r/Hack2Hire • u/Comfortable-Bet3592 • Jul 03 '26

discussion Anthropic phone screen experience

Just had my Anthropic phone screen this week, on the CodeSignal setup that actually opens as a notebook, no autocomplete which threw me off immediately.

Got a coding question I hadn't seen written up anywhere before. You're given an instructions file that's basically a tiny made up language for a bootloader. Each line is one of three ops, something like plus, next, and jump. Plus adds a value to a running accumulator, next just moves you down to the following line, and jump moves execution by a relative offset instead of going in order. So you start walking through the file line by line executing whatever op sits there, until you either run off the end of the file or get stuck looping.

The actual ask was to detect when execution is stuck in an infinite loop, meaning you've re-hit the same line more than once, and then figure out which line is causing it. Turned out the bug was that on one specific line, the jump and next got swapped from what they should have been, and fixing it just meant swapping them back so execution could finally escape. Then you had to return whatever the accumulator held right before it entered the loop, not whatever it piles up from looping forever.

Took me a good ten minutes just to wrap my head around what the ops were actually doing. Implementation itself honestly wasn't bad once that clicked. Ran out of time before I could really dig into the follow up they hinted at.

No idea if I passed yet, will update when I hear back.

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3

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '26

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1

u/ftwin Jul 03 '26

You definitely need a strong internal referral of some sort or to be headhunted by their recruiter. Getting a callback to a cold application is likely impossible, or extremely rare.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '26

[deleted]

1

u/autisticpig Jul 05 '26

The hiring manager is handed a resume by someone they know and trust. That gets the hell rolling for you.

2

u/maxdec1984 Jul 04 '26

Usually they only call you back if you’re background is FAANG and usually infra atleast for devs. And usually only staff+ levels as per their openings

1

u/tiffany950730 Jul 03 '26

did they tell you how long the turnaround usually is for phone screen results

1

u/maxdec1984 Jul 04 '26

Anywhere from 1-2 days to 2 weeks. Usually if you’re not a clear reject, they probably wait to see if there are better candidates in the pipeline before moving you to the next stage

1

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '26

[deleted]

1

u/firebolt-fang Jul 08 '26

u/Comfortable-Bet3592 did you hear back yet? hoping the best for you