alt Hacker NewsAnthropic is at a place where they need the world's best software engineers, and they're willing to comp at insane levels to get them. However: You simply cannot post a Linkedin job for "Really Good Software Engineer, comp $10M+" and make any sense of the inbound applications you'll get. They're not the first to figure this out, and they won't be the last: Successfully building a company, and using that company's products, is actually the best job interview you can ask for if you can pay for that caliber of candidate.
What you should be paying attention to: Stainless is shutting down, and their team is joining Anthropic to build, who knows, some dumb integration to make Hubspot data available in Claude, or something equally as boring. But, Stainless was successful. Be the next Stainless. The idea is already validated, these AI companies have already done this to a handful of companies and they're going to keep doing it.
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Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles. Yet look at the positions they’re hiring for in marketing, finance etc.: https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs
Why aren’t they dogfooding their own products to replace such roles?
> Successfully building a company, and using that company's products, is actually the best job interview you can ask for if you can pay for that caliber of candidate.
This tests for very different skills than being an exceptional programmer.
The top trading firms had top-end recruiting figured out for ages, without jumping through all these hoops.
There are plenty of other reasons to acqui-hire, but it is not the only or even the most effective way to hire the strongest engineers
I'm not sure how you can equate building a startup and selling to a bigger company as a great interview for developers. Maybe they have great engineers, but IME it's far more likely they've got good founders, marketing or sales on top of (perhaps) some stellar engineering.
All that's moot though if your fundamental premise is wrong. Why does Anthropic need "the world's best software engineers" to build on top of the models? Compentent developers can build APIs - sorry - MCP servers and other integration plumbing.
Wouldn't that be a misuse of data and likely illegal?
If Anthropic can rummage through your data and workflows to deem you worthy of their grace, then that is seriously wrong.
> ... and their team is joining Anthropic to build, who knows, some dumb integration to make Hubspot data available in Claude, or something equally as boring.
Fun fact, I named it "Stainless" after Stainless Steel pipes, likening ourselves to a high-end plumbing supply shop. If you look at the earliest versions of stainlessapi.com on archive.org, you'll see our original motto was "Quality fittings for your REST API".
All that is to say, the incredibly "boring" infrastructural work of making "boring" APIs like Hubspot's more usefully accessible is absolutely the kind of thing I'm excited to do at Anthropic :)
(It also happens to be what got us all excited to work at stainless in the first place, but of course, we understand it's not for everyone!)