Why ask a human to complete a coding test when they can just use an AI to help them? Anthropic engineering manager Felix Rieseberg says he has stopped using traditional coding interviews for his team. "Being able to quickly define problems and find elegant solutions was a weak but useful predictor for how successful you’d be on my teams," Rieseberg explained in a blog post on Tuesday. "Small coding challenges in real code did tell us something meaningful about candidates." No longer, he says. The coding interview is dead , as far as he’s concerned. "There’s no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both," he insisted. "Our most impactful builders are successful regardless of how good they are at these tests." In a response posted to social media, Jaana Dogan, principal engineer at Google, said much the same. "I’m not doing a ton of coding interviews nowadays but I’d be interested to interview how people use coding agents," she wrote . "That itself gives me more signals about candidates’ coding skills." Several months ago, Google reportedly began reevaluating how it conducts coding interviews and what it looks for in candidates. And while it would be surprising if similar conversations haven’t already occurred at other large technology companies where AI agents have demonstrated their coding capabilities, the rest of the tech industry appears to be moving more cautiously than the AI enthusiasts. "We are not seeing tech companies abandon skills assessments widely across the industry—at least not yet," said Nicole Bachaud, labor economist at ZipRecruiter, in an email to The Register . "In fact, based on our October 2026 Employer Survey of 1,500 employers, we see the tech industry (Information sector specifically) is actually the most likely to test for skills, with 62. 5 percent of employers requiring formal skill tests on initial applications." Coding interviews at Microsoft, and later Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other tech giants, vary, depending on what the hiring organization aims to evaluate. They may probe technical knowledge related to a specific subject, coding ability in a particular language, general problem-solving skills, team-oriented behavior, or other skills. Stripe’s software engineer interview process, according to Educative , consists of a phone screening stage, a technical phone interview, and several further on-site interviews. Rieseberg actually worked there and describes how founder Patrick Collison urged new hires to pay attention to things that seemed out of place. "His bet was that newcomers would spot friction and opportunities that old-timers had long stopped noticing," he said…
