I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

https://grell.dev/blog/ai_rejection

by serhack_ • 12 months ago

809 398 12 months ago

grell.dev

physicsguy• 12 months ago

Reminds me of the guy who created Homebrew being rejected by Google for failing some silly Leetcode puzzle.

rkomorn2• 12 months ago

Or the FastAPI creator not having enough years of experience with FastAPI according to a job posting.

Imustaskforhelp3• 12 months ago

That is the most absolutely absurd wild damn story that I have written.

Care to provide links...

How can interviewers be such stupid, the fastapi creator had the MOST experience with it, he created it..

delroth• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

it kind of happened, he went through seven interviews. from the same post:

But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.

IncreasePosts• 12 months ago

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.

RMPR3• 12 months ago

Iirc the homebrew guy did at least get an interview

wiseowise4• 12 months ago

Homebrew is “just” a package manager, not the core of part of Google. They could rip it out overnight and won’t even notice it. And Google gave him a fair shot.

This guy got rejected by some automated system without even interview.

kunley2• 12 months ago

So, was he rejected by an automated system or did he go thru seven interviews, as other commenters say?

motorest9• 12 months ago

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.

siva72• 12 months ago

This story feels after all the years still awkward. Many people at Google don't have anything that impressive on their resume like being the creator of homebrew. Commentary like "Google looks only for computer scientists, so you need to have studied CS" is so out of touch that i sometimes questions if these people ever worked in a big corporation. There are thousands of different roles, many multiple times suited for that guy. I suspect the people who vetoed didn't like that guy for some other reasons.

cprecioso• 12 months ago

I was thinking about this the other day. I think it might just be a thing of Google looking for a different thing than what made his open source project famous.

Without no knowledge of the details further than mxcl's tweet; probably any performance issues even on simple code, get infinitely multiplied when running at Google's scale, slogging the thing, on Google's dime. From what I've seen of him, mxcl is good at designing a really approachable product, and on running an open source project. But homebrew is really slow, even on the latests Macs, even for basic cases.

To me it seems then that he'd be more fit for a product owner/manager position than an engineering one, and that could be the root of his not-hiring.

tacker2000• 12 months ago

This guy is so full of himself, no wonder he didnt get hired. Just read the homebrew github issues / forum and you will see what i mean…

BoredPositron• 12 months ago

I wonder if he writes cover letters to every company that uses his library.

romanovcode• 12 months ago

Why not? This is second easiest way to get a great paying job, second only to nepotism.

ninetyninenine2• 12 months ago

He can probably use Claude to write is for him.

bkolobara• 12 months ago

Unfortunately they thanked me for my application but said the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications.

It seems like they didn't even look at his application.

bravetraveler• 12 months ago

Nor their tech. For shame! Where's the enablement?! I was promised productivity.

sigmoid105• 12 months ago

Even if someone from HR who screens for first rounds read it, they probably wouldn't understand why this might be an interesting candidate.

BenGosub2• 12 months ago

yeah, as this is so often the case, many times good, relevant applications are missed. I hope that this Hacker News post will get to one of the key people at Anthropic and they change their minds.

freddealmeida2• 12 months ago

At my firms I saw this happen often. HR would review, or a junior engineer and pass on very good candidates. It wasn't until I set up a review system with A-class engineers that we started to catch the best people. A-class engineers recognize themselves far better than anyone else. But they prefer to build than review resumes.

I ended up building my own head hunting firm specifically to address the whole pipeline. That helped somewhat but head hunting is its own very odd space. Full of inefficiencies and bias.

With any AI company, there are always limits you hit. Energy, compute, optimizations, inference, team resources, money, and all the flows to make it a company. HR is usually the one that gets the fewest resources.

motorest9• 12 months ago

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?

amelius2• 12 months ago

Yes, it sounds like a non-story to be honest.

ErikBjare• 12 months ago

It's a personal blog

throw_workday• 12 months ago

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...

freddealmeida2• 12 months ago

I hate workday.

ArcHound10• 12 months ago

I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV?

Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.

RMPR3• 12 months ago

Implementing the features they would want to prioritize. Just like most companies hiring OSS maintainers.

ArcHound10• 12 months ago

That is also a good point, but I worry that the power has shifted. I worry that companies might get away with no compensation for such efforts.

jaccola• 12 months ago

Because - They can decide more easily what he works on - They know he loves this work and is very capable of doing it - They can own his output, a competitive advantage - He will likely cost them ~nothing anyway

ArcHound10• 12 months ago

While that sounds rational, I worry that the same reasoning is not applied in the HR department.

But that might be just my frustration from experiences.

To continue the devil's advocate: why bother with all of this, if the company doesn't have to and the OSS version is enough anyway?

trueismywork3• 12 months ago

They probably already have someone working on top of it but it's just closed source because of the license.

pentamassiv8• 12 months ago

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

ArcHound10• 12 months ago

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.

trueismywork3• 12 months ago

Do you think they already have hired someone to work on it but are just not releasing the source code?

bravesoul23• 12 months ago

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-mc3• 12 months ago

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.

ArcHound10• 12 months ago

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.

antihero• 12 months ago

Couldn't they just get Opus to rewrite the lib?

The model probably has the lib in it tbh.

BobbyTables2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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_iain2• 12 months ago

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.

ArcHound10• 12 months ago

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.

mywittyname2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

In my opinion, lots of open source was developed as a sort of portfolio to get hired. From 2019 onward, my impression is that your open source projects (regardless of how much they are used) matters less and less and it’s about HR mysteriously picking you up in their process than anything else. I think, now, your open source portfolio matters exactly nothing in the decision to get hired.

I remember back in 2014-2019, it was hard and competitive to contribute to open source projects as they were tightly guarded. There are many projects that I use now in package.json that are looking for a maintainer. A complete 180 flip.

My guess is that real free open source will disappear in a few years and what will remain are open source projects monetized by some business somehow.

It’s a sad reality but that’s what the current people at the top have decided today.

stog• 12 months ago

Ah, it seems their AI powered cover letter review system isn't up to scratch.

Shorel• 12 months ago

Wait for the Meta offer, it could be a few millions.

latexr• 12 months ago

I’d be curious to see the outcome of changing the license to a Fair Source License or explicitly “You are not allowed to use this software if you are Anthropic, otherwise MIT”. They could still use the current version, but for any in the future they’d be forced to fork it or be prepared to face yet another legal battle (I can imagine some lawyers already salivating at the thought).

It’s also curious the author is looking inside the app for proof their software is being used. If it’s MIT, mustn’t the license be included and available somewhere easier to verify?

pentamassiv8• 12 months ago

Hey, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for submitting this. If you have any questions feel free to ask and please let me know how the writing was. It's one of my first posts so I'd like to improve

4gotunameagain• 12 months ago

Hey mate, I would just like to say that I wish they at least find it in their hearts to reward you for the value you have provided to them. Knowing cut throat american corps, I'm afraid the chances are nil. Even if a good amount for you is peanuts to them.

Which is why my position is GPL > MIT..

mnmalst• 12 months ago

They could literally give him 100k, 1mil or even 10mil which would still be a rounding error in their books.

kome• 12 months ago

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.

zamalek4• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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!

trueismywork3• 12 months ago

Do you think that making your product AGPL would being you more money/recognition/jobs for your effort?

pentamassiv8• 12 months ago

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.

null_deref2• 12 months ago

It was a fun and easy read

ChrisMarshallNY3• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

I have fond memories of playing Claptrap in Borderlands Presequel. None of my friends do though, his vaulthunter.EXE ability made few friends.

riedel2• 12 months ago

Also Microsoft and AppGet:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287

JdeBP• 12 months ago

As discussed at length on this page at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808807 .

lagniappe• 12 months ago

Thank you for your service

andrepd2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

jrockway2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

I wonder if it's useful for you to put a few subtle "hire me"s on your repo, mailing list, ect?

xico• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

Since you're asking: I took a pause mid-reading and told myself: "Woah, I like their writing style."

pentamassiv8• 12 months ago

Wow, what a great compliment. Thank you :-)

robpanico3333• 12 months ago

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.

htrp2• 12 months ago

edison was pretty good at self promo

mystraline5• 12 months ago

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.

foxglacier2• 12 months ago

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.

evanelias• 12 months ago

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.

captainbland• 12 months ago

I know a bunch of people have tried to argue the toss on this one with you but I'd just like to put it out there that I can't agree strongly enough! Anyone watching can see these big companies are happy to toss developers to the side and develop social harms for profit.

All of this is built on exploiting the open source movement. Delineating between closed source ventures and Free community efforts is just good sense at this point. If they're going to take they must give back.

tkdb• 12 months ago

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.

AndrewKemendo2• 12 months ago

Can you please send me your resume:

Andrew@gambit.us

archon8102• 12 months ago

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.

bigyabai2• 12 months ago

You should list a pay range unless you want to be ignored. Developers aren't going to go out of their way to play your little game without a carrot on the stick.

archon8102• 12 months ago

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_zamoyski3• 12 months ago

It might have been the motivation behind the post in the first place, though not without risk.

seanw265• 12 months ago

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.

utbabya• 12 months ago

If they use any form of filtering / evaluation along the line of STAR, the positive way you chose to deal with it plus the outcome of it being a top post on HN should score you half the position already, good luck :)

pentamassiv8• 12 months ago

UPDATE: Two people from Anthropic recommended me internally and their HR department already rejected the application. They recommended me for jobs where you need more experience with AI, so I agree that I wasn't a good fit for those positions. Thank you for your recommendations anyways. That was very kind.

A number of other people contacted me with offers so it looks like there will be a happy end to the story :-)

hleszek• 12 months ago

I would guess like him that no human engineer ever read his application. The less they would have done in that case would be to at least thank him for his work, even if they don't plan to hire him for some reason.

Automated systems, AI screening, and incompetent HR people are the bane of modern recruiting practices.

4ndrewl• 12 months ago

Perhaps, but just like vibe-coding being good-enough for some purposes they think vibe-hiring will get good-enough candidates?

I guess at least they're dogfooding it?

exitb• 12 months ago

It's inherently risky to blog about your professional relationships under your own name and this is a weirdly small hill to die on.

snowfield• 12 months ago

He was very courteous, no deaths on a hill to be found

SalariedSlave• 12 months ago

Publishing anything about it, regardless of content, is already a hill.

I like that people blog about these experiences and enjoy the insights, but I think it's never good for the authors..

forrestthewoods3• 12 months ago

Anthropic probably gets tens of thousands of applications. They seem to have filled their queue before even reviewing this particular candidate. Unfortunate but just reality.

Always always always try to get into direct contact with the actual hiring manager. Blog author had a friend of a friend let them know a relevant role was open. The correct move is NOT to blindly apply. It’s to ask for an intro to the engineering manager responsible for the role.

benzible• 12 months ago

A friend of mine is maintainer of an open source service used (at least, at one time) by all of the major social media platforms as a load-bearing piece of their infrastructure (intentionally keeping it vague). My friend was invited to interview at one of the biggest and was rejected after having a bad whiteboard session. Of course they immediately replaced my friend's service (ha!)

Imustaskforhelp3• 12 months ago

I think that everyone should read this blog post

"Overall I am overjoyed enigo is used in Claude Desktop and I tell everyone who listens to me about it :P. It's so cool to think that I metaphorically created the arms and legs for Claude AI, but I can't help but wonder if the rejection letter was written by a human or Claude AI. Did the very AI I helped equip with new capabilities just reject my application? On the bright side, I should now be safe from Roko's Basilisk. "

I also felt like this way that did they just AI in their interviewing process?

And I have a special love towards open source.

And I personally might be happy too that a company is using my work ,but in the name of the holy licenses, Companies are just exploiting the free nature of this and the fact that it seems like not even a human looked at the person for such job, who created a library that they are using it for free...

I was thinking of creating some code in MIT license, but I am going to create a code of AGPL except if you sponsor me on github or a special one time license which can grant you MIT.

People might say that I am not fostering the open source community, but I am not giving corporations free labour so that they can be billionaires.

I once saw someone write a software with the exact same idea (AGPL + gh sponsor me to get MIT) and the people in HN were pitchforking him, that's the harsh reality of the world. People want absolutely free labour.

I think open source needs to ask, Have we become the modern peasants in the name of our altruism?

that_guy_iain2• 12 months ago

I think we need to compare our industry with other industries. No other industry relies on free labour from random people, which comes with no support or promises.

I once told some non-techie folk about some code I wrote. It did something super simple and wasn't that big. They were all asking why I didn't sell it and thought it was crazy I would give it away for free with the BSD license. It was 900 lines of code... For us, that's nothing but for an average person they just think "I built it, I'll sell it"

Imustaskforhelp3• 12 months ago

Ya I also believe it this way, Mostly I like to build stuff for my own problems or something that I just find fascinating.

I am still in high school, so I was doing some question sheet that our teachers provided and there was an answer key but it had answers of everything. Now I don't know how other people approached it but I am really impatient and so I just open up answer key side by side but it reveals every answer.

So I firstly created an AI to ocr to card generator but it was an hit or miss and so I discussed it with my friend and he said that he used to use paint and somehow in his convuluted manner basically have a slider which would reveal answer...

I found it incredible and so I just created a single index.html that can do it. (Although vibe coded), Now I can't even think of monetizing such ideas when I realize that there are creators of some really incredible stuff and long convulated stuff and even they aren't sponsored so I have always felt that the scripts that I write or projects around such ~.5-3k loc. I just don't think of monetization.

I just don't know.. I like hacking stuff, I just feel more comfortable rebuilding stuff even if its mediocre if I feel like I can change it to suit my purpose better

I think that the only other industry that is gives as much completely free stuff might be research/science related, but maybe its due to the fact that computer are computer science too and thus related to academics.

I really just love tinkering with software and just the aspect of freedom that it can provide , but sadly, I find it just hard to really make money without being a job and such stories on which we are discussing, just makes me feel like I am kinda right.

On one hand we have 100 million payouts to researchers and on the other we have this, such disparity is kinda sad I suppose.

jve• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

nicksbg2• 12 months ago

As someone that works in HR, the incompetent HR combined with using AI for ATS ( or not knowing how to use ATS at all) is one of the core problems when it comes to losing quality candidates and is to blame for this. It should be illegal to hire HR from any education other than law, psychology, management and economy background. That way the responsibility would be larger, the ROI on HR would be higher (because the retention of the candidates and the quality of the candidates). Simply paying and promoting people with any educational background in a HR role is a waste of money which also creates problem for the company and not just employees.

graemep• 12 months ago

It should be illegal to hire HR from any education other than law, psychology, management and economy background.

A lot of people with education in management/business do go into HR, at least in countries I know, and it does not help. People with extensive management experience would help but they will only take more senior roles.

The other qualifications open opportunities interesting and well paid careers. How would you attract those people into HR?

I am not even sure it would help if you could.

I think the suggestion in the old management book by the guy who turned around Avis that you should have an old style personnel department to do admin and advice, and managers should have more involvement might be a way forward, but I am not sure it would work given the current level of regulation (in the UK anyway - I imagine most wester countries are the same). A lot of the function of HR is to avoid legal risk (e.g. fire people according to the rules, so go through the motions of warnings etc).

nicksbg2• 12 months ago

I think that old departments (personnel departments) should have been just modernized in reality. To be frank, in some cases a mix of HR/Legal department is cost saving too.

What it really comes to is that a lot of people love to micromanage everything. If you hire someone that has integrity and educational background in subject, he/she will warn you if the decision you are making will have consequences in the long run. If you have someone that does not have relevant education, that simply does not happen. The managers micromanage, those people receive salaries and if they step out of the line even when they are right, they are reminded that they do not have relevant knowledge in said department (law/economy). This in turn leads to a lot of people gaining something called shallow experience which then in turns leads those people to hire someone that des not pose the risk to their position further down the line.

The problem being in this case is that there are a lot of misses that happen when the HR is organized like that; from illegal hirings, not knowing key economic factors, not having a clue about the business itself, no clue about laws and procedures and so on. Which in turn does not really protect the company because the company loses both the money and employees.

renewiltord• 12 months ago

Unfortunately they thanked me for my application but said the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications.

Okay, they were just busy doing work and didn't have any time to look at applications so they shuttered the JD and auto-rejected anyone in the pipeline. Seems reasonable

siva72• 12 months ago

There is some dirty secret i learned in my time as a eng. manager: Working in open source / Being the maintainer of a popular library / Blogging about software: All this things won't give you necessarily a competitive edge but can work against you. It's counterintuitive but sometimes teams are looking for a more low-profile hire.

krzkaczor• 12 months ago

How so? Care to elaborate? I get that bloggers/educators can sometimes be not the best fit for IC roles but doing open source seems like a huge advantage.

jbreckmckye• 12 months ago

It might be similar to how employers dislike hiring entrepreneurs. People who already have a career bigger than their job

ozim• 12 months ago

IF you have a side gig it is easy to think you won’t be 100% invested in company success. If you monetize you most likely will jump ship.

There are other risks like burn out as you may read a lot of OSS contributors have — so when someone is hit by burn out it will be across the board not that they somehow will perform at their peak at job while burned out by coding on side.

atoav2• 12 months ago

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.

xxs2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

dogleash2• 12 months ago

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.

fgbarben4• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

"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• 12 months ago

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?

xxs2• 12 months ago

it doesn't mean one should not do it - but it's not an immediate benefit

motorest9• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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_deref2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

No equity.

robpanico3333• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

I wonder if it was geolocation? Anthropic is based in SF, the author seems to be based in Munich, and maybe they're not open to hiring people who aren't based in the US right now? Given the state of US visas right now, this wouldn't shock me.

bravesoul23• 12 months ago

London too.

Milpotel• 12 months ago

After Brexit that's still quite a hassle.

zamalek4• 12 months ago

My company, which is significantly smaller, hires people in multiple countries across the world. You don't need an office to hire (I am sure there so exist countries where you do, but I expect they are the minority).

rgavuliak• 12 months ago

Having worked in such companies, switching to that mode requires very different processes.

oytis• 12 months ago

Doesn't look like he was rejected, rather not considered at all.

captain_coffee• 12 months ago

Unfortunately, this seems on par with recruitment practices in the summer of 2025.

I can almost guarantee that they didn't even read that application / cover letter and auto-magically rejected it.

"the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications"

Zero effort. They probably didn't even realize the relevance of that specific application for that role. Unbelievable, I swear!

bootsmann• 12 months ago

Tbf, I'd rather get a "we didn't review your CV" response than a template "we are continuing with other candidates :)" response. It softens the blow considerably and helps me as an applicant better keep track on which variation of the CV is working best because I can just remove this datapoint.

motorest9• 12 months ago

Tbf, I'd rather get a "we didn't review your CV" response than a template "we are continuing with other candidates :)" response.

Idk it sounds plausible that OP might just have been late to the party, and applied when the recruitment process was at the final stages.

yard2010• 12 months ago

Yes, euphemism is one of the worst diseases of our time. This is gaslighting with fewer steps. It's almost always easier to lie.

zdragnar3• 12 months ago

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.

nikolayasdf1232• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

They should have used Claude Code for reviews

notahacker• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

'used' sounds weak, "Build technology powering Anthropic Claude Desktop".

woadwarrior01• 12 months ago

There's an ongoing lawsuit[1] pertaining to AI-driven job applicant filtering.

[1] https://www.cdflaborlaw.com/blog/federal-court-grants-prelim...

thisOtterBeGood• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

vdupras2• 12 months ago

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?

mlinhares• 12 months ago

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.

lawlessone2• 12 months ago

It's been like this a few years.

It's bit more AI now and bit less boilerplate rejections.

nikolayasdf1232• 12 months ago

reminds be of the time creator of Homebrew was rejected by Google in coding rounds. but this is even worse, they would not even interview this guy. shame on Anthropic... (or is it Misanthropic?)

gamblor956• 12 months ago

Anthropic also rejected me for a job... that I never even applied for...

This sort of silliness is what you get when you run crucial business processes using AI instead of humans.

senko2• 12 months ago

The author should have just asked the friend of a friend for a warm intro instead of trying to go through the main gate.

Sucks, but that's the reality of hiring (and getting hired) in tech in general.

Onewildgamer• 12 months ago

Was wondering something similar, if OP had blogged it earlier when he found claude was using it and re-posted it in HN/reddit it in a sensational way to capture eyes. Maybe through one of the forums he could have got an introduction and a job doing what he loves.

OP still has a chance now, maybe not anthropic, even other competitors can come knocking.

fnordpiglet• 12 months ago

My experience with Anthropic and OpenAI is they’re not super interested in experience and don’t take internal references very seriously. Most of who I know that was hired were fairly junior folks and they have an early weed out that’s a fairly rudimentary but very specific Python programming quiz typically administered by very junior (like 1-2 years out of school) - even when interviewing extremely senior and experienced people of some substantial success and renown. This isn’t uncommon - meta and others do this too. But the programming quiz at Anthropic is sudden death and the first round, and the people administering it are looking for a very specific implementation that if you don’t see it immediately they just Gen Z stare and don’t discuss etc. It’s one of the more amateur selection processes designed with an extreme bias against more senior folks (frankly it felt unintentional just naive). (Meta etc scale the programming weight to seniority and the administrators scale as well - asking for depth of understanding of concepts as seniority grows with the expectation experience brings more to the table than syntactic knowledge).

So getting an internal reference and being highly qualified for something they need done isn’t enough. You need to also make it past the 20 years old gate keepers and their amateur hour hiring process.

senko2• 12 months ago

Yikes this sounds awful.

rglynn• 12 months ago

I'm glad you shared this, I had been considering Anthropic but this really leaves a sour taste.

nomel2• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

He already works for them without pay in a way. Why would they hire him?

_giorgio_• 12 months ago

To close the source.

To drive the development.

To prioritize some bug fixes.

LAC-Tech• 12 months ago

I'm very much starting to re-consider open source. It mainly seems to be a way for already incredibly wealthy companies to get things for free, or to strategically release things to crush their competitors.

Maybe we ought to go back to paying for proprietary software. A lot of people used to make money that way, ie by selling their own desktop app.

rpunkfu5• 12 months ago

I don't mean to downplay the author's skills, but I don't see how creating an input simulation library fast-tracks someone for consideration in an AI-related engineering role.

pentamassiv8• 12 months ago

The role I applied to was not really AI related

rpunkfu5• 12 months ago

I wasn't aware of that; it wasn't clearly specified. It only mentioned a "secret" feature, but I assumed it was AI-related rather than UI-related. Additionally, Anthropic's Claude Code position on their website states that they expect their developers to work across the stack, including both front-end and back-end.

mijoharas3• 12 months ago

Didn't he say it was for the team integrating his input library into claude desktop? Seems pretty relevant experience.

rpunkfu5• 12 months ago

It mentioned an "open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop," which doesn't specify whether the "secret" feature is AI-related or UI-related. My guess leans towards the former.

UK-AL2• 12 months ago

Being able to get hired at a company is often unrelated to being able to generate viable products.

If you want to get hired don't focus on skills to build useful things. Focus on psychology and charisma.

toptierdev2• 12 months ago

or just lie

SJC_Hacker• 12 months ago

Yeah, no. You have to pass tech interviews and generally know your shit

dogleash2• 12 months ago

The tech interview still doesn’t fall into parent posters categories of “able to generate viable products” or “skills to build useful things” either.

lan321• 12 months ago

Not too often tbh. You either get dogshit LeetCode or, more often, just a general chat about what you've done and know. There, social skills play a massive role. Make simple projects sound like state-of-the-art, present everything cool that happened as something you were directly involved in, present the 2 most obscure bugs in the project as something you fixed every other Tuesday when you get bored...

motorest9• 12 months ago

Yeah, no. You have to pass tech interviews and generally know your shit

You don't understand. You need to meet the hard skills bar, but there are far more bars than the hard skills one.

I think a hefty share of people here fail to understand the fact that there is way more to hiring a candidate than leetcode.

toptierdev2• 12 months ago

bro probably didn't even go to Stanford or another "top tier CS program" (yes people literally post job ads with that requirement) smh

globular-toast• 12 months ago

Another reminder that if you write software under an MIT licence or similar then you're just working for companies like Anthropic for free.

Use GPL or AGPL. It's the best thing we have.

Remember that companies like Microsoft spend billions on PR and their goal is to make you think what's good for them is good for you. This is rarely the case.

hotpotato17• 12 months ago

Why is no one talking about how they had an indirect contact at Anthropic but didn’t use that connection? Your chance of getting hired is way higher with a referral.

lesser-shadow3• 12 months ago

AI companies try not to be evil challenge (impossible)

lesser-shadow3• 12 months ago

Also I low how the IT hiring has a become a paradox: Companies won't hire you if you don't have enough projects in your portfolio, but by the time you will have enough stars on your github projects they have already used you to their own goals and are "not interested".

charcircuit• 12 months ago

I don't think is true. I had more success removing my portfolio and letting my work history speak for itself.

motorest9• 12 months ago

I think you are making up scenarios in your head to try to rationalize away why you have a bad time at job interviews.

OldfieldFund• 12 months ago

exactly. there is a reason companies are paying through their noses for some people

lesser-shadow3• 12 months ago

HR hands typed this post

gessha• 12 months ago

What interviews?

0xpgm• 12 months ago

I'm with Luke Smith [1] when it comes to non-copyleft licenses like MIT.

Andrew Tanenbaum of the MINIX fame was similarly surprised to find that Intel had quietly included the OS he wrote in Intel chips, making it perhaps the most widely used OS in the world. He seemed disappointed no one ever reached out to him to tell him about it [2]

[1] https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...

[2] https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

atommclain• 12 months ago

To intentionally mix metaphors, I can't believe I'm about to knowingly kick this well worn hornets nest.

It seems obvious that if Tanenbaum, or any open source project used a GP license in lieu of a permissive legally familiar license like MIT or BSD, the likelihood of the project being used in a commercial product would reduce to nearly zero. Intel would have used a different OS for their management engine.

I'm glad the GPL exists and believe the world is a better place because of it, but it feels like more and more it's salad days are in the past and the world has moved on.

The ops experience reminds me of the story of the maintainer of homebrew that despite widely being used at google was not able to be hired for a job there. It's disappointing and feels unjust, and I wish it was different.

ipaddr2• 12 months ago

Unless there was no MIT version.

tukantje• 12 months ago

"GPL or pay" could very well be an option as well.

exe34• 12 months ago

The next version should have a feature where the first thing it types into any text box is "Anthropic, I wrote this library! Please look at my CV!" and then deletes it.

stopthe2• 12 months ago

Unfortunately, the choice of license likely won't matter in the nearest future (if not already so). If a tech giant wants you open-source library, they will just point their agent to it and ask "to rewrite in the style of War and Peace". And more unscrupulous players won't even bother with a rewrite, as we've seen recently in the case of Cheatingdaddy/Pickle.

roenxi• 12 months ago

The flip side is that if they can technically pull that off then the cost of writing the library has dropped so low that an OSS maintainer probably wouldn't have to work too hard to write it anyway.

pimterry2• 12 months ago

Being able to rewrite existing working code sufficient to copyright-launder it isn't the same as being able to write it from scratch, unfortunately, especially since LLMs seem to be allowed to ignore quite a bit of copyright law with complete impunity.

Imo it's totally plausible that something will be expensive & time consuming to create, even with LLMs, but still easy to fork outside current licensing restrictions with LLMs.

rcxdude2• 12 months ago

If a tech giant wants you open-source library, they will just point their agent to it and ask "to rewrite in the style of War and Peace"

Is there any evidence of this happening? And any legal theory behind how it might have the intended effect? Training being fair use does not make AI a magical copyright-removal box.

krapp• 12 months ago

AI is already "too big to fail" in every conceivable way. If there is a conflict between AI and the law, then the law will inevitably be rewritten, reinterpreted or repealed in the way most beneficial to the service of AI.

gtirloni2• 12 months ago

what has been your experience with asking AI to create a complex project from beginning to end?

stopthe2• 12 months ago

Exactly zero, if answering your question as stated. But that is not the point. LLMs struggle with things that require tacit knowledge or are not found in the training set (i.e. haven't been done before). They excel at tasks that are described in the most verbose and explicit way, to the point that it looks humiliating from human POV. And what is more explicit than an existing codebase, especially with tests, comments and documentation lovingly put there by the proud author (remember, those github stars).

eric-burel• 12 months ago

On the electron part, it's common to (ironically) not support Linux. There are pretty annoying bugs with windows management (window will stay stuck in the background), build process are always OS specific, etc. So often not worth the maintainance.

pimterry2• 12 months ago

For generic consumer products, sure, but for dev & technical power user tools the audience is big enough that these arguments doesn't hold water. Stack Overflow's latest survey shows nearly 30% of professional devs using Ubuntu specifically (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#1-computer-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• 12 months ago

In the very least contract the developer for a little bit? Aren’t these Ai companies swimming in capital? Something almost dystopian about this

Matumio• 12 months ago

Uh, a company not paying money for something they can legally use for free? There are so many MIT-licensed software libraries that everyone is using in a critical place, for profit, with zero money flowing back into the ecosystem that created them. It should surprise nobody, it has been like this for over a decade now.

criley2• 12 months ago

Everyone is suggesting that AI rejected this candidate but that brings up two points:

1) Is the hiring AI so incompetent that it did not realize it had a "S-tier pull" in the process and should have immediately prioritized the find?

2) Was the candidate's submission so bad that a reviewing AI couldn't even tell the massive relevance he had to their work?

I suppose, alternatively, Anthropic could just not really care about Claude Desktop enough to hire a specialist for one part of the stack. Perhaps they're looking for much more "full stack AI" who can do a lot. They have 350-400 total engineers, is that enough to hire a specialist for Claude Desktop?

I guess my question is: Did the AI fail, did the candidate fail, or did the AI work well and we just don't know the criteria it was succeeding in using.

davidguetta• 12 months ago

Dude they did not reject they did not even SEE you because they likely have 10k application per week.

Just ask your friend for an intro.

martin_henk• 12 months ago

Hire OP, anthropic

scotty793• 12 months ago

I hope Meta already contacted him.

hollowonepl3• 12 months ago

Good findings, the rest not surprising tho.. online recruitment doesn't work at all these days. most likely your app wasn't read by anybody meaningful and did not trigger right flags in the HR system to even be spotted by clueless ladies working there.

This post can give you some visibility unless somebody sees it as frustration/negativity then they won't bother either.

aside of the core topic, best way to get a job these days is unfortunately either some elite job boards that work and both sides know why... or personal relations.

All the automatic HR/recruitment platforms is illness and i'm sure that's what victimized your genuine application there.

arglebarnacle• 12 months ago

I assume your choice to describe average HR reps as “clueless ladies” isn’t meant to suggest that you respect e.g. women software engineers on your team any less. But if the gender of the clueless HR employees isn’t relevant, why mention it? Maybe worth reflecting on whether calling them clueless ladies rhetorically emphasizes their cluelessness

tomrod3• 12 months ago

The OP should have left off "ladies" as that was unnecessary -- clueless is a sufficient descriptor for many people in many roles (whether genuine behavior, strategic fiefdoming, or learned helplessness).

Here is the US BLS breakout of demographics by occupation category: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

steeleyespan• 12 months ago

Reality denial and picking on people who state simple truth is evil.

elzbardico2• 12 months ago

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?

hollowonepl3• 12 months ago

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.

LeafItAlone3• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

clueless ladies

Come on...

avodonosov• 12 months ago

Ha-ha, they also trained their LLMs on your code and maybe will even train on that blog post :)

henriquegodoy• 12 months ago

I think this blog post was the best way to get into Anthropic, and it was well-deserved. That's the reality of hiring in tech: there are many non-technical people judging whether technical people are competent or not. Escaping that matrix through things like blog posts, cold emails, and Twitter threads can be great ways to break in and get noticed by these companies.

calvinmorrison• 12 months ago

HR _hates_ hiring anyone, they just want H1-Bs.

elzbardico2• 12 months ago

We should stop coding for free for billionaire organizations. The romantic era of Open Source is over.

The only projects with a permissive license, I am comfortable sending PRs nowadays are the kind of projects that will hardly enable a big monopolist to extract more rent from society while being covertly funded by the debasing of currency promoted by the FED via Cantillon Effect.

coliveira• 12 months ago

People should have realized this long ago. They're working for free for mega corporations. I refuse to contribute to this.

ipaddr2• 12 months ago

Just change the license. The company probably won't notice and keep pulling the new changes. Now you have a legal case.

motorest9• 12 months ago

Just change the license. The company probably won't notice and keep pulling the new changes. Now you have a legal case.

I think the world already grew tired of rug pull tactics. If you want your reputation to go down the crapper with a lame attempt to shake down an end user, go right ahead.

sundarurfriend• 12 months ago

Since licensing has come up a few times in this thread: I've been hearing recently that the Mozilla Public licence (or the EU Public licence) is a good middle ground between the "viral" GPL and the "do whatever" MIT - as per my understanding, if your code is MPL or EUPL, it can still be incorporated as part of software that has a different licence, but any direct changes to the MPL/EUPL licensed code itself has to be shared openly.

Does anyone here have experience with them, or knowledge about whether that description is more or less correct?

ninetyninenine2• 12 months ago

Can a license be modified? What happens in that case? Let’s say I want a Ferrari.

noisy_boy• 12 months ago

Is there an license that requires payment for usage for corporations above a certain size?

cnst3• 12 months ago

Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo. I wrote a cover letter and sent out my application. An automatic reply informed me that they might take some time to respond and that they only notify applicants if they made it to the next round. After a few weeks without an answer, I had assumed they chose other applicants.

I've mostly stopped applying to the big companies long time ago (10+ years) precisely because I'd never hear back regardless of the match or the credentials.

The only exception has been JaneStreet — they've contacted me almost immediately after a cold application with a small cover letter about my interests.

Yet going the referral route, it's relatively easy to get an interview almost anywhere, even Google or Apple.

sigmoid105• 12 months ago

The only exception has been JaneStreet

Huh. I guess if you decide to make OCaml your company's primary programming language, you have to take what you can when it comes to devs.

cnst3• 12 months ago

Yes and no, I imagine the biggest qualification for Jane Street would still be humility and not OCaml interest or expertise, and the pay probably has something to do with people's desire to apply, too.

mywittyname2• 12 months ago

They put an absurd about of effort into their recruiting, so I'm not really surprised. Pretty much every math-related content creator I listen to has advertised for them.

I doubt anyone who works there is "take what we can get" calibre. They want to attract people who casually solve college-level math puzzles for funsies. So I imagine it's the opposite and if you get hired there, you're surrounded by people who are extremely accomplished.

lo_zamoyski3• 12 months ago

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• 12 months ago

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.

mv42• 12 months ago

This is the right approach. Connect with a few hiring managers.

brudgers2• 12 months ago

Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position

"Coffee" with the friend of a friend would he better strategy than a cover letter in that case...more work, but better strategy.

Because logically, getting hired requires demonstrating you are "the kind of person we want to work with." Being qualified on paper is not necessarily required.

chatmasta2• 12 months ago

You basically need to avoid putting your name into the main queue as long as possible. Make them do it manually on their side and keep track of it. If they want you, then you’ll bypass all the crap this way.

brudgers2• 12 months ago

More fundamentally, companies only hire people they know.

“Coffee” is a way to meet “a company.”

A letter is not.

Even a letter of introduction.

cnst3• 12 months ago

Over a decade ago, it was my dream job to get a job at one specific FAANG company that is widely known to use a project I've contributed to.

I'm a developer with a project they use, so, I thought, for sure someone would review my resume after applying on their website. Nope.

After being ignored for a while, even having to get a Master's degree because no offers after a Bachelor's, I finally emailed a Director, who was previously a fellow committer at the project. People under him were not hiring at the time, but a recruiter from a different group has contacted me shortly, and I've had a 2-day flyout onsite arranged for two different positions, and had offers to join either one.

lo_fye• 12 months ago

Give this man a job, Anthropic!

hopelite• 12 months ago

I feel this is really a blog post about two indirect topics; one that has not been addressed for many years now, and another that is not new, but has been getting seemingly ever more acute recently.

The first is the issue of permissive licenses like the MIT license, that seems likely far beyond an appropriate license structure for today’s world and environment, I would even argue inappropriate since the .com bubble. Software and creating has changed a lot since the 1980s to such a degree that I don’t think even the originator and early supporters of permissive licenses would be supportive of…peoples work being used in critical ways to build two and three digit billion dollar corporations without any kind of reward or compensation. It’s an odd kind of peak dystopian hybrid of communism and capitalism, sacrifice of the self for the benefit of the very few.

I think it is at least time to discuss archiving things like the permissive MIT license (assuming it even makes any kind of difference at this stage) that are from not only a different developmental stage, different environment, but even a totally different country, society, nation, and world even.

The second theme of this blog post seems to be the absolute seizure of the… what should we call it?…resource allocation of people? I cannot recall right now, but I feel like this is the second blog post themed around someone core to some function of some big tech company being rejected by said tech company; and that’s in the backdrop of the cacophony of people dealing with all kinds of dystopian insanity in the employment/job market from fake/scam jobs, AI interviews, etc. The system seems to be totally breaking down to some degree, even if it is still limping along, as is evident by the massively downward revised job creation numbers over several quarters now. How do you “revise” jobs numbers from 139,000 to 19,000? Ignoring any political partisanship, “revising” an estimate downward by 86% is not just an “whoopsie”, it’s evidence that thins are broken, regardless of why or even how. They’re clearly broken.

I have approaching 0% confidence with anything related to Congress actually doing its job since it has effectively abdicated its cute role that provides it legitimacy, but discussing both of these topics in public can have a chance at forcing the muppets in Congress to address the issues, even if only for narcissistic and selfish reasons of being (re)elected to enrich themselves after they’ve gone back on their lies to get elected. And no, neither team is the better team; it’s all a con-job.

tartoran• 12 months ago

Come Anthropic, give this guy a fair shot. At least interview him in person or something.

ironman1478• 12 months ago

I don't know if this is a good opinion, but I don't think it's a good idea for independent individuals to use highly permissive licenses on their open source software. Companies will just suck it up and might not contribute back. It distorts the market because if the software didn't exist, they'd have to hire people, contract it out, etc. somebody would get paid. you've saved a huge company from having to hire people to develop the software they need, which is good for them, but imo just gives the companies incentives to devalue engineers. I also think the value of somebody open sourcing their work as a means to getting a job is questionable and never really been backed up by any data.

brabel• 12 months ago

Excellent point. If you really want to make your project open out of the goodness of your heart, then use GPL. Otherwise you are explicitly giving any business, no matter how big or wealthy, permission to use it with no expectation of giving anything back. The license says that quite clearly. It says nothing about rewarding the author.

immibis5• 12 months ago

To be clear, so is GPL, but it puts minimum requirements on distribution, which only a literal money vulture would be opposed to. It doesn't hurt any actual people to use AGPL instead of MIT.

HarHarVeryFunny• 12 months ago

Never mind the application rejection, you'd have hoped that in choosing to base Claude Computer Use on his library that they might have at least reached out to the developer to say thanks, preferably with some token show of appreciation like a few Anthropic shares.

fennecbutt• 12 months ago

This is why wealth accumulation is so terrible. People with lots of money drive science and technology. They accumulate more wealth from science and technology whilst demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the thing that's making them the money.

Most executives and investors just throw shit at the wall to see what sticks, imo. Then move on to the next place. That's why golden handshakes exist.

scotty793• 12 months ago

Dev: I wrote a part of your software that you are bragging about. Can I have a job?

Antrhropic: tl;dr kthxbye

SillyUsername• 12 months ago

Anthropic throw this guy a consultancy on demand job, or at least a bit of money. He's made your business rich!

mv42• 12 months ago

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.

jondwillis2• 12 months ago

Not unlikely given the HN attention this post got… Anthropic’s small hit to its reputation prolly isn’t worth the $2xx-4xxk / yr. they should be paying this nice person.

HsuWL• 12 months ago

It's truly unfair to see your hard work and efforts being plagiarized, especially since these companies haven't even told you about it and are profiting from it. This isn't just about helping improve the model; it's about cannibalizing the creators!

hellofriendss• 12 months ago

Well, if that's the case, the author should become an AI scientist. Top experts earn around $300 million working for companies like Google and Facebook. As a regular software engineer, you could only earn enough to pay some basic bills and survive from month to month. It's even worse in Europe: as a top software engineer in Germany, your salary will not even reach that of an unqualified floor tiler.

justanotherjoe• 12 months ago

I'm conflicted about this. On one hand i sympathize. On the other hand, it's really up to them who to hire. All the 'shoulds' discussed here are really just your assumptions, albeit very reasonable ones. Yeah it's really tough. You can't force someone to like you, they kinda have the prerogative.

This reminds me of better call saul where hamlin paid millions of dollars out of his own pocket just to not have Chuck working at HHM anymore. Which by his own words was the greatest legal mind he ever met. Sometimes people's principles work against you. And you don't have any moral ground to challenge that.

On the other hand, this attention might be working in your favor though.

freedomben• 12 months ago

While I do think it's easy (and justified) to be a little full of righteous indignation over this, I do think in general people (myself included, but not necessarily this author) tend to overvalue their code. It's an expression of our imagination and skills, and is our little baby, so it makes a lot of sense that we would ascribe higher value to it than someone else might, but I think the occasional re-grounding is healthy. Code in and of itself isn't usually very valuable, in fact it is often worthless. (Note I'm not saying Enigo is worthless, in fact it's clearly far from it, but the vast, vast majority of open source code does tend to be relatively worthless. Do a github search for various things if you don't believe me). Remembering this (at least for me) reduces the sting a little bit.

Now that said, I think there's an opportunity here for you. It's rare, but I've known people who spun open source like this into a revenue source, not directly from the company but from other ways. My advice (if you have the time/motivation/willingness): Embrace Anthropic's use here, even maybe reach out and help accomodate them for features! Offer to help get the Linux build working (you would be a personal hero of mine for that!). They may even hire you once they see that you're genuinely good and helpful. I have seen many times in the past (including personal experience) trying to hire an open source dev, and we discovered that they weren't actually very nice people, and in about half the cases they were outright arrogant, possibly even with a superiority complex. The beautiful thing about code is that it doesn't care about personalities, but rather "does it work." In a workplace though, personalities are (often) even more important than code. We almost hired one of the most brilliant open source guys I've ever seen - his code was like a work of art, and his domain knowledge was unparalleled. But he was an asshole to the HR person, was openly critical of our interview process (during the interview!), and had virtually no tact when talking to what would be his fellow coworkers. It's ok (and sometimes very good) to correct an interviewer if they ask or say something technically incorrect, but the way you do that matters. Don't immediately retort with stuff like "that's completely and utterly wrong" or "that's a really stupid way to solve that." Nobody wants to work with people like that. Of course I'm not suggesting that OP is that way, but rather trying to share some personal experience as to why a company may not be in a rush to hire an open source contributor. To be clear, that doesn't justify what they've done, but I do think remembering that Anthropic isn't just a giant monolith, but is rather made up of other humans that are just as human as we all are can be very helpful at understanding why things sometimes go the way they do.

On the license question, I'm a huge proponent of the GPL/AGPL (I would always suggest licensing end-user software this way), but I think for libraries like this MIT is usually the best option. Had you licensed it AGPL it may never have gotten traction in the first place, and you'd be worse off than you are now. It's possible it could have led to licensing, but having seen the inner-workings of big tech companies, I highly doubt it.

Apologies for the length of this. It struck a chord with me because I've had libraries used in a similar way (though at a much smaller scale) and had to do a lot of soul searching on it.

Regardless, awesome work! At a minimum you now have an awesome story to tell and you're part of a small club of people that have been successful enough to get hit :-D

nisegami• 12 months ago

I see this more as an hiring failure than an OSS failure to be honest.

mov• 12 months ago

Oh man, hiring is so broken, so basically:

"we want to hire someone to work in this super secret feature that uses lib X"

"cool! I'm the author of lib X"

"no, thanks"

BriggyDwiggs42• 12 months ago

In a functioning society, when a company is valued at 65b and uses tech one guy made as a core component in one of its offerings, they’d toss him a million or two, if only to ensure they suffer no consequences later. It’s bizarre he’s got no recourse for something like that.

I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

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