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

251–260 of 399 posts

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

#251

Post by pulisse »

didibus wrote: post #242

> Some teams might ask you to do LeetCode, but in my case, I didn’t even have a technical interview I'm a bit surprised and in denial about this. Maybe this was exceptional hiring practice during the COVID craze which has also resulted in most of the recent layoffs? I say that simply because I've personally and of everyone I know, have never encountered an interview that didn't involve that.

It's not so surprising: The position was just an internship, and the hiring manager was already familiar with the work product of the candidate (the app that drew their attention in the first place).

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

#252

Post by didibus »

yieldcrv wrote: post #43
SilverBirch wrote: post #27

I think the sort of more general point, rather than "build something great that someone at Apple notices", is that Graduate and Internship programmes are scale businesses. They get thousands of people applying and will hire atleast dozens, probably some FANG are hiring hundreds. So yes, we're all special snowflakes, but that's not what this process is for. It's about harsh rounds of easy to design problems to winnow…

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.

To be honest, building something on your own time is very different, in that, it's much easier.

You start from scratch, you can pick something you're interested in building and maybe also feel you can succeed at. You make up your own requirements, as you see please, so things aren't ambiguous or changing in requirements constantly.

There's no prior legacy constraints, there's no time constraints, it doesn't require finding ways to deliver faster by leveraging other developers.

You get to spend as much time as you need, go watch tutorials, take a hiatus, come back to it when refreshed, fail multiple times and try again, etc.

You can choose the programming language, framework, library ecosystem, that you're more familiar with and comfortable with.

And so on.

So having someone that can show some cool personal projects I've found isn't always a great way to know if they'll be good in a work environment and on a team.

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

#253

Post by josephg »

neon_electro wrote: post #231
josephg wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. You, me and the GP commenter seem to all be vigorously agreeing with one another. Job interviews should be based on what the role entails. If that includes data structures and algorithms, so be it. If not, leave them out!

As the GP commenter said:

> It really depends on what you're working on. ... It's all context.

I brought it up because many (most) commenters in this thread seem to be claiming that this knowledge and skill is never useful. That its ridiculous to ask about this stuff in any job interviews, except as a ritualistic hazing ritual. This is also absurd.

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

I've never had an employer name any data structures explicitly. Its our job as the software experts to know which tools and technologies are relevant. But with that said, I can't remember ever using custom data structures in frontend website code either. If I were hiring a web developer, there are so many things I'd rather spend time talking about in an interview. (HTML & CSS knowledge, web frameworks, design skills, raw programming skill, etc.)

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

#254

Post by comprev »

fnands wrote: post #78
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The correlation between people who are willing to grind leetcode and who turn out to be good engineers is high enough that it's worth it for them to keep as a tool to sort the massive pile of applicants they get. One "subtlety" this misses is that leetcode-style trivia tests only work for those who are willing _and able_ to grind leetcode etc. There are many who have the aptitude and experience but have e.g. childr…

The cynical part of thinks that that might be a feature, not a bug.

It is a feature.

FAANG want dedicated engineers who don't have the distraction of family and/or sick relatives.

They don't want people who need to finish _promptly_ each day to put their kids to bed.

They want their pound of flesh in exchange for a high salary and ability to add "Worked at FAANG" on their CV.

If you have the time and dedication to grind leetcode for months the you've passed their requirement.

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

#255

Post by pb7 »

Clubber wrote: post #249
kaashif wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the word "wageslave" to describe 300k TC office workers is out of touch at best and downright offensive at worst.

>downright offensive at worst People are so easily offended these days. Having said that, if you work for a company and you get fired and blacklisted, you still don't eat. If you work for a wage, you HAVE to work for somebody or you starve. If you work for somebody, that somebody has a lot of sway over how your life looks. Better be good at kissin' ass. Also, if you don't think the US healthcare industry will take ev…

You’re a wage slave when you work for yourself too, probably even more so. You can’t even completely take a week or two off in most cases. Your work eats your entire life.

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

#256

Post by geodel »

kaashif wrote: post #189
zerr wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to become a wage slave if you've already built something that people want (thus can monetize it yourself)?

Using the word "wageslave" to describe 300k TC office workers is out of touch at best and downright offensive at worst.

Huh, its like calling couch potato is offensive to someone is offensive who watch TV and sit in couch all day because their TV is 77" OLED, couch is full grain leather and beer artisanal.

If someone with 300K+ TC gets offended by this term, playing world's smallest violin for those snowflakes would be most appropriate.

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

#257

Post by slt2021 »

foldr wrote: post #82
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…

I think a fair number of Leetcode 'medium' problems are reasonable as augmented versions of FizzBuzz. In most cases, someone who can code should at least be able to write a brute force solution to one of these problems and explain why their brute force solution is slow. Where I think Leetcode-style questions become problematic is when they're used as test of whether someone can invent and implement a clever algorithm…

some companies/teams use leetcode hard level problems to specifically select for ACM ICPC level talent to solve their particular problems, writing very tight compute kernels in constrained environment and unbounded input

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

#258

Post by jeffbee »

ninkendo wrote: post #244
jeffbee wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t see how you can increment `9999` in O(1) if the string length is considered the size of the input. You have to rewrite the string with zeroes, which is O(n) of the size of the string.

For that case, which is the worst case, yes. And the amortized average complexity is O(1) because that case is unlikely.

Are you starting to see why this is a good icebreaker? It has all kinds of discussion potential.

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

#259

Post by pb7 »

deckard1 wrote: post #217
kaashif wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the word "wageslave" to describe 300k TC office workers is out of touch at best and downright offensive at worst.

ah, yes. The American Dream of living in a 50 year old shitbox fixer that costs $2M in the suburbs of Cupertino. If you can make that much remote out in Nebraska then sure, fine. There are people doing a lot worse. But when doing much better looks like that, what even is the point?

Living in Nebraska when you have the means to live in civilization is a punishment. Why would someone choose to live in a place where the nearest restaurant is a Denny’s 45 mins away?

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

#260

Post by azinman2 »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #111
SilverBirch wrote: post #27

I think the sort of more general point, rather than "build something great that someone at Apple notices", is that Graduate and Internship programmes are scale businesses. They get thousands of people applying and will hire atleast dozens, probably some FANG are hiring hundreds. So yes, we're all special snowflakes, but that's not what this process is for. It's about harsh rounds of easy to design problems to winnow…

There a wonderful Corecursive podcast [0] that touches on unexpected ways to work with Apple. [0] https://corecursive.com/shipping-graphing-calculator/

That was a _very_ different time.
Post reply on HN