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

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

#151

Post by FirmwareBurner »

thereisnojesus wrote: post #138
angarg12 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like 100/day is swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction. I apply like 3-5/week and I feel like that's a lot.

Granted I don't live in a tech hub so my options are limited but 100/day feels like you're just spamming aimlessly and wasting your energy on quantity instead of quality.

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

#152

Post by and0 »

usrbinbash wrote: post #40

> and you need LeetCode for backend. Interesting. I have never done a single leetcode question. 70% of my job is writing backend code in Golang and Python with the odd bit of C and shell scripting every now and then. What am I doing wrong?

Nothing! Quite the opposite. You've avoided the typical modern meat grinder approach to hiring devs. If you've been at the same company for 5-6 years or just slotted into a comfy niche then you'll have avoided it. Congrats

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

#153

Post by jkaptur »

curiousllama wrote: post #119
yieldcrv wrote: post #43

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. which was dumb. but reinforced the supposed uniformity of that process. I'm glad people aren’t just continuing the practice simply because they experienced the practice.

The comment you're replying to is saying there's 2 processes, and it matters which one you're in. System A optimizes for min(p(hire|bad_candidate)). System B optimizes for max(p(hire|good_candidate)). System A has resume screens, long lead times, and Leetcode out the wazoo. System B has a few convos, short lead times, and review of actual previous work product. Horror stories come from great candidates in system A. T…

Well, it describes what it's like to be in system B. All it says about how to get in is to build something (good? great? flashy?) and hope someone notices.

This clearly does work sometimes, but it's not necessarily the best advice for everyone.

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

#154

Post by mmmeff »

I hung up on my Apple interviewer last year for giving me a horrendous leetcode question.

I asked the interviewer if it was typical work for someone working on the iCloud web app platform and he lied through his teeth, swearing it was.

I’ve got better shit to do.

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

#155

Post by wongarsu »

GeekyBear wrote: post #135
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.”

Both which school you go to and your GPA try to be proxies for what you can do. They are probably even reasonably good proxies (for some jobs). But on the other hand too many people rely on them, so as a manager you can get great hires by finding brilliant people who are undervalued on those metrics, and thus not as strongly fought over on the market.

And of course at some point in your career nobody should be asking for your GPA or school anymore because by then there should be much better ways to communicate your ability.

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

#156

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

smt88 wrote: post #105
3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree customers don't care about bugs, software quality and voice assistants, you can hear them complaining in literally every forum for Apple users. An ecosystem has stickiness, so many things go wrong, that people strongly care about, but the overall equation still tips in favor of "I'll stay". The UI design went completely downhill in iOS7 with Forstall leaving and Ive taking over. I love Ive, but he's not…

> you can hear them complaining in literally every forum for Apple users My layperson friends seem not to know iOS has any bugs at all. They just seem to think software in general is flaky. And all those complainers still keep buying these things, so they don't care enough to switch. > Tim Cook needs a "product guy" to help him round out the management team. Why? Objectively speaking, why does he need a product guy?…

You're describing Tim Cook as some automaton who only cares about performance indicators and believe me you don't know him well if you think that. But the fact is he's good at operations, and not great at products. Not everyone can be great at everything.

Product design is, at this level, about your overall philosophy of product, and product portfolio, how they feel, how they fit together, and what is important, are we going pros, are we going consumers, why, how, etc. What do we want to see more of in the world, what is useful, how can we make it useful, and humane, and intuitive yet powerful. That's the product guy's job. Jobs, Ive, Forstall were product guys. Ive unfortunately kind of sometimes leaning into odd obsession with minimalism.

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

#159

Post by pkteison »

Going to college is still the most successful route towards landing an interview. My managers generally won’t let me schedule an interview with somebody with no degree, even with personal recommendations. And all of my coworkers have college degrees. I hope people don’t read stories like this and draw general conclusions based on rare outliers.
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