Anthropic 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.
> ... 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!)
In the niches there are riches and boring businesses build wealth. Congrats!
Good for you guys. I'm happy for you.
I can't even figure out what Stainless does (did)
It turned API specs into ssoftware devolopment kits and model context servers. Basically connecting existing tools to AI agents so they can actually use them.
They might be a big part of the reason why claude code can edit notion docs for you pretty easily
do they have one of those websites that looks like all of those websites
edit: they sure do
Nothing (AI slop to create an unnecessary product, funded by A16Z).
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?
I've seen this at work. Giving Claude Code to a mediocre programmer gets you mediocre results. The really effective engineers with coding agent can accomplish a lot. Thousand monkeys...
I've also seen this. But I'll extend it to saying that giving Claude to a bad programmer gives bad results.
And seeing how people use it: good programmers review output and iterate to get better output. But bad programmers simply trust the output is good: they have no ability to review it themselves and often don't try.
As a mostly non-programmer it got me a lot done.
With about 5-10h over the weekend using free tier Claude and ChatGPT I managed to put together a scraper for a particular thing on a website I’m interested, grab the item images, do an initial pass with local OCR, if it hit some keywords, run openCV to crop for better OCR and dump the hits for further investigation.
Nothing particularly advanced but it would have taken me a horrendous amount of time without it to be half as good, like it did when I built a similar scraper 10 years ago.
Neither were very good code quality i’m sure.
> giving Claude to a bad programmer gives bad results.
On average, the output is still better than what a bad programmer would produce.
...And then they train their next generation models with these elite engineers' skills.
AI can let you downsize the number of employees that you have and maintain the status quo or it can let you maintain the number of employees, reduce technical debt, improve products, and services.
Do the economics work out ? You can downsize the devs you have, but you need to maintain a smaller stable of very expensive devs, and then factor in the token usage.
For example, a recent story about the openclaw creator using $1.3M of tokens/month. And let's assume he's getting paid $5M/yr which is probably a vast under estimate.
Is he providing value that a traditional software development org with normal developers couldn't provide for $20M/yr?
The issue is there’s non linearities involved. Although I don’t know I would use the open claw guy, but let’s take Isaac Newton. You can’t sum up people and arrive at an Isaac Newton worth of talent. He’s singular, unique, and irreplaceable at what he did. There were others similarly outsized in their ability to change things, and there are today as well. But you can’t funge talent at some level with more people - in fact as we know there’s a rapidly diminishing return on people investment.
Finally in some ways agentic workflows magnify the power of the individual who is adept at harnessing them, they don’t have to argue (much) with the agents to effect their ideas. I’ve found a lot of very bright engineers spend their days fighting to be heard by managers and peers who can’t / won’t understand them. By unshackling them from trying to debate down idiots, they deliver way way more, and of the right things, than they otherwise could have.
You can replace Newton with Leibniz.
| Newton... He's Singular, unique, and irreplaceable at what he did.
Leibniz, literally parallel.
Was Newton just a smart guy at the right place and the right time. These smart folks require other smart folks to understand and verify what they did. There are many who have amazing pedigrees in history.
I feel like using $1.3M/year is a wild outlier. A $200/month Max sub is a pretty cheap way to get quite a lot of benefit.
His usage is actually 12x that ...
The $1.3 million doesn't mean much. The article stated he could've switched to a significantly cheaper option and cut the bill to $300k. That's still a lot but since he worked for the company that sells the tokens it isn't as though they were paying the retail cost.
For those who, like me, had to do a double take on that number: https://www.businessinsider.com/openclaw-peter-steinberger-a...
Yes, $1.3M in token cost in less than 30 days and some days were even off-peak, if you can call it that with that insane scale that likely hides quite a lot of tokens in the lower bars.
HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159227
I honestly believe that most Silicon Valley developers could have their pre-AI output replaced by 10 dollars/day in Gemini 3 pay as you go spend.
I don't think existing companies will bite that bullet, but I think you'll see AI native companies in five years with like, a baffling small number of people.
Why in five years? Where are these hyper productive small companies running laps around bigger ones right now?
But Anthropic is adding employees
Maybe smart to convince everyone else to fire and slow down while you hire and speed up. I don't think it is actually planned, but perhaps smart in hindsite.
They most certainly are. This is Jevons paradox.
>Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles.
Who claimed that?
Their customers will be happy if their product replaces all the junior positions and midwit developers off the payroll. then that's already a huge saving to any company's bottom line.
Even if it doesn't directly replace workers, reducing the bargaining power of those spoiled SW devs and not having to give them huge raises all the time or they leave, is still enough. That's the whole point of layoffs and offshoring anyway.
> that's already a huge saving to any company's bottom line
Possibly not if they are paying the full cost of inference
> Who claimed that?
Dario Amodei
> 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.
Normally I would say those Engineers would leave eventually, because there are not enough technical challenges and/or the pace is slower. But I guess when you pay much above market rate that doesn't really matter.
Also have you tried getting hired lately? Go where? They’re lucky to have jobs.
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
Trading firms are surely not hiring for the broad founder-like skill set Anthropic is. Trading firms want narrow extreme technical brilliance.
> founder-like skill set
Successful founder is deeply filtering for very uncommon skills. Effectiveness, grit, decision making, independence, technical plus sales ability.
University is a shit filter in comparison.
The current word is "taste" but even that is way too narrow. Intelligence is close, although usually too academic (hence the VC uni dropout theme).
The other big problem with a independent capable people is that they rarely apply for jobs.
> 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.
I did use the word "software engineer" there, but realistically what they're looking for is exactly the name of the role they wear: Member of Technical Staff. Software Engineer, businessman, product manager, designer, agentic harness engineer, cloud, devops, all rolled into one. They want people who can own the entirety of a product from end-to-end. A responsibility domain so vast that most peoples' first thought is to laugh, and that's exactly why they're acquiring companies; the responsibilities they're looking for mirror the role the founders and higher-level leadership in successful startups would have had. The lower-level engineers will probably be let go. They'll gladly pay $50M-$100M for just a dozen or so of the top people.
The candidate you're describing is a unicorn. Even assuming that this acqui-hire routine is a good way of finding such people, that doesn't answer the question why they're needed for "some dumb integration to make Hubspot data available in Claude, or something equally as boring" (as you suggested above).
I think you're overestimating the rationality of this game.
> I did use the word "software engineer" there
The reason why I avoided this term is that in Germany, there exists a quite strict of whatx an engineer (Ingenieur) is, which is defined in the laws of many federal states (Ingenieurgesetz [engineering law]). "Ingenieur" (engineer) is a protected professional title:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ingenieur&oldid=2... (*)
Falsely claiming that you are an Ingenieur when you aren't (by the definition in the Ingenieurgesetz) is a punishable crime in Germany:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Missbrauch_von_Ti...
There exist some boundary cases under which as a software developer you can call yourself an "Ingenieur", but you have to be insanely careful about whether you actually satisfy the legal criteria (see (*)) - in most cases you don't and you are thus a criminal if you do.
'Engineer' is also a legally protected title in Canada, so 'developer' is the common term.
Wait, does that mean that if I self describe as a software engineer on LinkedIn and get an offer by Germans id be breaking the law by accepting?
If so, is this ever enforced?
> Wait, does that mean that if I self describe as a software engineer on LinkedIn and get an offer by Germans id be breaking the law by accepting?
Using the German translation "Softwareingenieur" of "software engineer" on your LinkedIn page might easily get you into trouble.
Typically, as far as I know, law enforcement agencies only get active in the punishable act "Missbrauch von Titeln, Berufsbezeichnungen und Abzeichen" [abuse of titles, occupational titles and emblems] if the culprit gets denounced by someone or if there is a public interest, but everybody knows how easy it is to make enemies in your job or on the internet.
Yes, hence the term software engineer which has programming as just one part of the job.
It isn't a good test for that either.
Having a successful business requires a lot of factors that don't really have anything to do with software engineering. Things like luck, connections, access to funding, good marketing, etc. And while have good engineers on the payroll undoubtedly helps, the good engineers aren't necessarily the ones getting a big fallout from the acquisition and may not stick around for long after the acquisition, especially if they get put on a project they don't care about.
OK, let's go to the source then and ask Claude:
What's the difference between a software developer and a software engineer?
The honest answer is that in most day-to-day contexts, the distinction is more about company culture and title preference than actual job duties. A "software developer" at one company might do more rigorous engineering work than a "software engineer" at another.
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.
The world’s best software engineers aren’t optimising for comp — they’re optimising to be the world’s best software engineers
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.
I think what you're missing is that prior to the acquisition, Anthropic was a customer of Stainless. They did not need to "rummage through [their] data and workflows" to understand the quality of their product.