[HN Gopher] I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
___________________________________________________________________
I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
Author : serhack_
Score : 693 points
Date : 2025-08-06 07:25 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (grell.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (grell.dev)
| physicsguy wrote:
| Reminds me of the guy who created Homebrew being rejected by
| Google for failing some silly Leetcode puzzle.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Or the FastAPI creator not having enough years of experience
| with FastAPI according to a job posting.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://x.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830?lang=en
| delroth wrote:
| Which is not something that happened, even according to Max
| Howell himself: 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Founders of a lot of companies also tend to be dicks. But
| seems to do alright. Seems to be a double standard there
| itsalotoffun wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| itsalotoffun wrote:
| You've got it backwards friend
| skeezyboy wrote:
| umm, linus torvalds, richard stallman, elon musk to name
| a few
| petcat wrote:
| None of those people ever applied for a job at Big Corp
| where one of the most important aspects is to be able to
| work well with other people and tactfully navigate the
| social structure of the company.
| skeezyboy wrote:
| being a dick has not hindered there prospects. id argue
| dickheads are more prevalent in tech due to the
| prevalence of autism
| ryandrake wrote:
| Nobody is saying it hinders their prospects in general.
| They're just saying that "being a dick" is incompatible
| with a specific kind of job: one that requires
| collaborative and cooperative work with other people and
| navigating the social hierarchy of a company.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| In my experience, it's the nice people that get fired and
| the assholes that get promoted. It's not exactly a secret
| that silicon valley is full of arrogant assholes.
| stephenr wrote:
| I mean, he's also the same guy who apparently thought "Unix
| ideas that have worked for literally decades, nah fuck
| that. I know better".
|
| It took over a decade before the project made _some_
| improvement on how the default install path is handled.
|
| To my knowledge it _still_ has absolutely atrocious
| dependency resolution relative to things like DPKG.
|
| Not hiring this guy is honestly like a fancy restaurant not
| hiring the guy who comes up with the new McDonalds obesity
| burger special menu. What he created is _popular_ , it's
| not _good_.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Google is not a fancy restaurant. Five-guys private
| consultancy is a fancy restaurant. Google is the
| McDonalds of all McDonaldses, it makes software that is
| used by everybody, whether they want it or not, and you
| can't turn a corner without hitting something they
| control.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but
| people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have
| used that.
|
| This line could apply to millions of people around the
| globe.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I am often a dick_
|
| It make things really nice and easy when someone tells me
| enough about themselves in just a few words to make me not
| want to work with them.
|
| Maybe that's why he didn't get hired? His dickishness came
| through in the interviews?
| scotty79 wrote:
| I don't think most people who behave in this manner have
| enough self-reflection to write something like that. They
| would rather write that they are opinionated, principled
| or decisive or some other bs.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Building popular software doesn't mean you're a good
| programmer, especially since at that point Google was looking
| heavily at CS concepts and he admittedly wasn't good at that.
|
| It's also possible he would have been hired if he applied for
| L-1. A lot of people get an ego check applying to Google
| where they're a senior staff engineer or a CTO at a small
| company and get an L5 offer.
| zahlman wrote:
| Are people who don't work for Google supposed to understand
| what these levels mean?
| smsm42 wrote:
| True but surprisingly grinding leetcode puzzles also
| doesn't mean you're a good programmer. In fact, in my
| decades-long now programming career, I've had to take many
| more decisions of the homebrew kind (e.g. how the thing is
| going to work, how the API is going to look like, will the
| users love or hate that feature, etc.) than the leetcode
| kind. And now I am thinking the former is even more
| important. If you get the leetcode part wrong, worst thing
| your code would be slow. Not a good thing but also not a
| complete disaster - you can come back and optimize later.
| If you screw up the design and interface part, nobody would
| be using it - or worse, they'd be using it in ways it
| wasn't supposed to be used - and then it doesn't matter how
| fast it is.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| > True but surprisingly grinding leetcode puzzles also
| doesn't mean you're a good programmer.
|
| I don't think anybody with a modicum of experience finds
| this surprising at all.
| RMPR wrote:
| Iirc the homebrew guy did at least get an interview
| wiseowise wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So, was he rejected by an automated system or did he go thru
| seven interviews, as other commenters say?
| alias_neo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not the "subtle" but simply, inaccurate wording then
| alias_neo wrote:
| 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."
| kaffekaka wrote:
| 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.)
| benbristow wrote:
| Does 7 interviews not seem excessive? Got my current job
| with 1.
|
| Silicon Valley lives in lalaland.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| 7 is a bit excessive but it might be including team
| matching which is a bit more informal and less obnoxious
| than the leetcode style interviews
| motorest wrote:
| > Homebrew is "just" a package manager, not the core of part
| of Google.
|
| Yes, this. Sometimes I wonder if those coming up with the
| Homebrew example have any experience whatsoever with software
| development. I mean, sure the project is popular and surely
| doesn't hurt on a resume. But does it showcase any level of
| technical expertise or mastery? No, I'm afraid not. I would
| bet that the majority of software engineers would be able to
| put together an equivalent system in a week or so. Think
| about it, and pay attention to what are the system's
| usecases. It's hardly rocket science.
| m-s-y wrote:
| >does it showcase any level of technical expertise or
| mastery? No, I'm afraid not.
|
| But it does show that he can develop and ship a popular
| product, something outside the capability of so many "great
| engineers". Good luck generating any revenue on the backs
| of smart engineers that have no stomach for understanding
| the nuance of development over and above writing and
| checking in code.
| wiseowise wrote:
| It says nothing about fitting office culture of Google,
| or generating successful projects, for that matter. If
| he's so good, how come there's nothing else besides brew?
| siva7 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| 42lux wrote:
| I wonder if he writes cover letters to every company that uses
| his library.
| romanovcode wrote:
| Why not? This is second easiest way to get a great paying job,
| second only to nepotism.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| He can probably use Claude to write is for him.
| bkolobara wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Nor their tech. For shame! Where's the enablement?! I was
| promised productivity.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| motorest wrote:
| > I hope that this Hacker News post will get to one of the
| key people at Anthropic and they change their minds.
|
| Honest question: what leads you to believe they should change
| their mind?
| zem wrote:
| first of all because the key point is they didn't even look
| at his application, and by any objective criteria he should
| have easily got through a "worth a human looking at it"
| screen. but also, hiring the developer of an open source
| library that you want to use internally and paying them to
| both integrate the library and work further on it is an
| excellent way to have a sustainable open source ecosystem,
| which both anthropic and the developer will benefit from.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, it sounds like a non-story to be honest.
| ErikBjare wrote:
| It's a personal blog
| amelius wrote:
| Sure, but on HN it is a story.
|
| The "it rejected me" in the headline should have been "it
| didn't notice me".
| throw_workday wrote:
| Maybe Anthropic uses Workday for its HR, which is being sued
| for possible systematic discrimination by AI. (See links below)
|
| https://www.insidetechlaw.com/blog/2025/06/workday-ai-lawsui...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2025/06/23/what-th...
| freddealmeida wrote:
| I hate workday.
| ArcHound wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Implementing the features they would want to prioritize. Just
| like most companies hiring OSS maintainers.
| ArcHound wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is an incredibly short-term thinking. The reason is
| simple: the author is not obliged to continue while this
| sort of thing can be demoralizing.
|
| I don't know about the author's approach to this matter,
| but if I would find out that a company is making a killing
| using my software and then that company would refuse to
| even give me an interview I'd probably stop loving doing
| what I do. Sure, the software is under MIT license and it
| was the author's choice to do so, but what's the point of
| doing it under such a license when you can't even count of
| it mattering in a resume? What's the point of providing
| free labor to a company with revenue in billions? If you
| look at the author's blogpost, the only benefit the author
| mentions is making the number of downloads go up and that's
| just pathetic.
|
| I am reminded of an another, similar case with a library
| called "FluentAssertions". This library used to be free to
| use by anyone until the author changed the license and
| started charging money for commercial use. The author did
| that because he spend several year maintaining the library
| on his own time and dime and megacorpos like Microsoft
| wouldn't even bother to donate despite using it
| extensively. What happened afterwards was that the author
| got shat on by everyone on the internet for daring to ask
| for money. In the company I work for his library has been
| replaced with an another free fork at a incredibly fast
| pace. All that free labor and the author got dropped as
| soon as they fell out of line.
|
| The worst thing is that it wouldn't probably take much to
| make the author of the library happy. Even if they weren't
| interested in hiring him they could still acknowledge him,
| talk to him a bit to maintain good relations, throw him a
| nice donation as a thank you and now it would be a nice,
| good PR story instead of an another reminder that
| corporations are just looking to squeeze out value out of
| all of us.
| ArcHound wrote:
| Is it short term? Seems like the MS and the others got
| exactly what they wanted.
|
| Exploiting the passion for free work is a trade that will
| keep happening as long as there are passionate
| inexperienced people.
| yubblegum wrote:
| Sorry but have to call b.s. here. Many of us did in fact,
| in this very forum, kept pointing out that dumping on GPL
| (and the man and his ideas behind it) was a mistake and
| that non-gpl oss was for chumps. And we were greyed to
| oblivion. Same exact story as with surveillance tech.
|
| Hackernews is hugely responsible for many of the ailments
| of this field in 21st century. Own it.
| ArcHound wrote:
| I don't think we're in disagreement. And it wasn't me
| greying people out. But yes, I see what you mean by the
| "spirit of HN".
| mystraline wrote:
| > Many of us did in fact, in this very forum, kept
| pointing out that dumping on GPL (and the man and his
| ideas behind it) was a mistake and that non-gpl oss was
| for chumps. And we were greyed to oblivion.
|
| I'm not entirely sure that was intentional. On Reddit, it
| would be called 'brigading', and basically getting your
| corpo-techbros to -4 and flagkill posts.
|
| If done fast enough, you only need 5 500+ karma accounts
| to sink a post.
|
| Sometimes, I'll say something unpopular, but defensible.
| Its interesting to see the dramatic swings those
| contentious posts take.
| yubblegum wrote:
| The fact that the management of this forum, who are VCs,
| permitted such a mechanism is part of the "own it, HN"
| assertion. HN has baked in something like 'peter
| principle' into the forum. Karma Grifters who post
| articles that get them over the 500 points are then ala
| Peter Principle granted the right to 'grey out' actual
| thoughtful comments.
|
| Are you telling the management of this outfit never
| looked into this phenomena?
|
| How about ageism? Mr. Paul Graham and personality cult
| asserting that anyone over 20 something is no longer
| viable for leading edge tech work?
|
| We used to call these VCs "vulture capitalists" in the
| 90s. We geeks were so right about so many things in the
| 90s: We were right about GPL. We were right about VCs. We
| were right about surveillance tech. We were right about
| outsourcing ...
|
| But alas, "corpo-techbros" empowered by thoughtless forum
| software courtesy of Paul Graham and company got into
| this mess.
| mystraline wrote:
| > Are you telling the management of this outfit never
| looked into this phenomena?
|
| To counter, I think that HN is being used as a testcase
| to shove techbro and VC ideology across all of tech. And
| secondly, its some of the most potent tech market
| research. Its a textsearch goldmine.
|
| I believe YC knew what they were doing, and intentionally
| chose this course of action.
|
| I'm guessing you're not in the VC or founder club. I only
| found about that https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-
| news-undocumented
|
| > Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's
| usernames show up in orange, which -- although not an
| explicit benefit -- does allow fellow YC founders to
| immediately identify one another in discussions.
|
| Even with the significant bias here, I still read it. I
| also read lobsters as well, which is here minus techbro
| insanity.
| yubblegum wrote:
| > I believe YC knew what they were doing, and
| intentionally chose this course of action.
|
| Seems plausible. They certainly are not dummies. They
| just have a different 'value system'. So, yeah.
|
| (Thanks for lobsters tip. til.)
| jondwillis wrote:
| They definitely know now, even if it wasn't the original
| intent.
| andrepd wrote:
| I guess the author can learn their lesson and not use a
| permissive software license which lets behemoth
| corporations do exactly this.
|
| It's very sad, but the resigned and almost _subservient_
| tone of the author does not lead me to believe a lesson
| has been learned.
| trueismywork wrote:
| They probably already have someone working on top of it but
| it's just closed source because of the license.
| dmurray wrote:
| But they are hiring someone else to work on it.
|
| > I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the
| team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude
| Desktop using enigo
| pentamassiv wrote:
| Right now it is just a hobby and there are still a number of
| bugs remaining. Since I don't have an income from it, I can't
| dedicate more time to it. Hiring me would allow me to work on
| fixing them full time and make the progress much faster
| ArcHound wrote:
| Hey, props to your attitude, and I wish you the best of luck.
|
| Obviously, you've provided value to a company in a really in-
| demand area. It doesn't feel right to treat the contributors
| like this. Sadly, it seems that the companies have the power
| and the intent to just abuse and exploit
|
| I don't have a solution. I am just expressing my frustration
| from the perceived injustice.
| trueismywork wrote:
| Do you think they already have hired someone to work on it
| but are just not releasing the source code?
| pentamassiv wrote:
| I don't think so. They use an outdated version straight
| from crates.io (at least in the publicly available version
| of Claude Desktop).
| joelfried wrote:
| Seems like it's time to remove links to outdated
| versions. Replace them with your resume?
| nathan_douglas wrote:
| I believe crates doesn't really allow that, partially so
| that people can't easily sabotage the supply chain like
| that :)
| pentamassiv wrote:
| Correct, you cannot remove a version or the whole crate
| unless very specific criteria are fulfilled. You can
| "yank" versions. That prevents people from adding the
| version as a new dependency, but if you relied on it
| before it got yanked, your build will succeed.
|
| I wouldn't delete old versions even if I could though. My
| goal is to publish a rock solid library that everyone can
| depend on and build awesome projects with
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| That's like having someone say gives you free tractor blueprint
| but you can hire its inventor to come and put it together, or
| some other engineer.
|
| An FOSS project is rarely production ready that is really free
| as in beer considering TCO. Especially for a tech company.
| mac-mc wrote:
| Lets make a new license: If you wont hire me, use my library
| and make over $100m in revenue a year, you must pay a
| commercial license to use my software equivalent to the total
| cost (equity grants included) of an average principal engineer
| or director who manages 50+ people at your company in your
| highest COL metro, whichever is higher. For OSS work that isn't
| mostly one author, make it go to the foundation for the OSS
| project instead and apply the rule to principal maintainers.
| You could even scale it in multiples of revenue in principle
| engineer units of $1b per principle engineer of global revenue.
|
| IMO I think foundational projects that every single bigtech
| uses like ffmpeg should get on this licence yesterday. They
| would start getting millions because it still would be way
| cheaper than making it themselves in their bloated cost
| structures.
| ArcHound wrote:
| I agree with the spirit of this comment, but I worry about
| the implementation.
|
| See the comment of Manly read in this section. Once the
| threat of payment approaches, you can just switch to a free
| fork. A single person can't really win a trial against a big,
| well-funded company.
| mettamage wrote:
| They can fork it, but can they find the maintainers? If
| it's just their own internal employees, then they
| definitely have less expertise in that codebase.
|
| Might as well hire the actual expert.
| Etheryte wrote:
| I don't really see how this is an issue, depending on the
| license text it's trivial to make the license apply in the
| same manner. As for winning, I think that's more of a US-
| centric view, if you sue elsewhere in the world there's
| plenty of courts that are happy to slap big tech.
| ArcHound wrote:
| Genuine question that might sound trollish: do you please
| have examples of such cases?
| Etheryte wrote:
| I think Jacobsen vs Katzer [0] is the most relevant one
| to the discussion here, but there a number of successful
| cases on this front. If memory serves, BusyBox has also
| managed to enforce GPL in court on a number of occasions.
|
| [0] https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/jacobsen-v-katzer
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Suing a major corporation still seems like quite a bit of
| work, and what's the end goal? Is it to humble a major
| company, or to get paid? Because if it's the latter, it
| feels like there are easier ways to do so.
| Etheryte wrote:
| This is obviously a subjective opinion, but at least in
| my mind, the point is to defend your rights. No one else
| is going to come along and defend you against the
| corporate steamroller.
| zamalek wrote:
| If the license were copyleft forking would not be a
| solution.
| antihero wrote:
| Couldn't they just get Opus to rewrite the lib?
|
| The model probably has the lib in it tbh.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| It's a nice idea but couldn't a big company simply move its
| engineering team to a subsidiary that doesn't get sales
| revenue?
|
| (I'm not an accountant!)
|
| Would be hilarious to bury a clause like "Modified MIT
| license -- head of HR must publicly announce any employment
| application rejections of the maintainers while wearing a
| chicken suit)."
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| That would just open the door to commercial competitors to
| undercut the price by reverse engineering it
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design). You'd be
| playing on the proprietary software industry's home turf and
| they will straight up curb stomp you.
| dirkc wrote:
| I can't say for Anthropic, but I've seen Google hire people
| working on open source projects that were aligned with the
| skills they were looking for. Desktop search and collaborative
| editing comes to mind, although I might be mis-remembering?
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| But he's not doing the work for free. He's doing something else
| for free which they use. He has domain knowledge with the
| library that noone else has, their can either pay someone to
| learn it or they can hire someone with it.
| ArcHound wrote:
| And that's exactly what these companies can abuse.
|
| If this wasn't available for free, they would gladly pay for
| a programmer to create it. But if it's already free, they can
| use it as a starting point. Maybe they'd need to
| internalize/extend it. But the option of paying for the work
| already done is gone.
|
| Do this for each npm dependency and you're looking at huge
| savings.
| imtringued wrote:
| This is still illogical. You can hire the original
| maintainer and pay an incremental cost, or you can hire a
| random developer and pay the initial learning cost + higher
| incremental cost.
|
| If every company using a library chose the former, then
| every hour of development would be paid for (from the
| perspective of the maintainer) and the cost would be spread
| out across all its users.
| ArcHound wrote:
| A counterproposal:
|
| You can use what is as is. Then you can ignore all of the
| other issues if they don't impact your bottom line.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I like your corporate OSS financing
| model. But there seems to be not enough incentive for
| companies to use it. Why take ownership for a small cost,
| when you can use an imperfect thing with no cost?
| mywittyname wrote:
| Why wouldn't a company want to hire the fore-most expert in a
| tool that is critical to the company? They are hiring for
| someone with that exact expertise.
|
| A competitor could hire the OP instead, get them to work on
| improving the software for a few years. Giving the competitor a
| major head start.
|
| Worst-case scenario, the tool they are building doesn't work
| out and Anthropic has a pretty good developer to put on other
| projects.
| csomar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ah, it seems their AI powered cover letter review system isn't up
| to scratch.
| Shorel wrote:
| Wait for the Meta offer, it could be a few millions.
| latexr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They could literally give him 100k, 1mil or even 10mil which
| would still be a rounding error in their books.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Are they even profitable?
| incone123 wrote:
| Profitable schmofitable! But seriously, that is
| orthogonal to whether those figures are rounding errors
| at anthropic's financial level.
| pmontra wrote:
| 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.
| htrp wrote:
| they are raising another billion dollar round
| kome wrote:
| you're right about MIT vs GPL confusion. people brainwashed
| themselves into thinking MIT is "more open", because it's
| more permissive, but it lets others profit off your code
| without contributing back.
|
| GPL makes them share or pay to relicense, since you own the
| copyright. with MIT, they don't need to ask. MIT just
| benefits big corps. GPL better protects the open-source
| spirit, and paradoxically, the ownership of your work.
| cesaref wrote:
| And yes, people being able to use your code for whatever
| they want is absolutely more open than having restrictions
| on how/who gets to use it.
|
| One other model that can also work well is to dual license
| as GPL + commercial, so people who want to publish their
| work can use the GPL license but you can potentially fund
| the project from license sales to closed source users using
| the commercial licensing option. I see this a fair bit in
| the audio community I work within.
| spookie wrote:
| Why would it be unfeasible to just share the code parts
| that are GPL?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| If you link against GPL code, your code needs to be GPL
| compatible. There are some IPC based workarounds, but
| they are too annoying and slow in most cases.
| fsflover wrote:
| LGPL exists too.
| simion314 wrote:
| >And yes, people being able to use your code for whatever
| they want is absolutely more open than having
| restrictions on how/who gets to use it.
|
| Yes, this is why people should use free not open , and
| GPL is more free when you report to the entire community
| otherwise you are in the famous case from a story where
| an USAian was claiming "Amerika is the land of the free,
| we are free to own slaves"
| npteljes wrote:
| Yeah, basically MIT is "more open" in the short term, while
| GPL is more open on the long term. GPL, while restricting
| some freedoms right now, is actually enabling the remaining
| freedoms to be sustainable in the future. Very similar to
| how law enforcement works out with regards to a sustainable
| society, and how market restrictions work out to create a
| sustainable and diverse market.
| zamalek wrote:
| I have always preferred permissive over copy-left, because
| I've historically been unable to use packages at work, which
| puts food in my mouth, as a developer who spends some time
| contributing to projects, especially those that I use at
| work.
|
| This has changed everything. AGPL and GFDL from now on.
| brainless wrote:
| I honestly think this is some system failure, even a Claude
| based one. I hope someone in the Claude Desktop team sees this
| and reaches out to you. Cheers!
| trueismywork wrote:
| Do you think that making your product AGPL would being you more
| money/recognition/jobs for your effort?
| pentamassiv wrote:
| I don't know. I have no comparison but it is common for
| crates to be released under MIT. I took over the
| maintainership from the original author so the license was
| already there. I rewrote pretty much everything so I guess I
| could try changing the license now but that's not something I
| wanna think about.
|
| I do the work because I see it as payback for all the great
| open source software I use all the time.
| riedel wrote:
| I really like the copyleft idea, however, I think you did
| nothing wrong, IMHO, because if large corps like an idea,
| they will rather reimplement it rather than even bothering
| with ways to conform to AGPL or buy an alternative licence.
| Particular in the age of AI, all source available code has
| become pretty much public domain (value is still in
| maintenance, etc). License have mostly become a
| compliance/ideology game that alienates most people.
| However, changing the license on the main repo, with only a
| minor version bump, would be a nice asshole move to get
| their attention past HR (won't make a difference, but if
| you have nothing to lose).
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Copyright is but one pillar of intellectual property law.
|
| I'd like to see an attempt by useful freedom respecting
| software projects to deploy patents to combat non-free
| reimplementations.
|
| A GPL license that grants you rights to the backing
| patent as long as the software you develop with it is
| also released under the GPL license.
|
| Use the library for closed source software? Copyright
| violation. Reimplement the software under another
| license? Patent violation. Create something slightly
| different and call it the same thing? Trademark
| violation.
| starkrights wrote:
| Not sure of the rest of the world, but at least in the
| US, patenting "software" is a pretty murky subject
| legally (at least it feels that way when trying to do
| some basic research on it) Something that seems common
| among sources discussing it is that "Software Related
| Inventions" (eg, a computer that does XYZ) can be
| patentable, but software/code itself is not literally
| patentable. Seemingly, because we're talking about
| libraries that would be pure software, not a product for
| sale based on it, you wouldn't be able patent libraries
| like you're talking about.
|
| I'd provide links to some discourse of this, but honestly
| I think it's better to search "can you patent software in
| the US" and do a brief read of various sources, because
| the terminology between them can seem somewhat
| counterfactual to eachother.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Copyright mostly protects big corps nowadays. That's
| because you need lawyers to enforce copyright, and if the
| other side has more money the battle may not be worth it.
|
| On the other hand, Meta was found torrenting terabytes of
| books and for them it's a nothingburger. The rules are
| really meant for commoners.
| anonnon wrote:
| > but it is common for crates to be released under MIT
|
| Something that isn't brought up enough in the "rewrite
| everything in Rust" discussions is that the API guidelines
| explicitly recommend MIT/Apache to "maximize compatibility"
| (i.e., corporate friendliness, or developer and user
| exploitation): https://rust-lang.github.io/api-
| guidelines/necessities.html#...
|
| Your project has been around for a while, but it's crazy to
| me that anyone still open sources anything under MIT (or
| similar) in the era of LLMs. Are they that confident in
| their job security? Are they already independently wealthy?
| Frankly, even a proper copyleft license is likely to just
| be ignored, or the code laundered through an LLM-assisted
| rewrite, by these companies. I prefer to just keep anything
| I can't sell all to myself rather than release it, at this
| point.
| null_deref wrote:
| It was a fun and easy read
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Do you feel like Claptrap did?[0].
|
| In all seriousness, good work. Sorry about the rejection, but
| it reminds me of the story about the Homebrew guy getting
| rejected by Google[1].
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/hDzWw5rfefQ
|
| [1] https://x.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
| gherkinnn wrote:
| I have fond memories of playing Claptrap in Borderlands
| Presequel. None of my friends do though, his vaulthunter.EXE
| ability made few friends.
| riedel wrote:
| Also Microsoft and AppGet:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287
| JdeBP wrote:
| As discussed at length on this page at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808807 .
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Cool. Thanks for the link, but I wasn't actually trying to
| steal anyone's thunder, and ... I did read the article.
| Just felt that it wouldn't hurt to link to it.
|
| Also, that discussion gets pretty mean. Didn't feel like I
| wanted to send people there. I just wanted to give the guy
| a pat on the back, and bring some humor into it. Been
| there. Sucks.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't know--As a non-celebrity tech worker, it's
| actually kind of comforting to see a company that doesn't
| just automatically roll out the red carpet and grease
| internal wheels, just because a candidate once wrote some
| very popular software. It sounds like there are still
| companies that make you go through the same whiteboard
| hazing and non-deterministic hiring process as the rest
| of us mere mortals, regardless of how well known you are.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Actually, I don't disagree with some of the people that
| had issues with him, but I do have issues with folks that
| refuse to look at past performance, in general (I'm
| biased. I have a great deal of past performance, and can
| prove it).
|
| It was just a kind of nasty conversation, and I didn't
| feel that it was appropriate to deliberately send folks
| there. I'm not really into the whole "Make the Internet
| Darker for Everyone" schtick.
| lagniappe wrote:
| Thank you for your service
| andrepd wrote:
| I'm disappointed about your resigned, almost subservient tone.
| This company is profiting immensely off of _your_ work, and
| they don 't even give you the courtesy of a job interview?
|
| ~~Have you considered a copyleft licence like LGPL?~~ Answered
| in a sibling comment
| zoky wrote:
| _> This company is profiting immensely off of your work_
|
| I wouldn't say that's exactly the case. Not to denigrate the
| author or anything, but this library is a relatively minor
| part of what Anthropic is doing. It's a UI manipulation
| library, specifically one that simulates keyboard and mouse
| inputs. While something like that is certainly necessary for
| the project in question, it's not anything that couldn't be
| rewritten in-house without too much difficulty, especially
| since they're only using a subset of the platforms supported
| by the library.
|
| I'm sure that working on this project has provided the author
| with expertise in this area that Anthropic could benefit
| from, and so in that sense it's still a shame that they
| wouldn't give him an interview, but that's really all that
| can be said about it.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Also worth noting that NONE of the AI companies are
| profiting at all, let alone "immensely".
|
| Google is, but not from AI.
| nomel wrote:
| > it's not anything that couldn't be rewritten in-house
| without too much difficulty
|
| This is my experience, at every group I've been in.
| Extending the date a bit is much easier than involving
| legal for approving a new library.
|
| The group I'm in now sunk a substantial amount of money
| into a lawsuit for a library that accidentally made its way
| in, so are now "No LGPL." with some crazy loops and
| approvals required if there's really no alternative (very
| rare). From their perspective, it's cheaper and safer to
| rewrite than not be in compliance, unintentionally or not.
| jrockway wrote:
| You have to think about other users as well. One person
| taking advantage of you doesn't mean you have to cut off all
| the people not taking advantage of you.
|
| Expecting a reward from open source software is a recipe for
| disappointment. I have contributed code to projects by
| companies that say I'm a mentally-ill household object. I'm
| not going to change the license of my open source projects to
| get back at them, because the collateral damage against
| entities that aren't evil simply isn't worth it. (It's also
| somewhat unlikely that the people working on NTP servers at
| Facebook wrote those policies, so...)
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I hope that was just an auto-reply rejection, that it got
| caught in the HR bureaucracy, and some human developer sees
| this and re-considers.
| fenomas wrote:
| Hey, great work, and just wanted to lend my voice in support!
| It's kind of wild how many open source devs have a story along
| similar lines. (Mine is the time when Mojang used my voxel
| engine..)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I wonder if it's useful for you to put a few subtle "hire me"s
| on your repo, mailing list, ect?
| xico wrote:
| If we are at the point where a hiring manager for a position
| deeply related to an open source library is not at least
| checking if the authors would be interested, I'm not sure.
| 131012 wrote:
| Since you're asking: I took a pause mid-reading and told
| myself: "Woah, I like their writing style."
| pentamassiv wrote:
| Wow, what a great compliment. Thank you :-)
| robpanico333 wrote:
| This lands. I discovered an emergent feature in GTP40 and when
| I tried to post about it on the developer forum, the spam
| filter removed my post. I asked GPT40 to rewrite it for me. I
| posted the update, and got banned. There's too much 'noise'.
| People like Einstein and Tesla would've gone unnoticed today,
| as I doubt they would've become "social media influencers" just
| to promote their ideas.
| htrp wrote:
| edison was pretty good at self promo
| robpanico333 wrote:
| Absolutely. He had a rare combination of skills and
| personality traits. He was good at sourcing unorthodox
| talent too -- he employed immigrant Tesla!
| mystraline wrote:
| You should change the license to AGPL and 'custom, contact for
| payment details', and provide a link to this as why you did so.
|
| Simply put, anything not a viral license like GPL allows
| parasitization by companies effectively living off FLOSS devs,
| with absolutely nothing to gain. Human rights under GPL were
| meant to apply to humans, not '3 lawyers in a trench coat'
| (corporations).
|
| They can make their decisions (snubbing a dev of code they deem
| good enough for enterprise). And you can make comparable
| decisions, punishing them for the sheer hubris.
|
| It also reaffirms that my decision of AGPL for everything is
| the right one. They can contact for custom terms.
| foxglacier wrote:
| Some people want others to freely use their software and
| choose MIT precisely because it's more free than GPL. There's
| nothing wrong with just making something for free and giving
| it away if that's what you want. Not everybody has to be
| chasing money in all their activities.
|
| The author said he was proud of this outcome and nervous at
| how widely his hobby project will be deployed. That sounds
| like the ambition of many open source authors and a win.
| Might never have happened with GPL.
| mystraline wrote:
| > Some people want others to freely use their software and
| choose MIT precisely because it's more free than GPL.
|
| MIT license is absolutely not 'more free' than the GPL.
|
| In fact, MIT means you give up effective ownership and
| control. You lose control and contributions.
|
| And what do you get for that loss of control? Exposure. Or,
| in this and many other cases similar, you get diddly shit.
| Some company paracitizes your code, sometimes even demands
| SOC questionnaires and 'do this bug NOW', and other abuse.
|
| > Not everybody has to be chasing money in all their
| activities.
|
| Talk about missing the point! This was all about money. It
| was about a job at the company where the code is being used
| in a production manner. And they didn't even bother to give
| an interview.
|
| And not many of us are independently wealthy, and can do
| things that we want with no monetary care. And, most FLOSS
| devs aren't that. Instead, they're being _used_ as unpaid
| stepping stones so some overvalued AI hypesquad can
| vibecode (or slotmachine programming) faster.
|
| > The author said he was proud of this outcome and nervous
| at how widely his hobby project will be deployed. That
| sounds like the ambition of many open source authors and a
| win. Might never have happened with GPL.
|
| That's where I hope the author relicenses as LGPL and
| proprietary, and doesn't give Anthropic any more free
| professional work.
|
| And if it never would have happened with the GPL, gasp,
| they would have had to pay developers to create it.
|
| And until I'm independently wealthy, I too will license
| AGPL. If you're making money on my stuff, I want a cut.
| Simple as that.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > And until I'm independently wealthy, I too will license
| AGPL. If you're making money on my stuff, I want a cut.
| Simple as that.
|
| A. So much for "Not everybody has to be chasing money..."
| as missing the point
|
| B. What hubris to claim that just because you wrote
| something it is now "yours" in any meaningful way. The
| copyright lobby has infected everywhere.
| mystraline wrote:
| So, what is your net-worth, in that you fight for
| freebies to corporations? What net worth should I strive
| towards so I can be nonchalant and passe about money?
|
| I'm certainly not there.
|
| Also more curious, is the AGPL doesn't affect humans
| doing stuff. It affects companies when they grab, modify,
| and host and not share contributions. Read about anti-
| TIVOization. That's why the AGPL. I'm guessing you know
| this, and why you're attacking my viewpoints as 'missing
| the point'.
|
| And yes, copyright is everywhere. And the GPL has some of
| the sanest terms to reuse, as long as you follow the
| requirement. And the GPL also further grows the
| ecosystem, due to virality.
|
| But Anthropic wasn't exactly submitting code either, were
| they? In my world, parasites get antiparasitic drugs.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Also more curious, is the AGPL doesn't affect humans
| doing stuff.
|
| It does affect humans doing stuff that isn't malicious,
| like if you need to solve a problem by modifying the code
| then now you also have to make that change public which
| is a hassle, I'd rather not have to track or maintain
| such things. I'd rather not have to think about that, and
| I care more about such nuisances than I care about the
| possibility of companies stealing it.
| rcxdude wrote:
| > So, what is your net-worth, in that you fight for
| freebies to corporations? What net worth should I strive
| towards so I can be nonchalant and passe about money?
|
| I've seen people with un-stressed about money with net-
| worths that are orders of magnitudes below those that
| seem to obsess about it.
|
| Your motivations are your motivations, if you don't like
| the idea of someone using your work to make money without
| giving you a cut, you can do you, but why is it hard to
| understand that other people might just not care that
| much about it (or, gasp, even find their work being used
| more rewarding than the potential monetary compensation)
| evanelias wrote:
| > It also reaffirms that my decision of AGPL for everything
| is the right one. They can contact for custom terms.
|
| Since your replies below are focusing on compensation: have
| you actually made a nontrivial amount of money with that
| model?
|
| I would expect that should be a prerequisite to reaffirm it
| was the correct decision, especially if you're giving
| unsolicited advice to strangers about how they should license
| their software.
| tkdb wrote:
| Fun write up, lovely irony (if your work did actually help AI
| auto-reject you).
|
| If I was you, I would probably feel similar "you used my
| project, you probably want to hire me!"
|
| But there's a logical fallacy there.
|
| Your creation being useful to a person or company [?] you being
| a fit to work with/for them full time.
|
| Still, you deserved human eyes on the question from their side.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Can you please send me your resume:
|
| Andrew@gambit.us
| archon810 wrote:
| Are you the head of AI at a military contractor? This is
| probably information you should disclose when asking people
| to send you their resumes.
| archon810 wrote:
| Now that this is trending on Hacker News, surely there will be
| a happy ending when someone from Anthropic sees this post and
| hires you with sincerest apologies and everyone lives happily
| ever after? Can we get a positive story out of this, universe?
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| It might have been the motivation behind the post in the
| first place, though not without risk.
| jrockway wrote:
| What's the risk? The current state is "your application has
| been thrown into a fire and will never be seen by human
| eyes". How can it get worse than that? There is no downside
| to complaining on HN, except for getting the reputation
| that you really wanted to work there, which, again, isn't
| that negative of a thing.
| seanw265 wrote:
| Hey, I really liked the post and especially the title. Quite
| surreal but also very fitting at the same time. The writing was
| great too. Hope you keep going. I'd love to read more.
| hleszek wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| He was very courteous, no deaths on a hill to be found
| SalariedSlave wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jve wrote:
| Other comparison would be that we are equipped with tools
| (software) other people build completely for free. And we can
| improve those tools and propose them to be implemented (PR).
| Or just continue using our custom-modified tool (Forking).
|
| And we often get the luxury to ask questions and receive
| answers (Issues) directly from the manufacturer (author,
| contributor).
|
| And we need not much investment to set up our own factory...
| thus "materials" can be free and then we give away our
| product.
| jerf wrote:
| The problem is that 900 lines of code is also nothing for
| your potential customers as well. Non-programmers have a very
| poor ability to judge how difficult something is and how
| worth paying for it is. 900 lines is probably less effort for
| most organizations than it is to evaluate paying for the
| functionality.
|
| Out on the super, super far end of the distribution you may
| have things like paying for what is essentially 900-ish lines
| of extremely, extremely carefully vetted code for things like
| encryption, but that is very, very exceptional.
|
| I've got a few open source projects on my GitHub that are in
| the 900 line range, and I know they're used in a few
| "interesting" places but I'm not crying about it because the
| simple truth is the commercial value of that code is simply
| $0. If I tried to sell it to the people using it, they would
| perfectly rationally just say no. I am abundantly compensated
| for it by all the _other_ open source software I get to use.
| nicksbg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| It might be similar to how employers dislike hiring
| entrepreneurs. People who already have a career bigger than
| their job
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| 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
| ozim wrote:
| 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.
| atoav wrote:
| I was part of the selection committee for a position once,
| where we selected the more junior engineer.
|
| The probably most simple explaination would be that for some
| roles you like to have someone that can be easier "shaped"
| into a certain role. Someone who is already successful may
| bring their own system of doing things. This is great if it
| is a good fit, but can produce frictions if it isn't.
|
| The next thing is that if you apply to a mediocre position
| with overly amazing credentials, it can raise suspicions.
| Something must be wrong with you, maybe you got amazing
| credentials, but you are complicated to work with. Maybe
| you're looking for the mediocre job just because you think it
| will be a walk in the park, etc. There are legit reasons for
| this (e.g. "my partner moved to $TOWN for her career and I am
| looking for something to do here, and you seem like the best
| fit. I know I am technically overqualified, but I wanted to
| go back to coding for years now and this offers me a geeat
| chance to give it a go").
|
| Of all the senior canidates we have rejected the most common
| issue was that they didn't offer a convincing explanation to
| why they chose that specific position. The worst one was
| talking about how it would be a relaxing position for them.
| neuroticnews25 wrote:
| >Maybe you're looking for the mediocre job just because you
| think it will be a walk in the park
|
| >The worst one was talking about how it would be a relaxing
| position for them
|
| What's wrong with that? Can't you compensate being lazy
| with being efficient?
| atoav wrote:
| Yes, sure, in theory. But the position we were filling
| was one with very little supervision and oversight, for
| room reasons. So basically one person in a room in a
| different building who has to maintain a bunch of stuff
| in addition to build up a organizational structure from
| scratch.
|
| Filling it with someone who you might have to check after
| not for seemed like a risky bet. Call it a gut feeling. I
| worked together with a guy like that, which lead to me
| having to save the day every other week because he forgot
| to organize for an event he knew about months in advance.
| xxs wrote:
| > huge advantage.
|
| It dependents on the size of the organization a lot. However
| in general it's likely that the new hire is the most
| competent of them all, which would be an immediate risk for
| some of the managers (e.g being displaced)
| oniony wrote:
| Some companies want subservient, homogenous employees that
| come in, do work, and can be let go if they do not perform.
| That's a simple equation.
|
| If you get in somebody who is a star, however minor, that
| changes the equation, changes the dynamic. Now that person
| can have more confidence, can have more sway in the decision
| making. If the company wants to let them go, then they might
| post a message to their followers, riling them up, creating
| bad PR for the company. It's no longer a simple equation.
|
| So it all comes down to the insecurities of the company.
| dogleash wrote:
| > Care to elaborate?
|
| When parent poster says things like "low profile" it should
| be interpreted as cheap and doesn't know their worth. Assume
| all hiring managers want the least qualified and cheapest
| possible employee that can still get the job done.
|
| Not always true, but true enough to be useful and more true
| than hiring managers admit to themselves. I've been a senior
| involved with hiring for years because while I full don't
| want to manage, I also never trust my manager to hire well.
| They have multiple mutually exclusive narratives they tell
| themselves about how they hire/manage. Not all of them are
| true, and sometimes not any are.
| fgbarben wrote:
| This is cope and propaganda to discourage people from
| developing their own brand. Better for the corporation if the
| workers have no support structure or reputation that might lead
| them to quit
| pjc50 wrote:
| "Developing your own brand" is not a scalable solution.
| There's only ever going to be a few thousand developers who
| are well enough known to be called a brand.
| closewith wrote:
| > Better for the corporation if the workers have no support
| structure or reputation that might lead them to quit
|
| That's exactly right.
|
| > This is cope and propaganda to discourage people from
| developing their own brand.
|
| Not really "cope and propaganda" when it's true, is it?
| xxs wrote:
| it doesn't mean one should not do it - but it's not an
| immediate benefit
| motorest wrote:
| > This is cope and propaganda to discourage people from
| developing their own brand.
|
| This is such a US-centric cliche that it even reads as a
| parody. No, the man isn't keeping you down.
| rvba wrote:
| Weak managers and teams dont want to hire the person who
| actually delivers something that works.
|
| The new person could show how unproductive they are.
| ubutler wrote:
| In my experience, maintaining a very popular software library,
| supporting open source, and blogging have absolutely all
| contributed to my success, and, additionally, as someone who is
| now a founder seeking like-minded, highly skilled engineers,
| those are key signals for an attractive hire.
|
| I can understand though, perhaps in a work environment where
| management is unlikely to be able to retain high skilled
| talent, you may want 'low-profile' workers that aren't going to
| have as many competitors chasing after them...
| null_deref wrote:
| I agree with the other comments on this thread, but I have a
| question of my own, why not work as consultant at that point
| and not as team member?
| fakedang wrote:
| No equity.
| robpanico333 wrote:
| That's often works and is a good idea, in my personal
| experience. It would be so much better, however, if we had a
| functional and affordable health care system for independent
| consultants. Consultants working from outside the US may
| actually have an advantage in this regard, depending on where
| they are exactly.
| davidgomes wrote:
| 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.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| London too.
| Milpotel wrote:
| After Brexit that's still quite a hassle.
| zamalek wrote:
| 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).
| oytis wrote:
| Doesn't look like he was rejected, rather not considered at all.
| captain_coffee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| hinkley wrote:
| I had a hiring manager tell me a couple weeks ago that I
| probably made it further because I applied late. All the
| people using AI and automation to apply are hitting the
| apply button early, and the laggards tend to be humans.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Yes, euphemism is one of the worst diseases of our time. This
| is gaslighting with fewer steps. It's almost always easier to
| lie.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Unfortunately, "we didn't review your CV" is a great way to
| get sued in the US if the name of the applicant is in any way
| potentially indicative of the applicant's gender, race,
| religion, or any other protected status.
| lawlessone wrote:
| I remember applying for a German company for something and
| they wanted me to submit a professional photo. For an IT
| role...
| 1attice wrote:
| For good or ill -- probably the latter -- headshots are
| expected with CVs in most of Europe. It's a local custom.
|
| Source: I worked in Germany and had to deal with this.
| (In fact, one of the ways I made my application stand out
| from other North Americans was to learn this ahead of
| time and include a headshot in my original application)
| znpy wrote:
| Just a datapoint: headshot are not required in Italy.
|
| Germany is weird. But then again, that's not news.
| ako wrote:
| And we now see a lot of proof that that is warranted: lots
| of people in the US are now openly racist and/or have other
| prejudices. It is fair to assume many people don't get a
| fair chance because of this.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The first company I worked for (a smallish business)
| interviewed a guy who seemed normal and knowledgeable
| enough in the screener call. At the time, they just asked
| that people being in code samples to discuss in the
| second interview (this predated GitHub) and he brought in
| some obviously copy-pasted code that didn't fit together.
|
| He then, without prompt, in the middle of a conversation
| mentioned that he was the second coming of Christ. The
| interviewers ignored the comment and continued the
| interview.
|
| When he didn't get the job, he sued the company for
| religious discrimination. Fortunately, the interviewers
| could honestly say they didn't discuss or ask about his
| religious beliefs, and he lost. It was said he did this
| elsewhere as a a scam, though I never verified it.
|
| The simple matter of fact is that it doesn't matter how
| neutral you are; there are enough people out there who
| will look for any way to perceive and benefit from a
| grievance that you must assume they will.
| ako wrote:
| Of course you're right, there will always be people that
| try to abuse the system. But the bigger picture here is
| that more people are truly being discriminated for their
| color, religion, sex, etc, than there are people abusing
| the system. A system that improves live for many should
| not be removed because some people try to abuse it.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| they should have used their AI to scan through resume... they
| are AI company afterall. shame they missed this guy. it shows
| their resume-scannign AI is useless.
| practice9 wrote:
| They should have used Claude Code for reviews
| notahacker wrote:
| Tbf the other summer recruitment practice in AI this summer is
| Zuck running round offering engineers with some sort of
| reputation $100m+ windfalls, so maybe all the OP needs to do is
| add "author of computer interaction library used by Anthropic"
| to his LinkedIn profile to acquire that garage full of Ferraris
| rasz wrote:
| 'used' sounds weak, "Build technology powering Anthropic
| Claude Desktop".
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| There's an ongoing lawsuit[1] pertaining to AI-driven job
| applicant filtering.
|
| [1]: https://www.cdflaborlaw.com/blog/federal-court-grants-
| prelim...
| thisOtterBeGood wrote:
| Poor poor... I always felt that too many people in hr decision
| making underestimate the role of talent. Many awesome software
| products stem from teams with extraordinary talent. Average
| people create average software.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| To be fair with Anthropic, they probably get unfathomably many
| applications for everything, on top of the cold calls/emails.
| They're one of the hottest companies in the world, so I'd
| expect tens of thousands of applicants. Media writing about
| $100m+ hiring deals in AI does not help, either.
| vdupras wrote:
| Aren't they an AI company? Couldn't they sort it out? If
| Anthropic, of all companies, can't sort out incoming job
| applications, what exactly are their tools for?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Compute is a precious resource.
|
| The world is also full of totally delusional people who
| dreamed up the idea of using winzip to compress VRAM on the
| GPU, and now Anthropic will definitely hire them for $1M
| year for this genius solution, so better write up a glammed
| up resume and auto-send it once a day for any open
| position.
| vdupras wrote:
| Opportunity also is a precious resource. Redirecting
| resume to /dev/null is wasting it. I have a hard time
| believing that LLMs, with all their sophistication,
| aren't ideally suited for this task.
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't know how slighting customers who want to work for
| you works out in the long term. You end up getting fewer
| opportunities from them and their friends in the future.
|
| Seattle is full of people who will tell you what it's
| like to work for Amazon and how you don't want to work
| there. I guess if you're big enough though the money
| papers over a lot of sins. The smaller you are, the more
| people you can piss off before you run out of prospects.
| Anthropocene still has a long way to go before they are
| Facebook, who struggles because something like 50% of the
| people who would work for FB already have.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Is it? What I've been marketed is that AI is widely
| available for every task I could conceptually think of,
| and that I should be using it for everything.
| bbor wrote:
| IDK, compute isn't really _that_ precious. If $20 /mo can
| get you many (?) invocations of their research agent, I
| feel like it could pretty easily be worth it to screen
| applications for jobs that pay $350K/year -- and that's
| just "entry-level"![1]
|
| That said, their career page puts this at the very top of
| the details section: We value direct
| evidence of ability: If you've done interesting
| independent research, written an insightful blog post, or
| made substantial contributions to open-source software,
| put that at the top of your resume!
|
| This guy seems rad, but his GitHub[2] and this blog are
| both light details or links, which is odd considering
| that his LinkedIn[3] is detailed+professional. Perhaps
| Anthropic _does_ have Claude screening resumes, but he
| didn 't express the nature of the situation clearly
| enough for it to catch it?
|
| Otherwise, the only other explanation I see that doesn't
| look terrible for Anthropic is they didn't see a need for
| more Rust expertise...?
|
| [1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/anthropic/salaries/s
| oftware...
|
| [2] https://github.com/pentamassiv
|
| [3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/robingrell/
| mstaoru wrote:
| > what exactly are their tools for?
|
| Obviously, for writing and sending said job applications.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Nah, if there was ever a time where making meaningful
| contributions to open source was important to land you a good
| paying job in a hot tech company, that died a long time ago.
| The people making these decisions don't care, unless you have
| someone inside to put your resume first it doesn't matter that
| you wrote all the code that makes their product even possible,
| the hiring manager won't care.
|
| I might just be old but i really haven't felt like contributing
| to open source at all lately because i've bills to pay and kids
| to care for and taking time out of this just for the sake of
| enriching some billion dollar corp that will eat me and spit me
| out doesn't feel like a good investment for my time.
|
| Sometimes i feel sad that it came to this but this is the place
| we're living in right now.
| lawlessone wrote:
| It's been like this a few years.
|
| It's bit more AI now and bit less boilerplate rejections.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yikes this sounds awful.
| nomel wrote:
| > Sucks, but that's the reality of hiring (and getting hired)
| in tech in general.
|
| If you're in the inside, it doesn't suck at all, it's _so much
| safer_.
|
| Hiring a new person, based on a few hours of interviews, and a
| resume half full of exaggerations and lies, is such a
| ridiculous gamble. Worst part is, if you realize they're not a
| good fit, it's sometimes incredibly hard to get rid of someone,
| more often not an option at all.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| He already works for them without pay in a way. Why would they
| hire him?
| _giorgio_ wrote:
| To close the source.
|
| To drive the development.
|
| To prioritize some bug fixes.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The role I applied to was not really AI related
| rpunkfu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Didn't he say it was for the team integrating his input library
| into claude desktop? Seems pretty relevant experience.
| rpunkfu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rpunkfu wrote:
| You got me, adding "using enigo" makes all the difference
| -- I guess position is exclusively for working with this
| one library and that's the position they got overloaded
| with applications on and couldn't process one sent by OP.
| mijoharas wrote:
| It clearly does make a difference as to why he thought
| his experience was relevant to the job (i.e. what we were
| discussing before), and I think you agree with that hence
| your somewhat "selective" omission when you posted the
| quote.
| rpunkfu wrote:
| I wasn't making a statement about whether his experience
| was relevant to the job. I don't know the author and
| don't automatically doubt his knowledge. I was simply
| sharing the opinion that being the author of that UI
| library alone does not fast-track someone for the
| "Software Engineer working on Claude Code" position at
| Anthropic.
| UK-AL wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| or just lie
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Yeah, no. You have to pass tech interviews and generally know
| your shit
| dogleash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Social skills are not a substitute for technical skills,
| but they are still important. You have to work with people.
| motorest wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lesser-shadow wrote:
| AI companies try not to be evil challenge (impossible)
| lesser-shadow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I don't think is true. I had more success removing my portfolio
| and letting my work history speak for itself.
| motorest wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| exactly. there is a reason companies are paying through their
| noses for some people
| lesser-shadow wrote:
| HR hands typed this post
| 0xpgm wrote:
| 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-
| cuc...
|
| [2]: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
| atommclain wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Unless there was no MIT version.
| exe34 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hire OP, anthropic
| scotty79 wrote:
| I hope Meta already contacted him.
| hollowonepl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| wongarsu wrote:
| To save everyone the click: HR managers: 76% female, HR
| workers: 75% female, HR assistants: 84% female.
| tomrod wrote:
| 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.
| e4325f wrote:
| I found it useful at least.
| imtringued wrote:
| That doesn't make the remaining 24% more clueful.
| Identifying a department by the gender of its workers
| seems pretty suspect.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I read the original comment as implying that the average
| HR person reviewing your resume will be a clueless woman.
| Not as implying that only women work there or that people
| of other genders working there are more clueful.
|
| The comment is open to interpretation, and you are free
| to interpret it in a less charitable way. The ambiguity
| is absolutely something we can and should criticize the
| comment for
| tomrod wrote:
| Neat fact: statistical independence means that two
| factors are orthogonal.
|
| My prior, expressed in my earlier comment, is that
| cluelessness and gender are orthogonal.
| hollowonepl wrote:
| I never implied any of that nonsense that I've perhaps
| triggered nor I want to be responsible for other people's
| interpretations outside core meaning
| steeleyespan wrote:
| Reality denial and picking on people who state simple truth
| is evil.
| planb wrote:
| Yes - people in HR departments are often female and often
| clueless, but I don't see the parent denying this. The
| wording of OP connected both though, which is sexist and
| can be considered "evil".
| Levitz wrote:
| Funny enough, I see this whole framing as sexist itself.
|
| Nobody would have bat an eye if he said "clueless guys"
| or "clueless gents", and given the prevalence of women in
| HR, that wording would actually have more chances of
| having a sexist background to it.
| planb wrote:
| You're right, but that just reflects the structural
| sexism in our society while the wording by the op was
| intentional (I suppose. If not, I might as well be more
| sexist then he is).
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| "guys" is gendered but is very often used to mean a
| general group.
|
| >given the prevalence of women in HR, that wording would
| actually have more chances of having a sexist background
| to it.
|
| The reason there are more women than men in HR is clearly
| because the men they do hire are too clueless and get
| fired faster. Ever have an HR department with all men?
| Most dysfunctional department I've ever interacted with!
| "Clueless HR men" is just redundant. The ~25% that exist
| are DEI hires. So it wouldn't be sexism, it would be
| reality.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| ~80% of software developers are male. [1]
|
| I'm not sure the percentage of companies that use software
| for highlighting candidates, but Anthropic almost certainly
| does and this [2] source says 75+% do.
|
| So since men wrote the software that didn't highlight the
| candidate, is it the clueless men that caused this?
|
| [1] https://www.zippia.com/software-developer-
| jobs/demographics/
|
| [2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/6/22659225/automated-
| hiring-...
| elzbardico wrote:
| After years hearing justly about bad things perpetrated by
| males as a class, without any concerns about generalizations,
| I think we are mature enough to also call for responsibility
| in the other side of the aisle.
|
| Having a free pass for doing evil stuff is what gave man
| their bad rep, should we now for equity give women a pass to
| become the new slave lords?
| hollowonepl wrote:
| Nopes, nothing to the ladies in general nor any other gender
| in general. Just a shortcut to my own negative experience
| with HR by example. English is my foreign language and in my
| country we are not that allergic to terminology. But clueless
| processors stay as valid... regardless of particular
| denomination.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| >spotted by clueless ladies working there
|
| Why the need for the sexist addition of ladies? People of all
| sexes and genders in HR can be clueless.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > clueless ladies
|
| Come on...
| avodonosov wrote:
| Ha-ha, they also trained their LLMs on your code and maybe will
| even train on that blog post :)
| henriquegodoy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| HR _hates_ hiring anyone, they just want H1-Bs.
| elzbardico wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| People should have realized this long ago. They're working for
| free for mega corporations. I refuse to contribute to this.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Just change the license. The company probably won't notice and
| keep pulling the new changes. Now you have a legal case.
| motorest wrote:
| > 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.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Can a license be modified? What happens in that case? Let's say I
| want a Ferrari.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Is there an license that requires payment for usage for
| corporations above a certain size?
| cnst wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Not accurate. They pay very well, and their interview process
| is supposedly quite challenging.
|
| A thing to consider, though, is ethical: they seem to have
| been involved in market manipulation. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y0zgrevl1o
| pizzathyme wrote:
| In my 6 jobs in my career from college internship to startups
| to Big Tech, I have never gotten a job from sending an
| application into a site. It's always been through (somehow)
| tracking down a person to speak to and get a referral.
|
| I would recommend that here. There's no reason why Anthropic
| couldn't use your talents! See if you can find a friend-of-a-
| friend who is there, and then do a phonecall with them.
| mv4 wrote:
| This is the right approach. Connect with a few hiring
| managers.
| brudgers wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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.
| cnst wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Give this man a job, Anthropic!
| hopelite wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Come Anthropic, give this guy a fair shot. At least interview him
| in person or something.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Dev: I wrote a part of your software that you are bragging about.
| Can I have a job?
|
| Antrhropic: tl;dr kthxbye
| SillyUsername wrote:
| Anthropic throw this guy a consultancy on demand job, or at least
| a bit of money. He's made your business rich!
| mv4 wrote:
| At least Max Howell (Homebrew) got an interview before getting
| rejected:
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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