[ahussain]

They wrote:

> If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at [e-mail] with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing.

That doesn’t seem snarky to me. They said if you beat Opus, not their best solution. Removing “perhaps” (i.e. MAYBE) would be worse since that assumes everyone wants to interview at Anthropic. I guess they could have been friendlier: “if you beat X, we’d love to chat!”

[0x3f]

I suppose you could interpret it either way, but having dealt with their interview pipeline I'd choose the snark.

[dude250711]

Yeah, a nerd bypassed HR and showed their true character. They are swimming in easy money.

[lovich]

That paraphrases to

"do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you"

It sounds incredibly condescending, if not snarky, but I would classify those adjectives as mostly synonymous.

[miki123211]

I suspect this is partially legal CYA.

There's more to employees than their raw ability to go below some performance threshold. If somebody passes the test, but lives in an US sanctioned country with no plans to move, is well known for using the n-word on social media or has previously broken an NDA, Anthropic probably doesn't want to interview them.

[andruby]

I understand how it can be interpreted as snarky, but how could it have been written better? It's a hard path to walk and recruiting/interviewing is inherently sensitive it seems.

[throwaway743]

I took the "perhaps" as a decision to be considered by the applicant, considering they'd be competent enough to get in at a place of their choice, not just anthropic.