I really enjoyed this read. The author printing out his source code so he could have a physical artifact signifying the end of the journey for that game really resonated with me for some reason.
Apple Interview – 1995
61–70 of 109 posts
Re: Apple Interview – 1995
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you're misevaluating your technical interview performance. You can feel like you're "bombing" an interview, while still performing above expectation. Some interviewers ask hard technical questions, don't expect most candidates to complete them within the allotted time, and give "hire" recommendations for some (but of course not all) that don't.
I think a good interview puts you in a position where you are struggling and out of your expertise - being able to demonstrate you have a solution for a bunch of stuff is less important than being able to demonstrate how you do when you don’t know and have to figure it out.
One of the best interview questions I ever had started with the interviewer asking me a fairly routine technical question, to which I gave a standard and acceptable answer. He then said, "Okay but what if I took away your ability to do X, Y, and Z - how would that change things?" He did that a few more times in different variations to really see how my answers would change especially as the tools/processes I would be forced to use started to stray from what I knew well.
Re: Apple Interview – 1995
#63This was a great read. Some commenters discussed the nature of the interview, and compared it to today. But personally I get this feeling that this was still in a time when software was developed mostly in bubbles. Knowing how to code was far less obvious back then than it is today, and knowing the right stack meant you could get hired on the spot. Also, I don't know of it's nostalgia, the way it's written or somethi…
I think this is just an artifact of the pioneers/total body of engineers: having the numerator stay relatively unchanged but with the denominator exploding.
Re: Apple Interview – 1995
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not pretending to be unicorn by keeping high hiring standards. It is a reflection on our strategy. Our strategy is that, long term, is better to have smaller, tight knit community of highly intelligent, capable and motivated people than try to throw masses of lower paid employees at the problem. We are fighting complexity and having large team of constantly rotating people that never seem to bear responsibility…
Highly intelligent, (technically) capable and motivated people are probably not in any way correlated with the amount of complexity you are needing to fight with. And if it is, it's most likely negative. Lack of intelligence is probably not your problem, the computer genius who swoops in and saves the day only exists in movies. You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable management who actually structures t…
> You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable management
> Your hiring process is not optimised to further business goals,
That's a lot of things you were able to figure out based on my comments.
Re: Apple Interview – 1995
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I have this exact same problem. I gave up applying for regular jobs eventually as it was so demoralizing. Only work contracts through contacts now. It pays the bills, so I can’t really complain I suppose
It's nice to know that I'm not the only one.
You're definitely not. I often hear people describe it as multitasking. My wife excels at multitasking but I perform better having my complete concentration on a specific task (the one exception being listening to music).
I can't even have the TV on for "background noise" like some people like to because you can guarantee it will completely take my focus away from whatever else I'm trying to concentrate on.
Re: Apple Interview – 1995
#66>I should pause here and point out that an interview at Apple was an all-day affair. Pairs of engineers would meet with and interview me for perhaps an hour. The first pair of engineers might grill me on some esoteric topic like code design, afterwards the next pair of engineers would sit down and maybe cover programming language specific questions. This took place in 1995, and sounds pretty much exactly like a techn…
I interviewed at Apple in 1987, and it was an all-day interview, but it wasn't much like the technical interviews I've done in more recent years--the ones characterized by brain teasers and whiteboard coding. There was none of that in my Apple interviews. They made me an offer and I worked there for ten years. Now, we can't conclude from that whether Apple has adopted whiteboarding and brain teasers generally. In tho…
> In those days Apple did interviews the way they did everything else: each group at the company did things their own way. I don't know whether that's true anymore;
It's still true.
Re: Apple Interview – 1995
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Highly intelligent, (technically) capable and motivated people are probably not in any way correlated with the amount of complexity you are needing to fight with. And if it is, it's most likely negative. Lack of intelligence is probably not your problem, the computer genius who swoops in and saves the day only exists in movies. You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable management who actually structures t…
> You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable management > Your hiring process is not optimised to further business goals, That's a lot of things you were able to figure out based on my comments.
Yeah, I'm speaking in general terms of the software industry, and common hiring processes, which according to your comments you seem to fit into pretty well.
I don't mean to criticise you but rather suggest that the hiring process should focus less on intelligence and coding skills, and try to hire people that have intellect. That can pair judgement with intelligence. That can relate decisions to goals beyond their own personal preferences.
I have too many bad experiences with highly intelligent, but myopic and immature software developers who are left to "self organise" and just end up being lose cannons of raw intelligence, that does much more harm than good.
Software development, is more an organisational problem than a technical one.
The organisation itself is already so vastly complex that no human being can comprehend it, and that's why you have a hierarchy of information and specialisation of roles. Even if your system by some miracle has zero accidental complexity, it's still going to overwhelm even the most intelligent person, just by the amount of essential complexity. So you will need an organisation of hierarchy and/or specialisation to manage this. And the biggest determining factor for how successful you are, is this organisation and how it works as a whole, rather than any individuals superior capacity.
I just think it's a really bad idea to try to hire "extra smart" people to try to solve these issues, because it won't work.
Re: Apple Interview – 1995
#68Anyone else remember playing Glider? As a young kid, I gladly lost countless hours trying to navigate a paper airplane through a Rube Goldberg mess of obstacles. What a fun, imaginative game. Would be cool if there was an emulated version somewhere. Or we could borrow the author’s book and transcribe it to a modern language, ha.
I think I played Glider on an educational CD-ROM perhaps, even one about air and science? Or maybe it was just a shareware disc.
Re: Apple Interview – 1995
#69This was a great read. Some commenters discussed the nature of the interview, and compared it to today. But personally I get this feeling that this was still in a time when software was developed mostly in bubbles. Knowing how to code was far less obvious back then than it is today, and knowing the right stack meant you could get hired on the spot. Also, I don't know of it's nostalgia, the way it's written or somethi…
There's a recent novel by Tamara Shopsin called "LaserWriter II" [1] that gives off that "sense of pioneering or discovery" feel for all ~200 of its pages. I highly recommend it if you're looking for a quickish read.
[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii
Re: Apple Interview – 1995
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable management > Your hiring process is not optimised to further business goals, That's a lot of things you were able to figure out based on my comments.
Yeah, I'm speaking in general terms of the software industry, and common hiring processes, which according to your comments you seem to fit into pretty well. I don't mean to criticise you but rather suggest that the hiring process should focus less on intelligence and coding skills, and try to hire people that have intellect. That can pair judgement with intelligence. That can relate decisions to goals beyond their o…
I think you have some good understanding of parts of the problem but the ease with which you generalise is dangerous.
Getting from "I have too many bad experiences with highly intelligent, but myopic and immature software developers" to "I just think it's a really bad idea to try to hire 'extra smart' people (..) because it won't work" is pretty poor logic.
I think much better and productive statement would be "Hiring intelligent people is not enough to solve the problem."
It is much more productive because from there you can go to actually discussing what else is needed to make good use of highly intelligent people.