[Anthropic] I failed the loop, here's what got me
Posting the L on purpose because these are rarer than the wins.
Strong on systems, ~6 years backend, cleared the technical rounds fine. The culture round ended me. I gave polished STAR answers and could feel them landing flat. They wanted the messy real reasoning behind my decisions, not a clean story arc.
If I redo it, I'd over-prep the behavioral and barely touch the coding. The lesson I didn't believe until it happened: at these labs the "soft" round is the hard one.
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Sorry about the result but thank you for posting this. The failure writeups are way more useful than the highlight reels. This matches what I keep hearing about that round.
Did they give you any feedback, or just the rejection?
Recruiter was actually kind about it: said the technical was strong but the values round "didn't give enough signal." Which is feedback, in its way.
Reapplying? Curious if people get a second shot after a values-round miss.