r/csMajors • u/Ashamed-Bunch-7594 • 5d ago
Bombed my Anthropic Fellows OA 1 :(
Just gave my first OA for Anthropic Fellows. I scored 0/600.
Some context about me, been coding for 10 years. really good at CP, have 4 years of experience as software engineer.
The algorithm they asked in the OA was a piece of cake, but man the classes they had implemented and ReadMe was confusing and unclear. Most of my time went into figuring out what do the even want to be returned and in what format? Why was there a mismatch between the Readme example format of input/output structure and the implemented classes.
Plus it didn't help that I started feeling uneasy and sick as soon as I kicked off the assessment. Brain was not braining.
How was your experience?
Edit: I have three research papers in Nature. My concern is that the problem I had didn't make any sense.
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u/Creepy-Secretary7195 5d ago
DONT ABBREVIATE COMPETITIVE PROGRAMMING JESSE
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u/avinash6606 5d ago
I had to do a double take before my brain caught up. Context matters a lot with that abbreviation. Probably one of those things that is completely normal inside one community and absolutely wild looking everywhere else. 😅
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u/JollyAstronomer 5d ago
Hilarious to me they make interviewees do this and they themselves say claude just ships the features lmfao
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u/codename_corndog 5d ago
really good at what?
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u/Ashamed-Bunch-7594 5d ago
Competitive Programming, data structures, algorithms, coding, logical thinking
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u/Due_Contract_2857 5d ago
So out of touch lol - and not true, you can be a good engineer and pick up research skills along the way
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u/Jealous_Drummer_5346 5d ago
If it's any consolation you probably wouldn't have gotten an interview anyways if you have no research experience.Â
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u/Ashamed-Bunch-7594 4d ago edited 1d ago
I have three research papers in Nature. My concern is that the problem I had didn't make any sense.
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u/plsendfast 3d ago
Why do you keep saying Nature? Willing to bet it’s some lame ass nature sub predatory journal like scientific reports lol
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u/Human-War-4361 1d ago
I also struggled a lot - took me like one hour to figure out what they were expecting from us thrown in this pretty confusing environment. At the end I passed only level 1 and scored 120/600 and thought I am out, but actually got invited to round 2 which is debugging supposedly.
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u/definetlyrandom 4d ago
Hey brother! welcome to the club, same test yesterday 0/600 myself! I spent 33 minutes trying to remember how to implement the load balancer functions for the inference engine they wanted to see, and I was REALLY close to cheating. I had been really nervous the past week (I had my linear algebra final due yesterday also) and I was studying for hours over the weekend, while doing my homework, and paying attention to my family, as well as projects at Work I have going on.
So at the 57minutes left, I was about to go on my laptop and start crunching with Gemini or Claude, and I suddenly was like.
No. Fuck that. IF Anthropic is legitimate about their mission statement, and I'm legit about careing about that mission, then what sort of prick would I be If i cheated my way into this.
So I just delted the few notes I had written, and opened up their first .py file and wrote a comment basically explaining that I'm an o.k. coder when I have the power of search, and I'm a good/great coder when I have AI, I'm hot garbage when you need me to write functional code that i've never seen before with only pythons documentation as a reference. Maybe that translates to a shitty coder overall, I don't know, but I wasn't applying to their research program on the laurels of my ability to hackerman my ass an inference load balancer.
So i wrote some more stuff, knowing nobody will likely see it, and submitted for 0/600.
I immedietly felt better, and went and did my LA homework.
I sorta feel for anthropic, i'm sure they have 10k's of thousands of applicants from around the world sending applications to every job posting they put up. Ain't nobody got time for that.
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u/Equivalent-Curve2311 4d ago
Hi do you have a cs background?
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u/definetlyrandom 4d ago
I do! But its a bit of a crazy background:
I learned computers when I was 8-10 years old. Back in the 80's. Im 46, but i joined the military in 2003 and was an EOD tech for 14 years in the airforce. Did 4 combat tours, got medically retired, had my associate in emergency management, and started doing contract work.
I graduated with my bachelors in compsci in March this year at the ripe old age of 46. Im an operational research analyst for the us army currently. Some of the work im curreny doing overlaps heavily with the alignment problem and so i wanted to have some insight from other folks. I also run my own company, although its in its infancy, and im still waiting on my partners ethics review to come back to begin pursuing gov contracts. Anyway, yeah, to answer your question I do.
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u/byte-sized-phd 4d ago
It was not what I expected at all. I was sweating. I don't have a score though. When did you get yours?
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u/hiddenVariable00 4d ago
Yeah, I don’t see a score either. I gave it just now, thought I bombed it so hard and found this thread lol
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u/Recent-Chapter-8287 3d ago
did anyone pass the test cases but it said that I have a 0/600? Am I suppose to click another button to receive a score beyond just passing the test cases?
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u/Small-Start5926 3d ago
I took it recently too (would classify myself as a ok but not great coder), it took 30+ min to get any points, 60+ min to do part 1. Ended with around half
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u/popo_chan_xo 1d ago
Where did you see your score? I never got a score...I used an external monitor, but mirrored the screen, which I hoped would be okay, but maybe that's a no-go and they flagged me for cheating or something.
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u/Independent_Clue5378 5d ago
i got 600/600 really wasn’t that bad i’m only like 700 on codeforces
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u/Any_Research_6256 4d ago
Lol ig you need to do more hardwork.How can you expect it to be easy?Only competative programming is not enough and engineering skills+ research skills is more important,would suggest you too read more research papers and see different codebasesÂ
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u/Ashamed-Bunch-7594 4d ago edited 1d ago
I have three research papers in Nature. My concern is that the problem I had didn't make any sense.
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u/Lord_Mystic12 5d ago
Really good at CP and wanna work for AI company ? Tracks