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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

#271

Post by Aurornis »

comprev wrote: post #254
fnands wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

This is hilariously out of touch.

Most of the FAANG people I know have kids.

Nearly all of their managers have families.

The one person I know who has two special needs kids specifically sought out a FAANG job for the stability, compensation, and work life balance it afforded.

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

#272

Post by pb7 »

Clubber wrote: post #262
pb7 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>You’re a wage slave when you work for yourself too, probably even more so. It certainly can be like that especially early on. Hopefully you would grow enough to hire good people to manage the business. If you work for somebody though, that will never happen.

>It certainly can be like that especially early on.

All the slavery with none of the wage.

>If you work for somebody though, that will never happen.

The alternative to starting a business that you'll hope will be self-sustaining and still earn you a respectable living is to work for the highest bidder, invest, and become financially independent. Odds of the latter are much higher for the average software engineer than the former.

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

#273

Post by thenoblesunfish »

As usual I feel I have to defend leetcode, despite the problems you can read in other comments. I learned a lot doing those problems, and they gave me the chance to demonstrate my talent and dedication directly, despite my resume in an adjacent field. Leetcode may be necessary, but in my case it certainly wasn't sufficient, and I am ultimately very happy with having done it.

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

#274

Post by didibus »

pulisse wrote: post #251
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).

Oh, internship, I missed that, because part of the article is behind some sign-up wall.

That detail is so important, should be in the title.

Internships are the exception. Good grades, good projects to show, sometimes connections, and a bit of luck is what you need. Then good performance during the internship and being on a team that still has head count to make an offer at the end of it.

But internships tend to be ageist. If you're too old, or are past that fresh out of school phase, you probably won't qualify for them.

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

#275

Post by thenoblesunfish »

BossingAround wrote: post #14

On the whole, it might be easier to grind LC than to create many side projects that you actually care about. This is all about one's internal motivation. For example, I don't really want to code in my free time. I have long accepted that I don't care. I don't have energy for anything but small-size side projects. I do, on the other hand, like solving puzzles, so LC is somewhat preferable to me, out of the two choices…

Agreed. And building your own greenfield project might actually be futher sway from most people's job than learning how to solve problems in a specific style..

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

#276

Post by ahoka »

Eddygandr wrote: post #80
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.

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.

But inverting a binary tree is trivial. It’s not like finding the shortest path in a graph, or something similar that requires recalling an algorithm on the spot. Go and look at the actual problem if you don’t believe me.

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

#277

Post by stcroixx »

slt2021 wrote: post #183
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…

this is a feature, not a bug. Companies absolutely want people with minimum outside job responsiblities, so that they can work them during the day, and pagerduty them during the night when stuff breaks. or overwork with boat load of feature requests and bug fixes and Ops workload - this is the reason why faang's offices are so fancy, have free food, laundry, massage, and bunch of other stuff. These fancy offices are…

I did it for 10 years with 4 kids. Multiple startups. Very few work off hours and none did in my experience.

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

#278

Post by monocasa »

ant6n wrote: post #246
monocasa wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Invert' is a pretty common word.

Yes but is it Referring to the additive or multiplicative inverse? Or maybe it’s making the tree upside down, so all leaves become roots, and the root becomes a leaf. But when we do that, do we just invert all the edges or transform the whole tree? Maybe it’s referring to changing a red-black tree into a green-white tree? Or turning a splay tree into a merge tree?

It can mean a lot of things, so you ask questions.

Howell (the homebrew 'google didn't hire me because of inverting a binary tree' guy) confirmed that they meant swapping right and left children of all nodes.

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

#279

Post by nine_zeros »

nomel wrote: post #230
nine_zeros wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refactoring is the best kind of test! It has a slight bias for programming languages but the bias can be mitigated by having refactorable libraries in many languages.

I'm fairly certain I would not perform well with this, unless the library was trivial. Refactoring is a task that's mostly about reading, understanding context, and a bit of rumination. I think having them design the library, or a fraction of it, from scratch, would give a more momentum.

> I think having them design the library, or a fraction of it, from scratch, would give a more momentum.

I have done this as a take home test and I am ok with this as long as it doesn't take more than 5 hours.

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

#280

Post by didibus »

Apocryphon wrote: post #261
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.

Apple is an incredibly heterogeneous company and conditions from interview practices to tech stacks vary incredibly from team to team.

Yes, but I speak from experience at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. Where I have personally worked for, applied too, or know people who did both.

To be fair, and somewhat surprisingly, I never have personally or know anyone that applied at Apple. So I do have a gap in first hand experience withe regards to Apple specifically.

Still, I would be very surprised if it was so different.

And as another commenter responded to me, it wasn't, the position was for an internship, so it makes sense now.

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