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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

#281

Post by yunwal »

pb7 wrote: post #272
Clubber wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 tha…

There’s also quite a few jobs where programmers can automate away a good portion of their work

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

#283

Post by hotnfresh »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #168
monocasa wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Invert' is a pretty common word.

Yes, but the common slang it is used for isn't the meaning we are using for l00tcode questions.

The common meaning isn’t slang. The (multiple!) math/CS senses of the word are jargon. Which is fine—nothing wrong with jargon—but their existence doesn’t make the ordinary sense slang.

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

#284

Post by gumby »

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/

You can just read his story (which has been on HN several times): http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

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

#285

Post by nonameiguess »

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.

It's amusing the answers so far are mostly all "well this is an easy question and he should have gotten it." I actually agree with that, but even so, he got rejected by Google but did get a job at Apple, which is what this article is about, and that seems like a far more relevant fact to me.

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

#286

Post by flashgordon »

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…

Most of this is correct - But Faangs have also been having their managers (eg EMs and PMs) do reach outs to make it look authentic - only to forward you to a recruiter and a standard 6 hour interview round (I know because I am not special and have fallen and almost fallen for this trap dozens of times)

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

#287

Post by suresk »

Aurornis wrote: post #264
ninkendo wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ironically, you just answered the "difficult" interview question in a few lines of casual commenting. If you're not allowed to use atoi and itoa, it's still not all that difficult to do in C. Incrementing ASCII characters and handling carries is really trivial. I'd be kind of worried if I was hiring a C developer who didn't know the basic things you described above. I'm not sure why you think those are esoteric conce…

Your last 2 sentences highlight the crux of it, I think - in the first sentence, you say "C developer" and in the second just "developers".

This actually does seem like a great icebreaker-type question for a C developer. I'm less convinced every developer should be able to go into that level of detail if they are doing Javascript or Python or whatever. Ideally they'd be able to at least reason through some of this and demonstrate some understanding of some of this, but I'm not sure it is a great icebreaker question for all developer roles.

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

#288

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

brookside wrote: post #247
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> insane amount of time every prospective employer demands of you I have worked an average of 40-hour/week jobs for my entire 30-year career. What's this "demand" nonsense?

I believe parent is talking about time demands of the interview process, not the job.

ah!

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

#289

Post by nonameiguess »

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.

I believe Google at least at that time was trying to hire engineers who could theoretically be put to work on any team, potentially being asked to create TensorFlow or MapReduce or contributing to the Linux kernel in service of Android, not people who have pigeonholed themselves into only being considered web developers.

If pure CRUD companies only looking for JavaScript specialists are also using leetcode screening, they're missing the point.

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

#290

Post by jackson1442 »

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…

As a data point on the scale of internships, Amazon hired approximately 15,000 interns last summer (not including winter interns). While I don't have a number for how many get full time offers, a large portion do since the internship serves as on-the-job training.
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