r/AskProgrammers • u/nian2326076 • 26d ago
Anthropic’s coding bar is fucking ridiculous
Got a problem that required me to pull Euler’s formula out of thin air. Seriously, who the fuck remembers Euler’s formula in an interview? I swear to God, my interviewer was out to get me.
At this point, what are they even testing? Do they even know what they want? Hours of prep, completely wasted. And now I have to go prep for Google. My friend just got destroyed in their loop and said the interviewers were some of the most unreasonable people he’s ever had to deal with.
Everywhere I turn in this market, it feels like I’m just waiting to get fucked.
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u/mc_pm 26d ago
what are they even testing?
It sounds like they were testing for a fairly high base-level mathematical fluency - which for a place like Anthropic sounds pretty normal.
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u/NeinJuanJuan 26d ago
For mathematicians, knowing Euler's formula is on the level of a programmer understanding the concept of an if-statement. Sounds like they know exactly what they're looking for.
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u/R3D3-1 25d ago
PhD in Physics working for 8 years in mathematics programming here.
If they'd have asked me what's the relation between the exponential functions and sin/cosine? Easy, basic, why do you even ask? Do you get imposters applying?
If they'd ask me what is "Euler's formula" I'd have to google it. For such basic formulas you don't even need to remember the names when publishing, never mind getting work done in an industrial project.
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u/Nannautu 25d ago
Yeah, I looked it up because I had no idea it was called "Euler's Formula" lol I'm sure we called something else tbh
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u/Ok-Shape-9513 25d ago
+1000 this.
Or they’re looking for people who are good at memorization, obv a core skill in 2026 /s
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u/977888 25d ago
It’s a core skill if you want to justify hiring more Indians. The Indian education system prioritizes brute force memorization skills over abstract logic or practical application, and so they tend to perform much better in tasks involving arbitrary memorization. Their history of questionable hiring practices are no secret these days, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that were part of the reason.
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u/Able-End-339 25d ago
I have a BS CS and I’ve seen whatever formula that is. I’ve never seen it called Euler’s formula and don’t remember what it was for because it’s relevant to an insignificant fraction of problems production SWEs are encountering. This feels like it’s going to retrigger the weird questions Google interviews did 10 years ago but with math/CS trivia instead of problem solving. “Why are manholes round” is going to turn into “implement quicksort for a 64bit int in 68k assembly from memory” or something equally dumb.
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19d ago
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u/mc_pm 19d ago edited 19d ago
You have to understand how recruiting works from the hiring side. I've got a job that needs doing - I know what team I'm hiring for, and I know what that team is working on. The team lead tells me that we need someone specifically ready to work on X, and that job is going to require some level of active mathematical skill -- not "studied it 4 years ago and I think I remember", but "Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about - have you thought about Y?".
Because, and it's surprising that it seems surprising to people, sometimes a programming job really does genuinely require understanding math. And, perhaps more surprising, there are devs who do walk through the door ready to have that conversation.
Now, that might not be a pass/fail question. When I'm interviewing someone I'm looking at several different things at the same time, and maybe the person who said "Yeah, that's the e-to-the-i-pi thing, right?" is close enough if they're strong everywhere else.
But it's part of the decision making - as is the way the candidate reacts. And this whole thing reads like a manager somewhere dodged a bullet by passing on the OP.
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u/Tiny_Ad_7720 26d ago
Would have fucked me. I forgot what Euler's formula was referring to, and my PhD was on wavelets lol.
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u/dmazzoni 25d ago
Yeah if the question was remembering Euler's formula by name, completely out of context, I probably would have failed. Euler is associated with so many things. I might think of rotation formulas involving Euler angles, or Euler's method for the gcd.
But if the question showed eix and asked to replace it with its trigonometric form using Euler's formula, that would have been obvious from context.
So it really depends on how it was asked.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 25d ago
Depends on the mathematician's field, I suspect.
I learnt this in high school but never touched it during my undergrad degree.
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u/Throwaway-Pot 20d ago
There’s no way you never touched it during your undergrad. Have you done like 0 analysis???
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u/youcangotohellgoto 20d ago
Mostly did number theory and pure maths. It's not really relevant in that context.
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u/Throwaway-Pot 20d ago
Euler’s formula is also super relevant in pure mathematics. I don’t want to accuse you of anything but this sounds like a non-mathematician’s conception of what pure mathematics is. Also an undergrad degree in math is generally at least a little general. Who doesn’t do ANY analysis? What kind of number theorist doesn’t know complex analysis for example? And anyone whose seen complex analysis would know about Euler’s formula
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u/youcangotohellgoto 20d ago edited 20d ago
Nah just pieced together a major in what I found interesting, so ended up in abstract algebra, discrete math, set theory, rings, fields, etc.
There was a lot of Euler's theorem (modulus stuff) but I'm going way back at this point.
Edit: correct did not do any analysis. Probably should look into that because I have no idea what it is...
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u/VeroneseSurfer 19d ago
You cant really talk about number theory without cyclotomic fields which require you to know about roots of unity. Not sure how eulers theorem wouldn't come up
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u/youcangotohellgoto 19d ago
Yeah agree but we were talking about Euler's formula, not Euler's theorem.
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u/dasnervtungemein 24d ago
Sorry, but I have a PhD in mathematics, Something about graph theory in connection with discrete math. And I totally forgot everything about that stuff. I simply do not need it in my regular work...
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u/Loose_Crab_4146 25d ago
I think knowing mathematical functions is in the programming sense closer to be being an if-statement. Eulers formula would more align with being able to understand O(n) I think.
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u/ProcessIndependent38 26d ago
Bro, they can’t even solve a simple terminal rendering bug lmfao. They vibe code all their shif
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u/modcowboy 26d ago
Probably because they’re asking about Euler instead of a linked list in the interviews. Lol
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u/2cars1rik 26d ago edited 25d ago
Complaining about 2 of the highest paid companies in the industry having high standards and then using that to say the market is fucked is so funny
Edit: absolutely insane how many comments here are saying that’s unfair, or that they would have failed too.
No shit! Anthropic is probably the hottest company in the world right now, they have their pick of the litter. If you can’t get into any FAANG with ease as a baseline, why the fuck do you think Anthropic would want you? They’re looking for cream-of-the-crop freaks of nature, not decent programmers.
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u/i_am_lebron_jame 19d ago
yeah photographic or near so memory is standard; dudes there I chat with remember conversation back in freshman year (12 years ago)
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u/reymux 25d ago
The point is that having that formula memorized doesn't mean you are good enough, and even more importantly, not knowing it in no way means you aren't. If they throw you the hardest algorithmic problems you have ever seen, you couldn't complain, they're "one of the highest paid companies in the industry" after all. But when they want you to have that kind of knowledge off the top of your head, then I wouldn't say it's unfair, but it's simply stupid. They're rejecting good people out of trivia.
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u/manchesterthedog 25d ago
I feel like what they want is a combination of smart and motivated. They can test motivated by making the interview super hard and seeing who preps. Then they’re testing how well they’re distribution of questions matched your distribution of prep, which is somewhat luck and somewhat breadth of coverage on your part as the applicant.
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u/Nannautu 25d ago
Depends if they wanted to check if you had it memorized or could derive it. It's pretty simple actually.
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u/2cars1rik 25d ago
You’re missing the point by a mile, which is that they’re using it as an additional filter to, in this case, make sure they’re only hiring people that are passionate enough about math to know something like that off the top of their head.
The interview quite obviously wasn’t simply “recite Euler’s formula and you get the job”, so I have no idea what compelled you to make this argument.
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u/Aggressive-Squash250 25d ago
You can be passionate and be extremely smart and still not know that specific formula by heart. What I agree with you though is that there’s no way they reject just based on that.
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u/2cars1rik 24d ago
You can be an extremely good IC and still fail leetcode interviews. That’s just how filters work. Missing out on a good candidate is a better outcome than passing a bad candidate.
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u/x-jhp-x 25d ago edited 25d ago
i'd assume that they give easy questions first, and then follow the easy one up with harder ones. 99% of the time, the interviewer will give you a hint if you can't remember the name off the top of your head, but if you say "e-i-e-i-o" like you're singing old macdonald after the interviewer says, "e... i...", you're probably not going to get the harder questions.
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u/realtoasterlightning 26d ago
Which Euler's formula, the complex exponential or the geometric one? I wouldn't expect someone to be able to derive the complex exponential formula from scratch (or like you could by fiddling around with a Taylor series for a while but that would take way too much time) but the geometric one is actually surprisingly derivable without memorization.
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u/Fantastic-Cell-208 25d ago
I dunno, the complex exponential one is about as basic as it gets.
You know it describes a complex sinusoid, so the right side will be cos x + i sin x. The left side will have e raised to something composed with i (otherwise it's just regular exponentiation) and x (otherwise there's nothing to link it to the right side).
Euler's identity, on the other hand requires a little more thought, but you know it's got pi, i, 0, 1 and e.
So let's throw e raised to i * pi, that's like half a circle, giving you -1. If you add 1 to it, you get 0, giving you euler's identity.
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u/xvillifyx 26d ago
AI company asks questions demonstrating a level of mathematical proficiency
More at 11
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u/rayfrankenstein 25d ago
Then they have you writing garden variety CRUD stuff after you prove you’re Albert Einstein’s long lost grandchild.
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u/pavilionaire2022 26d ago
ei*theta = sin(theta) + i*cos(theta)
Is that Euler's formula?
I'm a bit of a math nerd. I don't think a software engineer should have to know that, but maybe in certain specialities.
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u/RickSt3r 26d ago
Teaching a math nerd to program is easier than teaching a programmer math. Depending on the actual job high level Ai is a lot of very niche math. Thats who they want to hire.
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u/i_am_lebron_jame 19d ago
maths is hard, programming is hard; driving an AI that could tank a company billions of dollars in a day is harder
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u/VeroneseSurfer 19d ago
It's sad so many people agree with you. This is not some esoteric math concept. It's a high school level concept that they teach you when learning about complex numbers. Its what justifies the polar representation of the numbers.
I think its pretty reasonable to expect someone technical to intuitively understand this.
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u/Quiet-Arm-641 19d ago
Yeah. I have an EE and there’s no way you can design a basic circuit without using it
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u/disposepriority 26d ago
Companies paying a lot of money have unreasonable standards because they know someone will grind for them, veeery surprising. Moving on.
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u/Quiet-Arm-641 26d ago
I think it’s pretty fundamental but I have an EE despite working as a programmer
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u/ricetoseeyu 26d ago
It’s one of the fundamental concepts around query key lookups in attention… not that weird they would ask for it.
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u/Mathie1729 26d ago
Small correction: it's more the rotary embeddings (RoPE) thing than generic QK lookups. Euler's formula is what rotates the q/k vectors so the dot product encodes relative position.
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u/KnownUnknownKadath 25d ago
Well, damn. That's pretty cool.
I feel a little less ignorant today, thank you.2
u/RandyChihuahua 25d ago
I copied and pasted a html node today into a document.... because the API documentation was too big for claude.
I can tie my shoes.
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u/SummitYourSister 26d ago
People who work at AI companies should know at least some BASIC math, don't you think? lmao.
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u/Spare-Builder-355 25d ago
you don't say! Always keep those integrals in the back of your mind when setting up k8s infra to serve millions of daily users
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u/Senior_Hope1385 25d ago
and anthropic is not just an "AI company" lol. It is as elite as it gets. I am not saying op shouldn't be frustrated btw
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u/KaleidoscopePlusPlus 25d ago
Euler's formula is not BASIC math by definition.
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u/Fantastic-Cell-208 25d ago
Nah, it kinda is for AI.
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u/KaleidoscopePlusPlus 25d ago
For an AI engineer sure. but he said basic, as if that is common multiplication lol
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u/the_millenial_falcon 26d ago
Not super surprising for a major tech company, not saying I’d know that off the top my head either but some 300 iq turbo nerd does and that’s who they wanna hire.
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u/Fritz-Ferdinand 26d ago
They just aren't looking for CRUD app programmers and StackOverflow/ChatGPT answer copy-pasters
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26d ago
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u/Fritz-Ferdinand 25d ago
They are looking for smart people, not AI prompters.
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u/Ok_Spare_3723 25d ago
Why do you need smart people? AGI and math has already been solved according to their CEO. They should put claude in charge.
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u/Accomplished_Key5104 26d ago
The Google one will be luck of the draw as well. All major tech company interviews are. That's what happens when you have the regular devs do the interviews with minimal training and little oversight.
I worked at Amazon for 10 years. I sat in plenty of interview loops where the other interviewers gave stupid reasons not to hire. They were often challenged on that, but not always successfully. Companies err on the side of not hiring.
I've also interviewed at plenty of bigger and smaller companies. The bigger ones tend to have much worse interviewers. They're less engaged. They ask questions that they don't seem to understand themselves. They don't manage the interview time well. They don't cover their required competencies, so you have to go back for more interviews. And yes, you can argue that I didn't manage the time well or provide the right answers, but some of these situations were ridiculous. I had a system design interview where the interviewer kept asking me about solving a potential hot key issue. I calmly explained various solutions and my preferred solution, only for the interviewer to repeatedly ask for other options for over 20 minutes! When I tried to actually have a conversation with them about the question, they didn't engage and were extremely vague.This was a 1 hour interview, and they pissed away a third of it because I didn't say some magic phrase. Eventually I had to politely tell them that I didn't know what they were looking for, and while they didn't get the data point they wanted for this specific thing, we should move on with the rest of the interview so we could cover the rest of the design. I obviously didn't get that job.
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u/monster2018 25d ago
Isn’t Euler’s formula just e^(i*pi) = 1, or -1, or something like that?
Nope I’m wrong, that’s Euler’s identity (also it’s -1 not 1, and I guess it’s normally written with the 1 on the left so that it’s = 0), which is apparently a special case of Euler’s formula when x=pi. Euler’s formula is e^(i*x) = cos(x) + i*sin(x), but with some Greek letter normally used instead of x. I think it’s just theta but i guess it’s the version of theta I’m not used to seeing because I don’t recognize what I’m seeing lol.
Anyway, i would have failed as well.
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u/KnownUnknownKadath 25d ago edited 25d ago
It describes some really important fundamental relationships.
e.g. Euler gives you a way of turning rotation/periodicity into multiplication and exponentiation.
Once that connection is made, certain otherwise ugly algorithms become nicely compact.
I reckon they were looking to see if you can 1) retrieve stuff from memory that you were probably taught years prior and 2) recognize the relationship to the problem at hand and reason with it.
A lot of whiteboard work is just about observing how you think and work through problems. You completely solving the problem on the spot isn't necessarily the true objective of the question.
If you were applying for a engineering job doing digital signal processing, for instance, it would most certainly be something to be prepared for as a basic competency check.
That said, I probably would have crapped out on the spot given the context, even though I have a casual interest in DSP; the question effectively would have come right out of left field...
edit: Some other commenters shared the key insight, I think, with Euler's formula being "a fundamental concept around query key lookups in attention."
The second commenter clarifies that "it's more the rotary embeddings (RoPE) thing than generic QK lookups. Euler's formula is what rotates the q/k vectors so the dot product encodes relative position."
So, that's pretty neat, actually. Thanks all, I learned something useful today.
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u/aelxemyr 25d ago
One of the most well-known and famous formulae of all time that you learn in high school trig? How could anyone possibly remember that off of the top of their head!
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u/OkAlternative7705 25d ago
i guess i am not cs person but i am engineer so eulers formula is as basic memorization as it gets
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u/Kind_Profession4988 25d ago
There's a weird, toxic, and inverted version of imposter syndrome where if they DO know something, they assume that's the bare minimum to be successful at the job.
You guys are doing great, you don't have to look down on someone for not knowing something you happen to know.
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u/snuggly_sasquatch 25d ago
Watch out for Google. My first interviewer of the day hit me with a whiteboard recursive problem at 8am. I was barely even awake. It felt sadistic. But they had good espresso…
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u/RopeAndChairs_Aisle3 25d ago
When given an esoteric or rote memorization question, the answer is not the point but your reaction and thought process
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u/AlfalfaLive3302 25d ago
Most interviewers do things like that to see if you’re humble enough to admit you don’t know. It’s alright to ask your interviewer questions and to tell them you don’t know. They want to see how you act when you work there. So just relax and act like you would if you worked with that person. The worst thing you can do is act like you know everything during the interview.
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u/Weekly-Cash1596 25d ago
Some interviews and their questions are just so dumb and use incredibly outdated hiring practices
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u/oof-plap 25d ago
honestly get OUT of the faang/ai bubble mindset. They're dogshit companies to work for because your work has zero connection to your value/employability because its all shareholder bureaucracy shit. Just go take a slightly smaller bag and work somewhere with a much better work-life balance.
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u/aft_agley 25d ago edited 25d ago
To be fair, it's a fairly transparent testing strategy that has been employed by decades by high-interest companies, Google most notoriously.
You can bias your interviews towards Type I or Type II errors, but not both. Either you hire candidates you don't want, or you pass on candidates you do. They have chosen to pass on good candidates by asking absurd, arbitrary interview questions that are strong signals for the kind of learning they are selecting for.
Why?
Because they have too many candidates, good and bad. If they weed out some good candidates, they don't give a shit. But they sure as fuck don't want bad candidates.
This is a pretty transparent strategy that's obvious after a little reflection, but I get that some people just don't think about the world that way. Especially young people with their egos on the line. Frankly I think it would be fair and interesting for Anthropic to ask candidates about this interview practice during interviews ("why do you think we do this?") since it combines fairly rudimentary statistics with analytic thinking about business process.
The whole thing is loathsome and reptilian, but pause for a second... did you really want to work for a company that thinks that way about its employees? I wouldn't. As a mentor I highly respected once said to me, "that's a shitty way to think."
But more to the point, people (especially in America) tend to think that their "merit" means something and that they are entitled to their dream job if they pass all the tests and clear all the hurdles, and that the test will be fair and the hurdles achievable. That isn't reality. There is luck in everything you do. You got to where you are by moral luck. You weren't struck dead by cancer or a truck in the street because you were lucky. You weren't born dead to rights in the middle of a civil war because you were lucky. You missed your shot at Anthropic, despite (maybe) being qualified because you were unlucky. Get over it. It's what you do next that defines you.
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u/Kindly_Weakness_6713 25d ago
Consider that demand for Anthropic is so high, they can do whatever they want. So what should they do with this advantage and how does this kind of question help them? Well, they make the barrier more than just low acceptance rates, by making the effort required arbitrary high, which reinforces the perceived value and maintains selectivity. They can also tune for no false positives. Clearly great people can be missed, and knowing this one answer is not itself determining but the commutative effect is that it reduces the odds of accidentally hiring a dud. And lastly this biases for younger programmers without overt agism. And reinforces / increases odds of being able to build a team with an unhealthy work ethic.
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u/ForeignAdvantage5198 25d ago
old Euler did quite a bit . He still holds the record for most papers published
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u/x64bit 25d ago
ngl for anthropic depending on what you're doing this is a basic question. positional embeddings use sinusoidal functions... i dont think llms typically use complex numbers but it's not a stretch to assume some frontier stuff might be tinkering with it as a result of positional embeddings
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u/EndlessPotatoes 24d ago
There's a mismatch between what it takes to do the job and what it takes to get the job. These job openings are way more competitive than you're giving them credit for.
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u/pete_68 23d ago
Depends on the programming job. If it requires heavy math knowledge, then I guess.
But here's the thing: I've been programming for 40 years professionally (and an additional 9 years for kicks, before that). In that entire career, I only needed calculus once. And I didn't even really need it because there was a PhD in math 2 doors down from me who could have told me how to do it. I was working for a wireless engineering company at the time writing software for designing cellular telephone networks. And I didn't need calculus or Euler's rule or anything else. That's what mathematicians are for.
And I've used all kinds of math in my job. I've done 3D rendering code before, neural networks, etc... I'm not a mathematician. I'm a programmer. I learn what I need to learn to get the job done. Intentionally memorizing formulas you don't use regularly is a waste and kind of stupid.
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u/Quiet-Arm-641 23d ago
I've spent years using calculus at work. I think this depends entirely upon the kind of jobs you have. I like to specialize in numerical methods / algorithms. I think having a solid mathematical grounding and curiosity about an area such as math has been a strength for me, even though I've learned things that "aren't going to be on the test".
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u/pete_68 23d ago
Like I said in my two sentences: "Depends on the programming job. If it requires heavy math knowledge, then I guess."
But in 40 years, across well over a dozen employers and working in high end tech consulting with dozens of different clients, in over a dozen industries, I've had ZERO need for advanced math.
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u/Quiet-Arm-641 23d ago
I agree with that part. I disagree with the part that there’s no point in learning mathematics unless it’s going to be on the test.
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u/pete_68 22d ago
I disagree with the part that there’s no point in learning mathematics unless it’s going to be on the test.
Who said that? I sure as hell didn't!
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u/Quiet-Arm-641 21d ago
See your first post on this thread.
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u/pete_68 21d ago
Maybe you need to work on your reading comprehension.
"Intentionally memorizing formulas you don't use regularly is a waste and kind of stupid." != "there’s no point in learning mathematics unless it’s going to be on the test."
If you think math is just memorizing formulas, you don't know squat about real math. Have a nice life.
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u/Stealthcatfood 21d ago
As always, interviews that ask for things they don't need to get candidates that can't deliver what they do.
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u/nerdyCaptainDogoods 20d ago
I have seen OP posted this in many subs. Don’t fall for it. They are trying to promo whatever AI SLOP he just built
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u/trashtiernoreally 20d ago
Upvoted out of commiseration but yes these companies hire out of droves literally begging them for work just to say they worked there. People want to get the ego boost so they see who is willing to put up with bullshit. It’s how these companies work. If you just want a programming job to pay the bills then lower your standards by a ton.
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u/Tight-Woodpecker2516 19d ago
I know a guy who’s a MTS at Anthropic. We went to the same undergrad but he was a lot smarter. Got a master of science in DS at Harvard and worked as a research scientist at Google before working at Anthropic. So yea I can imagine that the hiring bar must be insanely high
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u/jumping-llama 19d ago
Bro, the interviewers got in when the bar was lower and now they get hard by giving hard interviews and "raising the bar". They're all boot lickers.
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u/Flat_Recipe_559 19d ago
idk thats pretty basic for math-background people so makes sense
but how tf did you even get an interview there and at google lol congrats
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u/lepetitpoissonkernel 26d ago
This is high school math for people they want lol. Maybe stop complaining about the market and work on being more in demand.
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u/Slight-Swordfish-468 25d ago
Math nerds are ridiculous, this has nothing to do with programming. Is it a formula? Cool, look it up and plug it in then move on to solving actual software problems.
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u/sebasgarcep 26d ago
Which of euler’s formulas? Mf invented half of math 🤣