Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#261

Post by vkou » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 6:24 PM UTC

wolco wrote: post #239

vkou wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not relevant to the position, but 'coding on a whiteboard' is a legal sorting function that will reject a lot of truly awful candidates (You pretty much can't bullshit your way through it. You may end up being an awful hire for other reasons, like your personality, but that's another story.) That it also rejects some good candidates is fine, there's always more candidates for FAANG jobs. (Few competitors pay FAA…

That's fair but these companies also claim it is hard to find developers and more hb1's are needed. Hard to have it both ways. I feel like there should be a course for passing these exams run by ex-FAANG employees. Perhaps a bootcamp.

1. There are plenty of websites which will let you grind away at FAANG interview questions. If you have a few weeks of time to waste on gaming this signal, you'll be coding self-balancing trees in your sleep... And have no issues with passing an interview for at least one of these firms. Depending on your current salary, this may be a much better ROI than your entire undergrad degree was.

2. Some of these firms occasionally host coaching sessions for referrals. Ask your friends if one is currently running.

3. "You don't need H1Bs, just lower your hiring bar" is a criticism that is a bit less applicable to firms with a high hiring bar, than to firms with a low hiring bar. If you are, in fact, talent-limited, an H1B will actually cost you more than a local worker. (Lawyers, immigration sponsorship, uncertainty in whether the visa will actually arrive, aren't cheap - and FAANG does not have a reputation for exploiting their H1B hires.)

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#262

Post by fnord123 » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 6:34 PM UTC

SkyPuncher wrote: post #127

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #70

Some time ago, I was contacted by Apple to apply for a job. My code is insanely well-documented. I like to think that a lot of the inspiration for my code docs comes from Apple's open codebases. Their code is exceptionally well-documented. In any case, as is usual with all employers, these days, they completely ignored the focused, relevant links that I sent them to elements of my extensive portfolio of repos, and, i…

> I'll make it clear that I'm NOT a fan of these. I am mediocre, at best, at them, as I don't come from a traditional CS background (I started as an EE). I come from a CS background and struggle with these too. The big problem I have is this performance stuff is often barely relevant to the position. You need to know the principle of a BST. Unless you're building a database working in a unique scenario, actually trav…

>You need to know the principle of a BST. Unless you're building a database working in a unique scenario, actually traversing it going to be done by some library.

Looks like you got stung by the confusion between binary tree and B-Tree (and B+Trees).

1. The b in btree isn't binary.

2. Databases use B+Trees.

3. binary trees are almost worthless.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#263

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 6:35 PM UTC

saghm wrote: post #223

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are reading it wrong.

Could you clarify what the intended reading is, then?

At my company, HR was run by the General Counsel. It was NOT a "warm fuzzy" HR, but it WAS an extremely "legal-correct" HR.

I would have been fired if I had shown any bias at all. I had my differences with some folks there, and I wasn't always thrilled with the way that things were run, but it was the most diverse environment I've ever seen; and I include a lot of Silicon Valley companies in that statement.

The simple fact of the matter was, that the jobs in my team required a fairly advanced knowledge of C++, and the lions' share of applicants were men in their 30s; usually married.

Marital status, gender, race, religious or sexual orientation/gender identification mean absolutely nothing to me; unless the applicant insists that it should. In that case, I generally find that they might not work so well in the team.

Lack of drama was important to me. We had a full plate.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#264

Post by whynaut » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 6:35 PM UTC

Permit wrote: post #176

onion2k wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring people who can pass a clever quiz without verifying if they do good work in the real world is precisely how a company ends up at the top of HN with the headline "Apple, Your Developer Documentation Is… Missing". I would argue that "how fast can someone implement this algorithm?" is a considerably less useful question to answer than "does this person document their code?" in an interview. If time is the constra…

If this were true then the same would be posted for Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc. There is likely no causal effect between whiteboard/algorithm interviews and poor documentation.

Maybe not much on HN (though I do remember many complaints about MS), but each of these have fostered complaints around the web.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#265

Post by kevingadd » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 6:37 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #70

Some time ago, I was contacted by Apple to apply for a job. My code is insanely well-documented. I like to think that a lot of the inspiration for my code docs comes from Apple's open codebases. Their code is exceptionally well-documented. In any case, as is usual with all employers, these days, they completely ignored the focused, relevant links that I sent them to elements of my extensive portfolio of repos, and, i…

Google is all-in on this too, but in my experience Apple is way worse at that kind of interview just like you experienced. I had one interviewer ask me to write strstr but then insist that boyer-moore could not possibly work. I don't expect every engineer to be familiar with common CS algorithms but whew, if you're gonna use them as an interview question...

The other parts of the interview weren't as bad but they also weren't great. Expecting you to know what happens when you export an int as 'main' instead of a function, for example - you can certainly figure that out from first principles or happen to know, but why should you?

It's sort of a "when a company shows you who they are, believe them" situation - even when I did get offers, seeing this reduced my confidence in the company.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#266

Post by chriskrycho » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 6:40 PM UTC

rubyn00bie wrote: post #253

chriskrycho wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. You should file issues against Ember's docs! We have different experiences of it for sure. Even just as experience reports, I know the folks who work on it would love that. 2. The Ember TS stuff is in need of an update—desperately—as are my (several-years-old-now!) blog posts. Unfortunately (unlike Apple) none of those of us who work on it get paid to do so at the moment – at all, including docs. I'd love it if yo…

1. Totally, I have, will do more, and would like to... One big difficulty I've had, because I want to fix things (like docs), is because everything post 3.12 is geared towards Octane and those docs are all quite a bit different than everything before it... (and I'm on 3.12) it makes finding the code to change, text, blob pretty difficult (IMHO) since master is mostly Octane. 2. I know you aren't paid and you're a sai…

The Octane transition is indeed a big one!

As for being welcoming and friendly—of course! We desperately need the help, esp. to hit the gaps that we're blind to because we're used to working around them. And honestly, "awful" isn't far off from how I would describe our docs; doubly so far anything related to Octane with TS (where it's subject to precisely the critique I leveled in this post: they don't exist!). See you on the issue tracker!

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#267

Post by thfc06 » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 6:40 PM UTC

This is exactly what I've been dealing with for the last month, as I attempt to completely re-write an Electron app in Swift. The part about scavenging through WWDC transcripts particularly resonated with me. Coming from JS ecosystem, I was also shocked at how few google results (even stack overflow) would come up for issues I was running into.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#268

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #248

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #70

Some time ago, I was contacted by Apple to apply for a job. My code is insanely well-documented. I like to think that a lot of the inspiration for my code docs comes from Apple's open codebases. Their code is exceptionally well-documented. In any case, as is usual with all employers, these days, they completely ignored the focused, relevant links that I sent them to elements of my extensive portfolio of repos, and, i…

> This was clearly not something the tester liked. Also, to add insult to injury, they dinged me for not writing a cascaded nil-coalescing operator. The code they wanted me to write was difficult to understand, and absolutely not one bit faster. The interviewer probably wanted you to write idiomatic Swift. That seems reasonable.

..except that it was for an Objective-C position, and "idiomatic Swift" doesn't mean "unmaintainable Swift."

Most of the open-source code that I've written has been for other people to take over. Most of my repos are still 1-contributor ones, but every single one has been written to be extended. The ones that have been extended are being extended very well, indeed. I have had almost zero questions about the codebase.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#269

Post by Razengan » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 6:50 PM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #167

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think the ternary operator, but worse. In Swift, this is expressed by "??". It means "If the previous test returns nil, then execute what is after the ??". For example, if you have a concrete Int, but the source might be an optional, then you could do something like this: let a = b ?? 0 That means that if b is nil, then set a to 0. Otherwise, set it to whatever value b has. You can chain these, like so: let b: Int? =…

> Think the ternary operator, but worse. How the hell is it worse? It lets me write things like toolbar.visibility = userSettings.showToolbar ?? defaultSettings.showToolbar someOption = localPreference ?? onlinePreference ?? defaultPreference which is a lot better for the coder and a reader than any other alternative I can currently think of.

Think I like others may have read that wrong and it was meant as a joke.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#270

Post by microtherion » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

OPs criticism is definitely justified, and it makes me sad. In my opinion, the peak of Apple documentation was the new, refactored edition of "Inside Macintosh" in the 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Macintosh

Not only is there not enough information, but the documentation team goes out of their way to reorganize what documentation exists every couple of years, so outside links into the docs constantly go stale.