Felix Rieseberg leads the development of the Claude.ai, Cowork, and Claude Code Desktop applications at Anthropic. This month, he took a step that many experienced developers may frown upon. He stopped giving job applicants traditional programming tasks. According to him, they are no longer meaningful because Claude can handle them better than most people. In his view, a small React task now makes no more sense than testing candidates on assembly language.
One might conclude from this that novice programmers are doomed. But Rieseberg argues the opposite. When he observed how people at the beginning of their careers work with artificial intelligence, he saw newcomers outperform colleagues who were probably better programmers and had been at the company much longer. Results no longer depend as heavily on how many years a person has spent learning frameworks and libraries.
A newcomer sees what others have stopped noticing
According to Rieseberg, the advantage new people have is a fresh perspective. He recalls how, when new employees joined Stripe, founder Patrick Collison encouraged them to pay attention to everything that seemed strange. Long-time employees had stopped noticing the problems and opportunities that a new person would spot immediately.
He experienced this himself at Notion. During one of his interviews, he was asked to design a mode in which the application would work without an internet connection. Only later did he learn that it was a trick question because everyone considered it impossible. The data model was indeed complex, but the claim that company CEO Ivan Zhao would never allow such a solution turned out to be a myth. No one had ever bothered to verify it.
The second story is less flattering to Rieseberg. Shortly after joining, he wanted to get large TVs for the teams that would display live data dashboards. He encountered internal obstacles and gave up. A year later, a new colleague, Ji Pei, arrived with the same idea. Rieseberg advised him not to bother, but in the meantime, Pei simply asked, and the TVs were in the office the very next day. Within a year, Rieseberg had gone from being the newcomer to being the person who said it could not be done.
No one is listening to you, so build it
The catch is that no one is usually interested in a newcomer’s opinion. Companies are built on layers of management, with several people in Silicon Valley approving or blocking ideas. As long as development was expensive, people first had to establish themselves before a company would give them room to act. But development is no longer expensive.
Rieseberg therefore advises junior engineers to first take a close look at what the company or their department wants to achieve. The goals being addressed by their manager’s manager are a good guide. They should then come up with a bold idea that would significantly help the company achieve those goals and build a working prototype, perhaps over a single weekend. Instead of writing documents, seeking support, and waiting for designers, they can immediately demonstrate a finished product.
However, he warns against one common mistake. Young developers like to cram many ideas into a single prototype, causing three excellent ones to get lost among twenty weak ones. A prototype has only one purpose: to show management the opportunity so clearly that they immediately understand who should take it to completion as well.
A graphical application built in one weekend
Rieseberg points to Anthropic itself as proof that this works. People at the company had become so accustomed to controlling Claude Code through the command line that no one thought to create a graphical interface. Then two relatively new engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, built a working prototype in a single weekend. The first public version was released roughly eight days later, and the application became a very popular product.
However, Rieseberg does not yet know exactly how to select new hires today. When reviewing résumés and portfolios, he now mainly looks for small prototypes that demonstrate taste, an ability to empathize with users, and a thoughtful approach.
Source: felixrieseberg.com
