Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode

aheze.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 399 posts

Re: Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode

#131

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Speaking from experience the problem with landing in at a FAANG without having gone through the usual Google-style interview process and all the academic pre-reqs and so on that everyone else around you went through is that, depending on your personality type and experience, the imposter syndrome can just go off the charts.

I came into Google through an acquire, and one where the usual interview process was waived. They needed us to continue working on the thing we worked on, and they went through our job histories and talked to our mgmt and slotted us where we would fit and for people that didn't "fit" they were mostly given 1-2 year contracts instead.

And while I lasted there 10 years after that, it really didn't do me any favours. Going through the process and succeeding would have been far better for me. A lot of people around me at Google had imposter syndrome, but I was an actual imposter; didn't do the interview, and didn't have a CS degree. Made worse by the fact that I was a site (Waterloo) where the vast majority of people -- including all the mgmt and site leads -- went through the rather rigorous program at U Waterloo, and were damn proud of it, and so ...

Just sayin', this is not a path I'd recommend. Google in particular is kind of run like a big university. Complete with their own equivalents of thesis committees (promo/calibration etc. etc.), an obsession with publish-or-perish, and campus cafeterias (and even equivalent of dorms). And their interview process is highly highly biased towards recent college grads who studied hard and recently in their algorithms and datastructures classes and are ready to whiteboard that up with confidence... It's a shared culture, with a high degree of conformity (that most of the people there wouldn't see/admit-to because of their conformance.)

I'm glad to hear Apple doesn't fit that mould entirely? Myself, at Google... if the money hadn't been so far beyond what I could get elsewhere, I would have walked after 6 months to a year.

Re: Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode

#132

Post by _jal »

birdyrooster wrote: post #128
stevebmark wrote: post #121

A nice story, and a unique situation from someone who obviously shouldn’t be giving anyone advice.

I dunno it’s actually not too atypical. My team is half graduates and half drop outs.

Yep.

I also personally managed to drop out of both high school and college.

Re: Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode

#133

Post by aheze »

lawgimenez wrote: post #53

I don’t get it, I am not in the US. OP is an intern and what percentage will OP get a formal software engineering job after internship? It’s confusing

A good percent, a bunch of full time people in my team used to be interns. But I could have started out as full time if I talked with my manager, I just didn’t want to get stuck in a big company without trying other stuff first

Re: Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode

#134

Post by hotnfresh »

TrevorAustin wrote: post #120
Eddygandr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't the guy who made Homebrew fail his interview at Google because he couldn't invert a binary tree? That's a guy who has built a popular product in the wild and can clearly code but failed because of the leetcode barrier at all IC levels.

To be fair, Homebrew is great product design, but actually pretty janky software engineering. Anyone who's had it wreck their PATH a couple of times isn't going to be an automatic yes vote on a technical screen.

As if average FAANG quality in customer-facing software is better.

If that’s the hang-up on hiring him, they need to get the log out of their own eyes first, because shifting to the quality level of Homebrew would be a big improvement for a whole lot of their software.

Re: Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode

#135

Post by GeekyBear »

stevebmark wrote: post #121

A nice story, and a unique situation from someone who obviously shouldn’t be giving anyone advice.

I found this quote interesting and worth sharing:

> I remember that my manager specifically pointed out that he didn’t care about where I went to school or my GPA — he said something like “it only matters what you can do.”

Re: Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode

#136

Post by monocasa »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #117
monocasa wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It came out that by inverting a binary tree just meant swapping the left and right children of all nodes of the tree. It's pretty much 'can you iterate through a tree?' which comes up a surprising amount.

Sure, but try coming up with that without even remembering what invert meant (it isn't a word that is commonly used in practice outside of CS education and l00tcode). Most of the problem in l00tcode question is just figuring out what is being asked for, not in doing the ask. That's why studying and understanding lots of l00tcode problems as prep is very effective (even if you haven't seen the problem, the problem is…

'Invert' is a pretty common word.

Re: Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode

#138

Post by thereisnojesus »

angarg12 wrote: post #110
sdfghswe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a weird take because the whole point of the last decade of leetcode was that people with special skills or that built something great can't even get hired. No, it looks like you're missing the point. Leetcode is not for people with special skills. It's for people with NO SKILLS other than "can code". Well if the only thing you can do is write code, you better be really good at writing code.

I'm a Machine Learning Engineer with 5+ years of experience at FAANG. I have designed and built real time ML systems that support millions of QPS with And yet I can't escape leetcode interviews. In fact I recently sent a spree of CVs and got automated rejection emails for most of them. I don't buy your take.

This is privilege if you think 3 CVs is a lot. I applied for 100 yesterday.

Re: Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode

#139

Post by VoodooJuJu »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #54
KaiserPro wrote: post #30

The problem is that "leetcode" is a definitely a thing that exists in "FAANG" interviews. The biggest stumbling block with leetcode is that you shouldn't be programming like that in real life. "make a linked list" no, just use a library like everyone else. "Implement addition in python but with string inputs", "no you can't use the built in x" All of that "clever" shit should be filtered out at PR/MR/diff review time…

The problem is though how do you evaluate for real work without a portfolio of experience? Real work projects take weeks - perhaps months - to design, build, review and release. How do you test for that, really? I agree leetcode style interviews are artificial, but I think they persist because few people have identified and popularised effective alternatives. At least with leetcode you've shown people in front of you…

>I think they persist because few people have identified and popularised effective alternatives

Astrology persists, but that's not a testament to its efficacy.

Re: Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode

#140

Post by PaulRobinson »

jebarker wrote: post #89
PaulRobinson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is though how do you evaluate for real work without a portfolio of experience? Real work projects take weeks - perhaps months - to design, build, review and release. How do you test for that, really? I agree leetcode style interviews are artificial, but I think they persist because few people have identified and popularised effective alternatives. At least with leetcode you've shown people in front of you…

This seems like a better way to evaluate real-world coding skills. Did you use it in a standard 45-60 min interview or as a take home problem? It seems like it'd take a decent amount of time to read the requirements and just introduce the task.

Take home and “please time box it to maybe an hour maximum, you’re probably doing a load of interviews and tech tests at the moment, so you don’t need to finish: I just want to see your approach”.

In-person time I used to like to ask a question I got from here: “Tell me about your favourite coding work or side project”. We’d then dig into choices, trade offs, obstacles and how they got around them.

My favourite answer to this was “an OpenGL implementation for the X Window protocol which I wrote in Common Lisp”. Just getting through the first layer of “Why [x]?”, took 15 minutes and we spent an hour talking about all the facets. Hired him, was a superb colleague.

Post reply on HN