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Apple Interview – 1995

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Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#91

Post by dopeboy »

asah wrote: post #83
magic_hamster wrote: post #49

This 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…

can confirm all this, and more. It wasn't until the late 2000s when programming became easy enough for the mainstream and you started to see "coding camps," upwork and the like. In the mid-90s, you had crazy demand for development but needed to be a brain surgeon to get hello world to work, let alone a website to be remotely reliable. There was no automated testing, let alone CI. Source control was sometimes used, so…

If the demand was high, why was the pay so low?

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#92

Post by thaumasiotes »

asah wrote: post #83
magic_hamster wrote: post #49

This 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…

can confirm all this, and more. It wasn't until the late 2000s when programming became easy enough for the mainstream and you started to see "coding camps," upwork and the like. In the mid-90s, you had crazy demand for development but needed to be a brain surgeon to get hello world to work, let alone a website to be remotely reliable. There was no automated testing, let alone CI. Source control was sometimes used, so…

> I remember showing PhDs about PKZIP and having them not believe it was possible to compress data without losing information - I had to literally show them the (rough) algorithm.

They were right; that is a well-known and trivial-to-prove theorem about lossless compression.

Lossless compression works because you only apply it to very particular types of data. It doesn't and cannot work on general data; that's why we have specialized compression algorithms for every different kind of data.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#93

Post by mikelevins »

ActorNightly wrote: post #86
benreesman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the best argument I’ve heard against whiteboard / leetcode interviews. A lot of people have trouble talking and coding at the same time, it doesn’t make them less smart.

In most interviews, if you say something like "Im just going to code in silence and we can talk about this later" is going to be well accepted.

How about, "I’m just going to take this question home to my office and work on it while out of all contact on no specific schedule so that I am not involuntarily preoccupied by my perception of a stranger watching me?"

No? I thought not. That’s why I simply avoid those kinds of hiring processes.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#94

Post by corrral »

twodave wrote: post #88
no_wizard wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the claim, of course, that solving the problem is not what matters. However, in practice, it is what matters, There is a "minimum" threshold (I can attest to this because I've been on the other side having to conduct them) where you more or less, must finish at least with some viable answer - even if unrefined - or you won't be moving on, full stop

I mean, sure, if you boycott the question you probably won't move on. But I'm not sure I want to work with someone unwilling to be curious or participate in problem-solving together. To me this filter is a positive effect of the test. In the interviews I've given I'll even handhold an applicant through to the optimal solution if need be, because to be perfectly honest I'd much rather have a coworker who is enthusiast…

> refuses to do so in a social setting (i.e. an interview).

Interviews are very different from working together collaboratively. They're very different from presenting work to or working with a client or stakeholder, too, and even very different from a sales presentation. The space of things that might come up is effectively unbound, how you're being judged is wildly uncertain, you are being judged, and you know almost nothing about the people you're "working with". As practiced in software, they're closer to being called in to give a thesis defense without knowing in advance which thesis you'll be defending—and also everyone in the room is a stranger, and also you have no clue which aspects of your performance are being judged or by what criteria, and even know for a fact that some of the people conducting these have completely opposite opinions about which behaviors are desirable and which are "red flags".

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#95

Post by mistrial9 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #92
asah wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can confirm all this, and more. It wasn't until the late 2000s when programming became easy enough for the mainstream and you started to see "coding camps," upwork and the like. In the mid-90s, you had crazy demand for development but needed to be a brain surgeon to get hello world to work, let alone a website to be remotely reliable. There was no automated testing, let alone CI. Source control was sometimes used, so…

> I remember showing PhDs about PKZIP and having them not believe it was possible to compress data without losing information - I had to literally show them the (rough) algorithm. They were right; that is a well-known and trivial-to-prove theorem about lossless compression. Lossless compression works because you only apply it to very particular types of data. It doesn't and cannot work on general data; that's why we…

I took graduate compression in the mid-90s.. JPEG was already invented and we studied that.. there was some handwaving but it was not as primitive as some comments make it out to be today

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#96

Post by simonh »

asah wrote: post #83
magic_hamster wrote: post #49

This 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…

can confirm all this, and more. It wasn't until the late 2000s when programming became easy enough for the mainstream and you started to see "coding camps," upwork and the like. In the mid-90s, you had crazy demand for development but needed to be a brain surgeon to get hello world to work, let alone a website to be remotely reliable. There was no automated testing, let alone CI. Source control was sometimes used, so…

I did a CS degree in the UK in the late 80s. The introductory language was Pascal running on a Prime Mini Computer. ANSI C had just come out, but none of us had computers. You had to book time in a lab. The Aztec C compiler we used was on a floppy disc and horrendously buggy. All the coding we did was minimal exercises.

I didn’t even hear of object oriented programming until the 90s, and actually learned how to write useful programmes in Perl and C on the Sun machines at my first job. I learned Unix from scratch from the man pages. It was a different era.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#97

Post by jonny_eh »

dopeboy wrote: post #91
asah wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can confirm all this, and more. It wasn't until the late 2000s when programming became easy enough for the mainstream and you started to see "coding camps," upwork and the like. In the mid-90s, you had crazy demand for development but needed to be a brain surgeon to get hello world to work, let alone a website to be remotely reliable. There was no automated testing, let alone CI. Source control was sometimes used, so…

If the demand was high, why was the pay so low?

The work wasn't critical… yet. It was mostly exploratory, a way to soak up an R&D budget, or get R&D tax credits.

It was harder to find the opportunities and therefore leverage multiple job offers.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#99

Post by corrral »

jonny_eh wrote: post #97
dopeboy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the demand was high, why was the pay so low?

The work wasn't critical… yet. It was mostly exploratory, a way to soak up an R&D budget, or get R&D tax credits. It was harder to find the opportunities and therefore leverage multiple job offers.

Jobs were a lot more local, too. People didn't move around as much. In general, not just in software. You also couldn't just spend a couple minutes and get a ballpark for what employers were paying in another city, let alone get a decent sense of what a bunch of markets looked like—it'd take some real effort. Reduced mobility and information being much harder to come by kept salaries lower, I expect.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#100

Post by biztos »

dopeboy wrote: post #91
asah wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can confirm all this, and more. It wasn't until the late 2000s when programming became easy enough for the mainstream and you started to see "coding camps," upwork and the like. In the mid-90s, you had crazy demand for development but needed to be a brain surgeon to get hello world to work, let alone a website to be remotely reliable. There was no automated testing, let alone CI. Source control was sometimes used, so…

If the demand was high, why was the pay so low?

Was it? In 1995 I was shocked to discover what the “computer guys” were getting paid, and decided I ought to be writing code (etc) as my official job instead of just the thing I do within my other job.
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