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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

#231

Post by neon_electro »

josephg wrote: post #172
gumby wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more code you write, the more you have to maintain. Sure, of course there are times where you need to re-implement something from scratch. But those times are rare (or should be). Making something from scratch without strong justification is a strong signal, just not a positive one. It really depends on what you're working on. A package to manage a dentist's office should be as off the shelf as possible. I don'…

Yep I absolutely agree with this. I’ve spent about the last year optimising text CRDTs so they’re actually usable in practice. A few years ago, 800mb of ram usage and 5 minutes processing was common to open a document. Now we’re talking 2mb of ram and 20ms. That is the difference between something not being viable and something being usable everywhere. And yes: my code involved a lot of custom data structures and alg…

I'm happy for you that you've found a job where the things Leetcode emphasizes has merit and importance and value in your day to day work.

Everyone who's on the other side of the Leetcode debate from you wants the exact same thing - an interview process that is representative of the actual day-to-day work.

As a Web developer, inverting a binary tree is not a thing an employer has ever asked me to do.

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

#232

Post by Austin_Conlon »

doomlaser wrote: post #29
BossingAround wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's horrible. If I needed more reasons to not work for Apple, this'd have definitely been a dealbreaker for me. Of course, Apple with their forced RTO and, in general, disdain for remote work, provides many reasons for me not to work for them anyways.

I wouldn't take it back. It was a singular experience in my career. I learned a lot. One of the cool things they did was have monthly talks for the interns from the executives. One of these was an off the cuff talk from Steve Jobs himself.

What did he talk about?

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

#233

Post by monocasa »

pkteison wrote: post #159

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.

That's pretty uncommon in the industry to wholesale only allow those with degrees. I've even seen people without degrees in defense and aerospace, probably the most hard ass niche concerning degrees.

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

#234

Post by neon_electro »

kaashif wrote: post #193
PaulRobinson wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 answe…

"Please timebox to an hour" is a bit dodgy though. If one candidate really does that, but the rest give it an extra 2 or 3 hours, that 1 hour candidate will probably be at a disadvantage.

Thank you for mentioning this. I always find myself going further back and forth with employers who allow a take-home exercise but ask that it be time-boxed nonetheless; it's difficult to try to unpack how they're trying to communicate what kind of time pressure a role experiences, and that if I took longer than their expected time box, does that look bad just because I needed some more time to understand the problem?

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

#235

Post by ecshafer »

georgeburdell wrote: post #123

Team dependent hiring is not “unique” to Apple, as the author posits. This used to be the norm before Google. It is fairly well known that Apple has a “hire different” approach that heavily values specific experience, which frustrates the Leetcode monkeys on Blind

I can't speak for Apple. But team specific hiring does have some big downsides. It allows some managers to brings friends / family in that are not really qualified. I once worked with a team that every single person on the team lived in the same town, and had some personal connection to the manager, they were not good. Without some standardization or minimum bar, it leaves teams to figure out how they hire, and that might not be good.

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

#236

Post by Austin_Conlon »

clouddrover wrote: post #47
3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has pockets of excellence. It used to be most of the company, something about how Jobs ran it, inspired people much overqualified to apply, and not even for very high salaries. At NeXT infamously a PhD (EDIT: in comp-sci, or physics?) worked as a janitor as he simply wanted to be around Jobs and cool smart people. Currently entropy is getting to Apple in many ways. iTunes and Apple Music didn't use to be medioc…

> At NeXT infamously a PhD in comp-sci worked as a janitor as he simply wanted to be around Jobs and cool smart people. What did he get out of that in the end? Just more janitor work?

Cleaned up some Objective-C code maybe.

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

#237

Post by deckard1 »

gumby wrote: post #91
devoutsalsa wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask me a question that boils down to “write a card shuffling algorithm”, I’m going to do less well because I’m being taxed by the thought of “Why is this person asking me to shuffle a deck of virtual cards?” During the interview, I’d probably just google “best algorithm for shuffling deck of cards in ”, and I’d tell you I was looking it up. If you tasked me with shuffling cards on the job, that’s what I’d do.

You could just ask, and we'd answer "it's just a simple problem so both of us can see what it's like to work together." You'd be surprised how many people show up who don't actually know how to write a for loop. And if you didn't like the experience you wouldn't want to work for us so the interview would be a success too.

you don't actually believe that "work together" crap do you? You realize you're dangling a job over their head, right? There is a power imbalance. You'll never see "work together" in an interview because you're not colleagues on equal footing.

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

#238

Post by jeffbee »

ninkendo wrote: post #226
pphysch wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know how to transform the string "12345" to "12346" in a mainstream PL? I don't think "valid applicant" and "doesn't really grok strings/types" are compatible, outside of intern/maybe junior positions. The filter works.

Eh… You’re given `99999`. Increment it. A naive approach would turn this into `9999:`. Making this work is a bit complicated and involves memory reallocation if you’re in a C-like language and you need to increase the length of the string in order to increment it. You’ll probably want a system where the caller passes a buffer of sufficient size to use for rewriting the string, in case you overflow. Make sure to have…

Whether this should be done in-place or not is a completely valid direction in which to take the discussion and would be a "pass" from me. Also a "pass" would be `return itoa(atoi(input)+1))` with relevant caveats.

An O(1) in-place solution with a sane API exists in C++ and the form of it is also a handy indicator of whether candidate who proposes solving this in C++ is familiar with more recent standards or not.

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

#239

Post by Retric »

KerrAvon wrote: post #194
CoastalCoder wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guy long-term sneaks into Apple buildings to get his passion project shipped with Apple's first PowerPC Macs. But my summary really doesn't do the interview justice. Highly worth listening to.

Note that the Graphing Calculator story is not something that could work after approximately the turn of the century. Security tightened up considerably sometime around then.

Possibly, but a great deal of security only works because people never really tests it.

There’s a few cases of people walking into ‘secure’ data centers plugging in their laptops only to realize they’re at the wrong company. People while swipe badges, act befuddled because it didn’t work, and then get let into the building. Or get out of an elevator with a bunch of people and just walk in as part of a crowd which holds the doors for each other.

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

#240

Post by neon_electro »

pocketarc wrote: post #12
eclectic29 wrote: post #3

This is just "one" experience, certainly not the norm. Even as an experienced engineer of 15 yrs I'd to solve leetcode (LC) style problems on the whiteboard a few yrs go. For better or worse (depending on whose perspective you see), LC allows companies to judge you based on a common framework of solving algorithmic problems using computer science fundamentals (data structures and algorithms) in a language of your cho…

I think it makes sense to use LC or something like it. Is there a better way to judge the 100 random developers who've applied to your position? - They may not have formal education, you can't judge on that. - They may not have active GitHub projects, you can't judge on that. - They may not be active on social media or have any kind of fame, you can't judge on that. - They may not have built anything they can show of…

The problem is when the companies that are absolutely not hiring "armies" of devs start doing the same thing.
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