> Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo. I wrote a cover letter and sent out my application. An automatic reply informed me that they might take some time to respond and that they only notify applicants if they made it to the next round. After a few weeks without an answer, I had assumed they chose other applicants.
I've mostly stopped applying to the big companies long time ago (10+ years) precisely because I'd never hear back regardless of the match or the credentials.
The only exception has been JaneStreet — they've contacted me almost immediately after a cold application with a small cover letter about my interests.
Yet going the referral route, it's relatively easy to get an interview almost anywhere, even Google or Apple.
I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV?
Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.
The author should have just asked the friend of a friend for a warm intro instead of trying to go through the main gate.
Sucks, but that's the reality of hiring (and getting hired) in tech in general.
Unfortunately, the choice of license likely won't matter in the nearest future (if not already so). If a tech giant wants you open-source library, they will just point their agent to it and ask "to rewrite in the style of War and Peace". And more unscrupulous players won't even bother with a rewrite, as we've seen recently in the case of Cheatingdaddy/Pickle.
Unfortunately, this seems on par with recruitment practices in the summer of 2025.
I can almost guarantee that they didn't even read that application / cover letter and auto-magically rejected it.
"the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications"
Zero effort. They probably didn't even realize the relevance of that specific application for that role. Unbelievable, I swear!
I wonder if it was geolocation? Anthropic is based in SF, the author seems to be based in Munich, and maybe they're not open to hiring people who aren't based in the US right now? Given the state of US visas right now, this wouldn't shock me.
Also I low how the IT hiring has a become a paradox: Companies won't hire you if you don't have enough projects in your portfolio, but by the time you will have enough stars on your github projects they have already used you to their own goals and are "not interested".
Ah, it seems their AI powered cover letter review system isn't up to scratch.
I don't know if this is a good opinion, but I don't think it's a good idea for independent individuals to use highly permissive licenses on their open source software. Companies will just suck it up and might not contribute back. It distorts the market because if the software didn't exist, they'd have to hire people, contract it out, etc. somebody would get paid. you've saved a huge company from having to hire people to develop the software they need, which is good for them, but imo just gives the companies incentives to devalue engineers. I also think the value of somebody open sourcing their work as a means to getting a job is questionable and never really been backed up by any data.
Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position
"Coffee" with the friend of a friend would he better strategy than a cover letter in that case...more work, but better strategy.
Because logically, getting hired requires demonstrating you are "the kind of person we want to work with." Being qualified on paper is not necessarily required.
Being able to get hired at a company is often unrelated to being able to generate viable products.
If you want to get hired don't focus on skills to build useful things. Focus on psychology and charisma.
As someone that works in HR, the incompetent HR combined with using AI for ATS ( or not knowing how to use ATS at all) is one of the core problems when it comes to losing quality candidates and is to blame for this. It should be illegal to hire HR from any education other than law, psychology, management and economy background. That way the responsibility would be larger, the ROI on HR would be higher (because the retention of the candidates and the quality of the candidates). Simply paying and promoting people with any educational background in a HR role is a waste of money which also creates problem for the company and not just employees.
There is some dirty secret i learned in my time as a eng. manager: Working in open source / Being the maintainer of a popular library / Blogging about software: All this things won't give you necessarily a competitive edge but can work against you. It's counterintuitive but sometimes teams are looking for a more low-profile hire.
> Unfortunately they thanked me for my application but said the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications.
It seems like they didn't even look at his application.
I’d be curious to see the outcome of changing the license to a Fair Source License or explicitly “You are not allowed to use this software if you are Anthropic, otherwise MIT”. They could still use the current version, but for any in the future they’d be forced to fork it or be prepared to face yet another legal battle (I can imagine some lawyers already salivating at the thought).
It’s also curious the author is looking inside the app for proof their software is being used. If it’s MIT, mustn’t the license be included and available somewhere easier to verify?
I think this blog post was the best way to get into Anthropic, and it was well-deserved. That's the reality of hiring in tech: there are many non-technical people judging whether technical people are competent or not. Escaping that matrix through things like blog posts, cold emails, and Twitter threads can be great ways to break in and get noticed by these companies.
I'm conflicted about this. On one hand i sympathize. On the other hand, it's really up to them who to hire. All the 'shoulds' discussed here are really just your assumptions, albeit very reasonable ones. Yeah it's really tough. You can't force someone to like you, they kinda have the prerogative.
This reminds me of better call saul where hamlin paid millions of dollars out of his own pocket just to not have Chuck working at HHM anymore. Which by his own words was the greatest legal mind he ever met. Sometimes people's principles work against you. And you don't have any moral ground to challenge that.
On the other hand, this attention might be working in your favor though.
I would guess like him that no human engineer ever read his application. The less they would have done in that case would be to at least thank him for his work, even if they don't plan to hire him for some reason.
Automated systems, AI screening, and incompetent HR people are the bane of modern recruiting practices.
On the electron part, it's common to (ironically) not support Linux. There are pretty annoying bugs with windows management (window will stay stuck in the background), build process are always OS specific, etc. So often not worth the maintainance.
I think that everyone should read this blog post
"Overall I am overjoyed enigo is used in Claude Desktop and I tell everyone who listens to me about it :P. It's so cool to think that I metaphorically created the arms and legs for Claude AI, but I can't help but wonder if the rejection letter was written by a human or Claude AI. Did the very AI I helped equip with new capabilities just reject my application? On the bright side, I should now be safe from Roko's Basilisk. "
I also felt like this way that did they just AI in their interviewing process?
And I have a special love towards open source.
And I personally might be happy too that a company is using my work ,but in the name of the holy licenses, Companies are just exploiting the free nature of this and the fact that it seems like not even a human looked at the person for such job, who created a library that they are using it for free...
I was thinking of creating some code in MIT license, but I am going to create a code of AGPL except if you sponsor me on github or a special one time license which can grant you MIT.
People might say that I am not fostering the open source community, but I am not giving corporations free labour so that they can be billionaires.
I once saw someone write a software with the exact same idea (AGPL + gh sponsor me to get MIT) and the people in HN were pitchforking him, that's the harsh reality of the world. People want absolutely free labour.
I think open source needs to ask, Have we become the modern peasants in the name of our altruism?
In the very least contract the developer for a little bit? Aren’t these Ai companies swimming in capital? Something almost dystopian about this
A friend of mine is maintainer of an open source service used (at least, at one time) by all of the major social media platforms as a load-bearing piece of their infrastructure (intentionally keeping it vague). My friend was invited to interview at one of the biggest and was rejected after having a bad whiteboard session. Of course they immediately replaced my friend's service (ha!)
Come Anthropic, give this guy a fair shot. At least interview him in person or something.
Good findings, the rest not surprising tho.. online recruitment doesn't work at all these days. most likely your app wasn't read by anybody meaningful and did not trigger right flags in the HR system to even be spotted by clueless ladies working there.
This post can give you some visibility unless somebody sees it as frustration/negativity then they won't bother either.
aside of the core topic, best way to get a job these days is unfortunately either some elite job boards that work and both sides know why... or personal relations.
All the automatic HR/recruitment platforms is illness and i'm sure that's what victimized your genuine application there.
It's truly unfair to see your hard work and efforts being plagiarized, especially since these companies haven't even told you about it and are profiting from it. This isn't just about helping improve the model; it's about cannibalizing the creators!
Since licensing has come up a few times in this thread: I've been hearing recently that the Mozilla Public licence (or the EU Public licence) is a good middle ground between the "viral" GPL and the "do whatever" MIT - as per my understanding, if your code is MPL or EUPL, it can still be incorporated as part of software that has a different licence, but any direct changes to the MPL/EUPL licensed code itself has to be shared openly.
Does anyone here have experience with them, or knowledge about whether that description is more or less correct?
At least Max Howell (Homebrew) got an interview before getting rejected:
https://x.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
In all seriousness though, the situation sucks. But there's still upside. Someone might reach out.
Well, if that's the case, the author should become an AI scientist. Top experts earn around $300 million working for companies like Google and Facebook. As a regular software engineer, you could only earn enough to pay some basic bills and survive from month to month. It's even worse in Europe: as a top software engineer in Germany, your salary will not even reach that of an unqualified floor tiler.
Doesn't look like he was rejected, rather not considered at all.
Never mind the application rejection, you'd have hoped that in choosing to base Claude Computer Use on his library that they might have at least reached out to the developer to say thanks, preferably with some token show of appreciation like a few Anthropic shares.
I'm with Luke Smith [1] when it comes to non-copyleft licenses like MIT.
Andrew Tanenbaum of the MINIX fame was similarly surprised to find that Intel had quietly included the OS he wrote in Intel chips, making it perhaps the most widely used OS in the world. He seemed disappointed no one ever reached out to him to tell him about it [2]
[1]: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...
I don't mean to downplay the author's skills, but I don't see how creating an input simulation library fast-tracks someone for consideration in an AI-related engineering role.
Anthropic throw this guy a consultancy on demand job, or at least a bit of money. He's made your business rich!
This is why wealth accumulation is so terrible. People with lots of money drive science and technology. They accumulate more wealth from science and technology whilst demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the thing that's making them the money.
Most executives and investors just throw shit at the wall to see what sticks, imo. Then move on to the next place. That's why golden handshakes exist.
Wait for the Meta offer, it could be a few millions.
Over a decade ago, it was my dream job to get a job at one specific FAANG company that is widely known to use a project I've contributed to.
I'm a developer with a project they use, so, I thought, for sure someone would review my resume after applying on their website. Nope.
After being ignored for a while, even having to get a Master's degree because no offers after a Bachelor's, I finally emailed a Director, who was previously a fellow committer at the project. People under him were not hiring at the time, but a recruiter from a different group has contacted me shortly, and I've had a 2-day flyout onsite arranged for two different positions, and had offers to join either one.
Anthropic probably gets tens of thousands of applications. They seem to have filled their queue before even reviewing this particular candidate. Unfortunate but just reality.
Always always always try to get into direct contact with the actual hiring manager. Blog author had a friend of a friend let them know a relevant role was open. The correct move is NOT to blindly apply. It’s to ask for an intro to the engineering manager responsible for the role.
Ha-ha, they also trained their LLMs on your code and maybe will even train on that blog post :)
Is there an license that requires payment for usage for corporations above a certain size?
I'm very much starting to re-consider open source. It mainly seems to be a way for already incredibly wealthy companies to get things for free, or to strategically release things to crush their competitors.
Maybe we ought to go back to paying for proprietary software. A lot of people used to make money that way, ie by selling their own desktop app.
Anthropic also rejected me for a job... that I never even applied for...
This sort of silliness is what you get when you run crucial business processes using AI instead of humans.
reminds be of the time creator of Homebrew was rejected by Google in coding rounds. but this is even worse, they would not even interview this guy. shame on Anthropic... (or is it Misanthropic?)
In my opinion, lots of open source was developed as a sort of portfolio to get hired. From 2019 onward, my impression is that your open source projects (regardless of how much they are used) matters less and less and it’s about HR mysteriously picking you up in their process than anything else. I think, now, your open source portfolio matters exactly nothing in the decision to get hired.
I remember back in 2014-2019, it was hard and competitive to contribute to open source projects as they were tightly guarded. There are many projects that I use now in package.json that are looking for a maintainer. A complete 180 flip.
My guess is that real free open source will disappear in a few years and what will remain are open source projects monetized by some business somehow.
It’s a sad reality but that’s what the current people at the top have decided today.
I see this more as an hiring failure than an OSS failure to be honest.
While I do think it's easy (and justified) to be a little full of righteous indignation over this, I do think in general people (myself included, but not necessarily this author) tend to overvalue their code. It's an expression of our imagination and skills, and is our little baby, so it makes a lot of sense that we would ascribe higher value to it than someone else might, but I think the occasional re-grounding is healthy. Code in and of itself isn't usually very valuable, in fact it is often worthless. (Note I'm not saying Enigo is worthless, in fact it's clearly far from it, but the vast, vast majority of open source code does tend to be relatively worthless. Do a github search for various things if you don't believe me). Remembering this (at least for me) reduces the sting a little bit.
Now that said, I think there's an opportunity here for you. It's rare, but I've known people who spun open source like this into a revenue source, not directly from the company but from other ways. My advice (if you have the time/motivation/willingness): Embrace Anthropic's use here, even maybe reach out and help accomodate them for features! Offer to help get the Linux build working (you would be a personal hero of mine for that!). They may even hire you once they see that you're genuinely good and helpful. I have seen many times in the past (including personal experience) trying to hire an open source dev, and we discovered that they weren't actually very nice people, and in about half the cases they were outright arrogant, possibly even with a superiority complex. The beautiful thing about code is that it doesn't care about personalities, but rather "does it work." In a workplace though, personalities are (often) even more important than code. We almost hired one of the most brilliant open source guys I've ever seen - his code was like a work of art, and his domain knowledge was unparalleled. But he was an asshole to the HR person, was openly critical of our interview process (during the interview!), and had virtually no tact when talking to what would be his fellow coworkers. It's ok (and sometimes very good) to correct an interviewer if they ask or say something technically incorrect, but the way you do that matters. Don't immediately retort with stuff like "that's completely and utterly wrong" or "that's a really stupid way to solve that." Nobody wants to work with people like that. Of course I'm not suggesting that OP is that way, but rather trying to share some personal experience as to why a company may not be in a rush to hire an open source contributor. To be clear, that doesn't justify what they've done, but I do think remembering that Anthropic isn't just a giant monolith, but is rather made up of other humans that are just as human as we all are can be very helpful at understanding why things sometimes go the way they do.
On the license question, I'm a huge proponent of the GPL/AGPL (I would always suggest licensing end-user software this way), but I think for libraries like this MIT is usually the best option. Had you licensed it AGPL it may never have gotten traction in the first place, and you'd be worse off than you are now. It's possible it could have led to licensing, but having seen the inner-workings of big tech companies, I highly doubt it.
Apologies for the length of this. It struck a chord with me because I've had libraries used in a similar way (though at a much smaller scale) and had to do a lot of soul searching on it.
Regardless, awesome work! At a minimum you now have an awesome story to tell and you're part of a small club of people that have been successful enough to get hit :-D
AI companies try not to be evil challenge (impossible)
Hire OP, anthropic
Why is no one talking about how they had an indirect contact at Anthropic but didn’t use that connection? Your chance of getting hired is way higher with a referral.
bro probably didn't even go to Stanford or another "top tier CS program" (yes people literally post job ads with that requirement) smh
Give this man a job, Anthropic!
Dude they did not reject they did not even SEE you because they likely have 10k application per week.
Just ask your friend for an intro.
He already works for them without pay in a way. Why would they hire him?
We should stop coding for free for billionaire organizations. The romantic era of Open Source is over.
The only projects with a permissive license, I am comfortable sending PRs nowadays are the kind of projects that will hardly enable a big monopolist to extract more rent from society while being covertly funded by the debasing of currency promoted by the FED via Cantillon Effect.
Can a license be modified? What happens in that case? Let’s say I want a Ferrari.
Everyone is suggesting that AI rejected this candidate but that brings up two points:
1) Is the hiring AI so incompetent that it did not realize it had a "S-tier pull" in the process and should have immediately prioritized the find?
2) Was the candidate's submission so bad that a reviewing AI couldn't even tell the massive relevance he had to their work?
I suppose, alternatively, Anthropic could just not really care about Claude Desktop enough to hire a specialist for one part of the stack. Perhaps they're looking for much more "full stack AI" who can do a lot. They have 350-400 total engineers, is that enough to hire a specialist for Claude Desktop?
I guess my question is: Did the AI fail, did the candidate fail, or did the AI work well and we just don't know the criteria it was succeeding in using.
The next version should have a feature where the first thing it types into any text box is "Anthropic, I wrote this library! Please look at my CV!" and then deletes it.
> Unfortunately they thanked me for my application but said the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications.
Okay, they were just busy doing work and didn't have any time to look at applications so they shuttered the JD and auto-rejected anyone in the pipeline. Seems reasonable
Another reminder that if you write software under an MIT licence or similar then you're just working for companies like Anthropic for free.
Use GPL or AGPL. It's the best thing we have.
Remember that companies like Microsoft spend billions on PR and their goal is to make you think what's good for them is good for you. This is rarely the case.
I feel this is really a blog post about two indirect topics; one that has not been addressed for many years now, and another that is not new, but has been getting seemingly ever more acute recently.
The first is the issue of permissive licenses like the MIT license, that seems likely far beyond an appropriate license structure for today’s world and environment, I would even argue inappropriate since the .com bubble. Software and creating has changed a lot since the 1980s to such a degree that I don’t think even the originator and early supporters of permissive licenses would be supportive of…peoples work being used in critical ways to build two and three digit billion dollar corporations without any kind of reward or compensation. It’s an odd kind of peak dystopian hybrid of communism and capitalism, sacrifice of the self for the benefit of the very few.
I think it is at least time to discuss archiving things like the permissive MIT license (assuming it even makes any kind of difference at this stage) that are from not only a different developmental stage, different environment, but even a totally different country, society, nation, and world even.
The second theme of this blog post seems to be the absolute seizure of the… what should we call it?…resource allocation of people? I cannot recall right now, but I feel like this is the second blog post themed around someone core to some function of some big tech company being rejected by said tech company; and that’s in the backdrop of the cacophony of people dealing with all kinds of dystopian insanity in the employment/job market from fake/scam jobs, AI interviews, etc. The system seems to be totally breaking down to some degree, even if it is still limping along, as is evident by the massively downward revised job creation numbers over several quarters now. How do you “revise” jobs numbers from 139,000 to 19,000? Ignoring any political partisanship, “revising” an estimate downward by 86% is not just an “whoopsie”, it’s evidence that thins are broken, regardless of why or even how. They’re clearly broken.
I have approaching 0% confidence with anything related to Congress actually doing its job since it has effectively abdicated its cute role that provides it legitimacy, but discussing both of these topics in public can have a chance at forcing the muppets in Congress to address the issues, even if only for narcissistic and selfish reasons of being (re)elected to enrich themselves after they’ve gone back on their lies to get elected. And no, neither team is the better team; it’s all a con-job.
Reminds me of the guy who created Homebrew being rejected by Google for failing some silly Leetcode puzzle.
Dev: I wrote a part of your software that you are bragging about. Can I have a job?
Antrhropic: tl;dr kthxbye
It's inherently risky to blog about your professional relationships under your own name and this is a weirdly small hill to die on.
Just change the license. The company probably won't notice and keep pulling the new changes. Now you have a legal case.
I wonder if he writes cover letters to every company that uses his library.
Hey, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for submitting this. If you have any questions feel free to ask and please let me know how the writing was. It's one of my first posts so I'd like to improve