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.
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.
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?
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
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..)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 :)
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 :-)
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.
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.
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!)
"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?
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?)
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.
> 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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 96.6 ms ] threadBasically "tl;dr" is what they responded with to his job application.
It seems like they didn't even look at his application.
Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Andrew@gambit.us
A number of other people contacted me with offers so it looks like there will be a happy end to the story :-)
Automated systems, AI screening, and incompetent HR people are the bane of modern recruiting practices.
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.
"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?
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
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!
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.
It's bit more AI now and bit less boilerplate rejections.
This sort of silliness is what you get when you run crucial business processes using AI instead of humans.
Sucks, but that's the reality of hiring (and getting hired) in tech in general.
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.
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.