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My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple

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Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple

#201

Post by scriptproof »

nickbauman wrote: post #79
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not prepared to get into my experiences at Apple much beyond the surface level that I touched upon, for a few reasons, but I left for the same reason everybody does. I was offered a career-advancing opportunity to prepend senior to my title and help build out a small startup that's going places and really making a name for themselves. Apple, like Google, has already "won" (for lack of a better word) and while a p…

Great answer. Could Steve Jobs himself succeed at a company like Apple as an employee? I doubt it. But that is the question.

They created at Atari a night shift just for him (he was the only employe of this team) to do the same work than the others. This answers the question.

Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple

#202

Post by jonahx »

downandout wrote: post #135

Though this isn't as bad as many I've read, stories like this are the reason I have never applied to work at any of these large firms (Google, Apple, etc.). I have been a full-time developer for more than 20 years. I have 4 software patents to my name, one of which formed the basis of a startup that was acquired for $64 million. I know a few people at Facebook and Google (not at Apple), and I am definitely in the sam…

Whatever your judgments are about the ethics or efficacy of this process, I'm confident that your reaction, and the pool of people excluded because of similar reactions, is not something they are overlooking, but is a consciously designed effect of the process. Testing stress-tolerance is probably one of their specific goals.

Does it lead to overall better hires than a less grueling process? I have no idea. But they must think it does.

Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple

#203

Post by jaimebuelta »

sandworm wrote: post #142

I cannot stand the whole "culture fit" gambit. It's a job, not a country club. The idea that some people will "fit in" and others won't and that this can be determined during an interview is naive at best. What you get are a bunch of new hires who's only qualification over the not-hired is that they put on a good show for the interviewers. I'd say they are the best actors, but that doesn't cover those very good actor…

While I agree that "culture fit" certainly is double-speak for a lot of toxic crap and discrimination, I think that corporate culture is something very important and worth keeping / building a good one.

Culture is also wether to be a perfectionist or to ship things now, even if they have bugs. To spend time sharing your knowledge with others or to document the code. To create a design or to quickly do what the customer wants. To generate comprehensive documentation, or to give personalised support. To tolerate brilliant aholes (hey, they are geniuses after all) or not.

All those things are different approaches to work, and being in places where the culture is different of your own can be a pain for both sides.

Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple

#204

Post by odonnellryan »

downandout wrote: post #135

Though this isn't as bad as many I've read, stories like this are the reason I have never applied to work at any of these large firms (Google, Apple, etc.). I have been a full-time developer for more than 20 years. I have 4 software patents to my name, one of which formed the basis of a startup that was acquired for $64 million. I know a few people at Facebook and Google (not at Apple), and I am definitely in the sam…

Not for Apple or Google, but I've literally been asked impossible questions during some interviews at other big-names.

Maybe I should have recognized they were impossible and addressed the interviewer. They were usually very number-theory heavy problems. After a bit of research, I determined that it wasn't really answerable, and people have done PHD work at MIT, CMU, etc.. to investigate the question I was given 30 minutes to work on.

I don't lie about my qualifications. I'm not a PHD student, there is nothing on my resume or CV that would imply I'd be aware of some obscure (not something I'd consider important to comp sci like crypto) area of research... but still, asked these really oddball questions.

Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple

#205

Post by mazesc »

xxxyy wrote: post #196
downandout wrote: post #135

Though this isn't as bad as many I've read, stories like this are the reason I have never applied to work at any of these large firms (Google, Apple, etc.). I have been a full-time developer for more than 20 years. I have 4 software patents to my name, one of which formed the basis of a startup that was acquired for $64 million. I know a few people at Facebook and Google (not at Apple), and I am definitely in the sam…

I think you are rationalizing. These interviews are really not that difficult. Try going through "Cracking the coding interview", a month of practice should be enough.

"Not that hard" is studying a month to pass a test in some artificial setting?

Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple

#206

Post by hmottestad »

EnderMB wrote: post #180
downandout wrote: post #135

Though this isn't as bad as many I've read, stories like this are the reason I have never applied to work at any of these large firms (Google, Apple, etc.). I have been a full-time developer for more than 20 years. I have 4 software patents to my name, one of which formed the basis of a startup that was acquired for $64 million. I know a few people at Facebook and Google (not at Apple), and I am definitely in the sam…

In a similar vein, I'd also like to know how many people manage to land jobs at the Google's and Facebook's of the world, and ultimately prove to be less-than-spectacular developers. I dropped out of a masters degree to join a startup as a .NET developer, but kept in touch with a few guys finishing there. One of them now works for Google. He was always great in the algorithm classes, and he knew his theory reasonably…

Maybe he gets to work on difficult problems that can only be solved by a great algorithm.

Or maybe he works on making a set of algorithms 5% faster.

Making a sorting algorithm just 1% faster for the most used cases will probably save a company like Google vast amounts of electricity.

I guess there are plenty people who understand both algorithms and programming language features well. But if you want someone who is awesome in algorithms you might not care if they couldn't grasp the simplest programming language feature like a for-each loop, or a static variable.

Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple

#207

Post by bevacqua »

tomp wrote: post #192
bevacqua wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite question to ask is "If you could change one thing about $company, what would you change and why?"

Would you expect an honest answer to that one?

It usually throws the interviewer off, sometimes they need to take a long time to answer, which can be good or bad, but its up to you to decide how honest they're really being

Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple

#208

Post by techhackblob »

If software development was not a creative process then such algorithmic/IQ test interviews would be very relevant. Unfortunately for those wasting their time with such interviews it is a creative process. A recent Nobel prize in economics was given to Daniel Kahneman for his work proving such gut instinct interviews are a failure. When I first left college and was bad at software development I passed those tests, got into software firms and got my experience. Now even though I write software everyday for my clients I wouldn't pass any of those interviews. Zuckerberg is right - younger people are smarter (at passing those tests).

Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple

#209

Post by Tloewald »

techhackblob wrote: post #208

If software development was not a creative process then such algorithmic/IQ test interviews would be very relevant. Unfortunately for those wasting their time with such interviews it is a creative process. A recent Nobel prize in economics was given to Daniel Kahneman for his work proving such gut instinct interviews are a failure. When I first left college and was bad at software development I passed those tests, go…

Where was there any suggestion of algorithmic or IQ test interviewing?
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