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#1-computer-o...) and my own metrics (building a cross-platform dev desktop app with a global dev/technical user base) show pretty similar numbers: 65% windows, 20% Mac, 15% Linux. I would expect there's a significant (comfortably above 10%) Linux user base within the claude computer use audience. The practical reality of distributing is mildly complicated, but there's now lots of good cross-distro options, and not having to deal with code signing everything makes some parts much easier than Mac & Windows. Ignoring that many users is fair enough for a startup or first MVP, but quite surprising for a company at Anthropic's level.
• user94wjwuid 1y ago
  In the very least contract the developer for a little bit? Aren’t these Ai companies swimming in capital? Something almost dystopian about this
  • Matumio 1y ago
    Uh, a company not paying money for something they can legally use for free? There are so many MIT-licensed software libraries that everyone is using in a critical place, for profit, with zero money flowing back into the ecosystem that created them. It should surprise nobody, it has been like this for over a decade now.
• criley2 1y ago
  Everyone is suggesting that AI rejected this candidate but that brings up two points: 1) Is the hiring AI so incompetent that it did not realize it had a "S-tier pull" in the process and should have immediately prioritized the find? 2) Was the candidate's submission so bad that a reviewing AI couldn't even tell the massive relevance he had to their work? I suppose, alternatively, Anthropic could just not really care about Claude Desktop enough to hire a specialist for one part of the stack. Perhaps they're looking for much more "full stack AI" who can do a lot. They have 350-400 total engineers, is that enough to hire a specialist for Claude Desktop? I guess my question is: Did the AI fail, did the candidate fail, or did the AI work well and we just don't know the criteria it was succeeding in using.
• davidguetta 1y ago
  Dude they did not reject they did not even SEE you because they likely have 10k application per week. Just ask your friend for an intro.
• martin_henk 1y ago
  Hire OP, anthropic
  • scotty79 1y ago
    I hope Meta already contacted him.
• hollowonepl 1y ago
  Good findings, the rest not surprising tho.. online recruitment doesn't work at all these days. most likely your app wasn't read by anybody meaningful and did not trigger right flags in the HR system to even be spotted by clueless ladies working there. This post can give you some visibility unless somebody sees it as frustration/negativity then they won't bother either. aside of the core topic, best way to get a job these days is unfortunately either some elite job boards that work and both sides know why... or personal relations. All the automatic HR/recruitment platforms is illness and i'm sure that's what victimized your genuine application there.
  • arglebarnacle 1y ago
    I assume your choice to describe average HR reps as “clueless ladies” isn’t meant to suggest that you respect e.g. women software engineers on your team any less. But if the gender of the clueless HR employees isn’t relevant, why mention it? Maybe worth reflecting on whether calling them clueless ladies rhetorically emphasizes their cluelessness
    • tomrod 1y ago
      The OP should have left off "ladies" as that was unnecessary -- clueless is a sufficient descriptor for many people in many roles (whether genuine behavior, strategic fiefdoming, or learned helplessness). Here is the US BLS breakout of demographics by occupation category: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
      • wongarsu 1y ago
        To save everyone the click: HR managers: 76% female, HR workers: 75% female, HR assistants: 84% female.
        • tomrod 1y ago
          The distribution in other categories is fascinating, and HN doesn't format tables well. Though "saving a click" typically refers to spammy clickbait news articles that bury the lede, which a statistical table directly relevant to the conversation does not qualify as.
• sub7 1y ago
  [dead]
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• avodonosov 1y ago
  Ha-ha, they also trained their LLMs on your code and maybe will even train on that blog post :)
• henriquegodoy 1y ago
  I think this blog post was the best way to get into Anthropic, and it was well-deserved. That's the reality of hiring in tech: there are many non-technical people judging whether technical people are competent or not. Escaping that matrix through things like blog posts, cold emails, and Twitter threads can be great ways to break in and get noticed by these companies.
  • calvinmorrison 1y ago
    HR _hates_ hiring anyone, they just want H1-Bs.
• elzbardico 1y ago
  We should stop coding for free for billionaire organizations. The romantic era of Open Source is over. The only projects with a permissive license, I am comfortable sending PRs nowadays are the kind of projects that will hardly enable a big monopolist to extract more rent from society while being covertly funded by the debasing of currency promoted by the FED via Cantillon Effect.
  • coliveira 1y ago
    People should have realized this long ago. They're working for free for mega corporations. I refuse to contribute to this.
• sundarurfriend 1y ago
  Since licensing has come up a few times in this thread: I've been hearing recently that the Mozilla Public licence (or the EU Public licence) is a good middle ground between the "viral" GPL and the "do whatever" MIT - as per my understanding, if your code is MPL or EUPL, it can still be incorporated as part of software that has a different licence, but any direct changes to the MPL/EUPL licensed code itself has to be shared openly. Does anyone here have experience with them, or knowledge about whether that description is more or less correct?
• ninetyninenine 1y ago
  Can a license be modified? What happens in that case? Let’s say I want a Ferrari.
• noisy_boy 1y ago
  Is there an license that requires payment for usage for corporations above a certain size?
• cnst 1y ago
  > Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo. I wrote a cover letter and sent out my application. An automatic reply informed me that they might take some time to respond and that they only notify applicants if they made it to the next round. After a few weeks without an answer, I had assumed they chose other applicants. I've mostly stopped applying to the big companies long time ago (10+ years) precisely because I'd never hear back regardless of the match or the credentials. The only exception has been JaneStreet — they've contacted me almost immediately after a cold application with a small cover letter about my interests. Yet going the referral route, it's relatively easy to get an interview almost anywhere, even Google or Apple.
  • sigmoid10 1y ago
    >The only exception has been JaneStreet Huh. I guess if you decide to make OCaml your company's primary programming language, you have to take what you can when it comes to devs.
    • cnst 1y ago
      Yes and no, I imagine the biggest qualification for Jane Street would still be humility and not OCaml interest or expertise, and the pay probably has something to do with people's desire to apply, too.
      • sigmoid10 1y ago
        I wasn't talking about why people would apply, I was talking about the statement that they responded fast to a cold application. Generally speaking, if you drop a ton of applications for what I assume is a lack of willingness or skill to deal with OCaml, that certainly factors in your hiring process.
    • mywittyname 1y ago
      They put an absurd about of effort into their recruiting, so I'm not really surprised. Pretty much every math-related content creator I listen to has advertised for them. I doubt anyone who works there is "take what we can get" calibre. They want to attract people who casually solve college-level math puzzles for funsies. So I imagine it's the opposite and if you get hired there, you're surrounded by people who are extremely accomplished.
• brudgers 1y ago
  Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position "Coffee" with the friend of a friend would he better strategy than a cover letter in that case...more work, but better strategy. Because logically, getting hired requires demonstrating you are "the kind of person we want to work with." Being qualified on paper is not necessarily required.
  • chatmasta 1y ago
    You basically need to avoid putting your name into the main queue as long as possible. Make them do it manually on their side and keep track of it. If they want you, then you’ll bypass all the crap this way.
    • brudgers 1y ago
      More fundamentally, companies only hire people they know. “Coffee” is a way to meet “a company.” A letter is not. Even a letter of introduction.
      • chatmasta 1y ago
        Companies don't hire people. People hire people.
• cnst 1y ago
  Over a decade ago, it was my dream job to get a job at one specific FAANG company that is widely known to use a project I've contributed to. I'm a developer with a project they use, so, I thought, for sure someone would review my resume after applying on their website. Nope. After being ignored for a while, even having to get a Master's degree because no offers after a Bachelor's, I finally emailed a Director, who was previously a fellow committer at the project. People under him were not hiring at the time, but a recruiter from a different group has contacted me shortly, and I've had a 2-day flyout onsite arranged for two different positions, and had offers to join either one.
• lo_fye 1y ago
  Give this man a job, Anthropic!
• hopelite 1y ago
  I feel this is really a blog post about two indirect topics; one that has not been addressed for many years now, and another that is not new, but has been getting seemingly ever more acute recently. The first is the issue of permissive licenses like the MIT license, that seems likely far beyond an appropriate license structure for today’s world and environment, I would even argue inappropriate since the .com bubble. Software and creating has changed a lot since the 1980s to such a degree that I don’t think even the originator and early supporters of permissive licenses would be supportive of…peoples work being used in critical ways to build two and three digit billion dollar corporations without any kind of reward or compensation. It’s an odd kind of peak dystopian hybrid of communism and capitalism, sacrifice of the self for the benefit of the very few. I think it is at least time to discuss archiving things like the permissive MIT license (assuming it even makes any kind of difference at this stage) that are from not only a different developmental stage, different environment, but even a totally different country, society, nation, and world even. The second theme of this blog post seems to be the absolute seizure of the… what should we call it?…resource allocation of people? I cannot recall right now, but I feel like this is the second blog post themed around someone core to some function of some big tech company being rejected by said tech company; and that’s in the backdrop of the cacophony of people dealing with all kinds of dystopian insanity in the employment/job market from fake/scam jobs, AI interviews, etc. The system seems to be totally breaking down to some degree, even if it is still limping along, as is evident by the massively downward revised job creation numbers over several quarters now. How do you “revise” jobs numbers from 139,000 to 19,000? Ignoring any political partisanship, “revising” an estimate downward by 86% is not just an “whoopsie”, it’s evidence that thins are broken, regardless of why or even how. They’re clearly broken. I have approaching 0% confidence with anything related to Congress actually doing its job since it has effectively abdicated its cute role that provides it legitimacy, but discussing both of these topics in public can have a chance at forcing the muppets in Congress to address the issues, even if only for narcissistic and selfish reasons of being (re)elected to enrich themselves after they’ve gone back on their lies to get elected. And no, neither team is the better team; it’s all a con-job.
• tartoran 1y ago
  Come Anthropic, give this guy a fair shot. At least interview him in person or something.
• ironman1478 1y ago
  I don't know if this is a good opinion, but I don't think it's a good idea for independent individuals to use highly permissive licenses on their open source software. Companies will just suck it up and might not contribute back. It distorts the market because if the software didn't exist, they'd have to hire people, contract it out, etc. somebody would get paid. you've saved a huge company from having to hire people to develop the software they need, which is good for them, but imo just gives the companies incentives to devalue engineers. I also think the value of somebody open sourcing their work as a means to getting a job is questionable and never really been backed up by any data.
  • brabel 1y ago
    Excellent point. If you really want to make your project open out of the goodness of your heart, then use GPL. Otherwise you are explicitly giving any business, no matter how big or wealthy, permission to use it with no expectation of giving anything back. The license says that quite clearly. It says nothing about rewarding the author.
    • immibis 1y ago
      To be clear, so is GPL, but it puts minimum requirements on distribution, which only a literal money vulture would be opposed to. It doesn't hurt any actual people to use AGPL instead of MIT.
• HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  Never mind the application rejection, you'd have hoped that in choosing to base Claude Computer Use on his library that they might have at least reached out to the developer to say thanks, preferably with some token show of appreciation like a few Anthropic shares.
• fennecbutt 1y ago
  This is why wealth accumulation is so terrible. People with lots of money drive science and technology. They accumulate more wealth from science and technology whilst demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the thing that's making them the money. Most executives and investors just throw shit at the wall to see what sticks, imo. Then move on to the next place. That's why golden handshakes exist.
• scotty79 1y ago
  Dev: I wrote a part of your software that you are bragging about. Can I have a job? Antrhropic: tl;dr kthxbye
• SillyUsername 1y ago
  Anthropic throw this guy a consultancy on demand job, or at least a bit of money. He's made your business rich!
• mv4 1y ago
  At least Max Howell (Homebrew) got an interview before getting rejected: https://x.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://x.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en In all seriousness though, the situation sucks. But there's still upside. Someone might reach out.
  • jondwillis 1y ago
    Not unlikely given the HN attention this post got… Anthropic’s small hit to its reputation prolly isn’t worth the $2xx-4xxk / yr. they should be paying this nice person.
• HsuWL 1y ago
  It's truly unfair to see your hard work and efforts being plagiarized, especially since these companies haven't even told you about it and are profiting from it. This isn't just about helping improve the model; it's about cannibalizing the creators!
• hellofriendss 1y ago
  Well, if that's the case, the author should become an AI scientist. Top experts earn around $300 million working for companies like Google and Facebook. As a regular software engineer, you could only earn enough to pay some basic bills and survive from month to month. It's even worse in Europe: as a top software engineer in Germany, your salary will not even reach that of an unqualified floor tiler.
• justanotherjoe 1y ago
  I'm conflicted about this. On one hand i sympathize. On the other hand, it's really up to them who to hire. All the 'shoulds' discussed here are really just your assumptions, albeit very reasonable ones. Yeah it's really tough. You can't force someone to like you, they kinda have the prerogative. This reminds me of better call saul where hamlin paid millions of dollars out of his own pocket just to not have Chuck working at HHM anymore. Which by his own words was the greatest legal mind he ever met. Sometimes people's principles work against you. And you don't have any moral ground to challenge that. On the other hand, this attention might be working in your favor though.
• freedomben 1y ago
  While I do think it's easy (and justified) to be a little full of righteous indignation over this, I do think in general people (myself included, but not necessarily this author) tend to overvalue their code. It's an expression of our imagination and skills, and is our little baby, so it makes a lot of sense that we would ascribe higher value to it than someone else might, but I think the occasional re-grounding is healthy. Code in and of itself isn't usually very valuable, in fact it is often worthless. (Note I'm not saying Enigo is worthless, in fact it's clearly far from it, but the vast, vast majority of open source code does tend to be relatively worthless. Do a github search for various things if you don't believe me). Remembering this (at least for me) reduces the sting a little bit. Now that said, I think there's an opportunity here for you. It's rare, but I've known people who spun open source like this into a revenue source, not directly from the company but from other ways. My advice (if you have the time/motivation/willingness): Embrace Anthropic's use here, even maybe reach out and help accomodate them for features! Offer to help get the Linux build working (you would be a personal hero of mine for that!). They may even hire you once they see that you're genuinely good and helpful. I have seen many times in the past (including personal experience) trying to hire an open source dev, and we discovered that they weren't actually very nice people, and in about half the cases they were outright arrogant, possibly even with a superiority complex. The beautiful thing about code is that it doesn't care about personalities, but rather "does it work." In a workplace though, personalities are (often) even more important than code. We almost hired one of the most brilliant open source guys I've ever seen - his code was like a work of art, and his domain knowledge was unparalleled. But he was an asshole to the HR person, was openly critical of our interview process (during the interview!), and had virtually no tact when talking to what would be his fellow coworkers. It's ok (and sometimes very good) to correct an interviewer if they ask or say something technically incorrect, but the way you do that matters. Don't immediately retort with stuff like "that's completely and utterly wrong" or "that's a really stupid way to solve that." Nobody wants to work with people like that. Of course I'm not suggesting that OP is that way, but rather trying to share some personal experience as to why a company may not be in a rush to hire an open source contributor. To be clear, that doesn't justify what they've done, but I do think remembering that Anthropic isn't just a giant monolith, but is rather made up of other humans that are just as human as we all are can be very helpful at understanding why things sometimes go the way they do. On the license question, I'm a huge proponent of the GPL/AGPL (I would always suggest licensing end-user software this way), but I think for libraries like this MIT is usually the best option. Had you licensed it AGPL it may never have gotten traction in the first place, and you'd be worse off than you are now. It's possible it could have led to licensing, but having seen the inner-workings of big tech companies, I highly doubt it. Apologies for the length of this. It struck a chord with me because I've had libraries used in a similar way (though at a much smaller scale) and had to do a lot of soul searching on it. Regardless, awesome work! At a minimum you now have an awesome story to tell and you're part of a small club of people that have been successful enough to get hit :-D
• nisegami 1y ago
  I see this more as an hiring failure than an OSS failure to be honest.
• mov 1y ago
  Oh man, hiring is so broken, so basically: "we want to hire someone to work in this super secret feature that uses lib X" "cool! I'm the author of lib X" "no, thanks"
• BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  In a functioning society, when a company is valued at 65b and uses tech one guy made as a core component in one of its offerings, they’d toss him a million or two, if only to ensure they suffer no consequences later. It’s bizarre he’s got no recourse for something like that.