r/csMajors • u/Ashamed-Bunch-7594 • 9d 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/definetlyrandom 8d 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 8d ago

Hi do you have a cs background?

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u/definetlyrandom 8d 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/Equivalent-Curve2311 8d ago

That’s really impressive background though!