Anthropic hiring manager’s advice for young engineers scared of losing jobs to AI

Anthropic engineering manager Felix Rieseberg has stopped asking job candidates to take coding interviews, and his reason is simple: Claude is now better at them. In a blog post on October 27, Rieseberg, who has led engineering for Claude.ai, Cowork and Claude Code Desktop, also shared advice for junior engineers worried about AI eating into their careers, at a time when AI has become the top reason companies give for layoffs.His take is more hopeful than most.

Newcomers bring fresh eyes, he argues, and AI has made their impact less dependent on years of experience. The catch is that companies rarely listen to people without status. “The only problem with all that ignorant power: Nobody cares what you think,” he wrote. The upside, he added, is that building something is no longer expensive.Why Claude has made the coding interview redundant at AnthropicSmall coding challenges were once a weak but useful signal of how someone would perform on his teams, but Rieseberg says that no longer holds.

Handing a candidate a little React task now makes as much sense as quizzing them on assembly, because Claude is better at both. His most impactful builders, he noted, succeed regardless of how they do on such tests.Instead, he is watching relatively new engineers overtake people who are probably better coders and have been around much longer. He calls it “hunger beats tenure”, and says the advice is really for anyone without social capital, status or power, whatever their title.He draws on his own career.

At Notion, one of his job interviews asked him to design an offline mode the company considered impossible, partly because it believed CEO Ivan Zhao would never approve the experience. That belief turned out to be wrong, and nobody had bothered to check.Anthropic manager’s five-step advice for junior engineers worried about AIFirst, chase business impact over your backlog. Work out what your company or department is trying to achieve, using your manager’s manager’s goals as a guide.

Then pick a radical idea that could sharply improve the odds of hitting those goals, and build a working prototype over a weekend instead of writing product documents and lobbying for a designer’s time.Keep that prototype to one idea. Juniors, he says, often hide “three excellent ideas among 20 bad ones”. Finally, use the outsider’s view. New hires understand users better than veterans do, and they haven’t yet learnt all the reasons something is supposedly impossible.Anthropic itself offers his sharpest example.

Staff had grown so used to Claude Code as a command-line tool that it took two relatively new engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, to build a working graphical version over one weekend. The first public version shipped about eight days later.AI layoffs are hitting entry-level tech jobs the hardestThe advice lands at an anxious time for freshers. AI was the most cited reason for job cuts in the US in September, behind 21% of all announced layoffs, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, with tech alone accounting for 29% of cuts.

Microsoft has offered buyouts to 60,000 employees and Oracle has cut 21,000 jobs. Goldman Sachs now estimates AI could displace up to 9% of US workers, roughly 15 million people, in the coming years.Anthropic is no exception. The company said last week that its share of entry-level technical hires has dropped from nearly 30% to 9% since March 2025, and its IPO filing shows Claude produced more than 90% of contributions to its codebase in September.

CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.Not everyone buys the doom. Some economists argue firms are “AI-washing” cuts they would have made anyway, and US unemployment is still hovering around 4.1%.Rieseberg admits he hasn’t yet worked out how to interview for people who build well with AI. For now, he scans resumes and portfolios for small prototypes that show taste, empathy and principled thinking.

If anyone has figured out a better way, he wrote, he would love to hear it.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.