Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Interview – 1995

engineersneedart.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 109 posts

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#31

Post by antihero »

chrchang523 wrote: post #29
mikelevins wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at Apple in 1987, and it was an all-day interview, but it wasn't much like the technical interviews I've done in more recent years--the ones characterized by brain teasers and whiteboard coding. There was none of that in my Apple interviews. They made me an offer and I worked there for ten years. Now, we can't conclude from that whether Apple has adopted whiteboarding and brain teasers generally. In tho…

It sounds like you're misevaluating your technical interview performance. You can feel like you're "bombing" an interview, while still performing above expectation. Some interviewers ask hard technical questions, don't expect most candidates to complete them within the allotted time, and give "hire" recommendations for some (but of course not all) that don't.

I think a good interview puts you in a position where you are struggling and out of your expertise - being able to demonstrate you have a solution for a bunch of stuff is less important than being able to demonstrate how you do when you don’t know and have to figure it out.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#32

Post by twawaaay »

grog454 wrote: post #24
twawaaay wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> telling someone to interview for two hours, having them decide that of all the offers of interviews they had yours was least interesting with the highest barrier to entry, and you deciding they were at fault isn’t going to help you deal with the modern realities of software But that is not my goal. My goal is hire as good developers as I can retain. I don't care about people bitching and moaning that the process is…

>If somebody does not care enough to work for us to put in couple of hours of work then they are very likely not a good candidate anyway. [emphasis mine] You compensate candidates for their time? I certainly assume you are compensated to interview incoming candidates, but its unusual for the candidate to be compensated (though not unheard of). I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I also get the impression ha…

Interviewing is a mutual process. The company invests time and resources into finding employees and candidates invest time and resources into finding a good place for them to work.

I see no reason to compensate the candidate for the time they spend on interviewing and when companies do this I see it as a desperate marketing gimmick.

Now, I assume all is done honestly. I put up an honest job offer, I explain the interviewing process upfront, I try not to waste candidate's time and certainly I do not ask people to do any take home exercises.

And since I started to do all interviewing remotely there is even less cost to the candidate -- basically they only need to spend couple of hours on interview alone and no travel.

I also try to put largest filters at the beginning of the process so that if you pass first interview it means you are likely on a good path to get the job. This works both ways, incidentally -- as I would prefer to spend more time with candidates that are promising.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#33

Post by ozarker »

morley wrote: post #7

> though not the cleverest engineer, [I] was one that worked quickly to prototype new ideas and took on some of the gruntwork that not every engineer wanted to work on. This is basically all I want from anyone I work with.

I’m a young engineer and I’m always happy to take on the grunt work to help the team as long as I get a little time to help on big picture stuff as well. I’m worried that I might be looked down on by more senior engineers who might think I’m just trying to avoid the more brain challenging work

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#34

Post by mproud »

mpetrovich wrote: post #12

Anyone else remember playing Glider? As a young kid, I gladly lost countless hours trying to navigate a paper airplane through a Rube Goldberg mess of obstacles. What a fun, imaginative game. Would be cool if there was an emulated version somewhere. Or we could borrow the author’s book and transcribe it to a modern language, ha.

Hell yes! It showed up on at least a few Shareware diskette bundles back in the day.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#35

Post by twodave »

mikelevins wrote: post #28
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #5

>I should pause here and point out that an interview at Apple was an all-day affair. Pairs of engineers would meet with and interview me for perhaps an hour. The first pair of engineers might grill me on some esoteric topic like code design, afterwards the next pair of engineers would sit down and maybe cover programming language specific questions. This took place in 1995, and sounds pretty much exactly like a techn…

I interviewed at Apple in 1987, and it was an all-day interview, but it wasn't much like the technical interviews I've done in more recent years--the ones characterized by brain teasers and whiteboard coding. There was none of that in my Apple interviews. They made me an offer and I worked there for ten years. Now, we can't conclude from that whether Apple has adopted whiteboarding and brain teasers generally. In tho…

I can’t speak for anybody who made you an offer, of course, but often these kinds of problems are just another way to witness first hand how the candidate goes about solving problems. Failing to solve the problem given a short window of time is indeed not relevant, but your problem solving process is _extremely_ relevant. I’ve spent a lot of time fixing crap because some engineer was engaging in “magical thinking” that the cost of not doing such screening is clear. Brain teasers can be hit or miss, so I don’t particularly like giving those to candidates (though as an interviewee I loved them), but you can get a great idea of someone’s appetite for doing the mental work of problem solving through a thoughtfully-designed code screening.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#36

Post by jacobyoder »

sarchertech wrote: post #26
twawaaay wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a shortage of actual developers. But there is no shortage of people who don't care about what they are doing or whether they can do it at all. When you are looking through piles of thousands of people, you are looking for ways to pare it down so that you are left at every step with higher concentration of the first group. Because spending same amount of effort on everybody is not a viable strategy.

> There is a shortage of actual developers. But there is no shortage of people who don't care about what they are doing or whether they can do it at all. In nearly 20 years of doing this I’ve have never had one of these dreaded fake developers make it through the resume screen, initial phone call, and a conversation with an engineer. And if I did, we’d just fire them as soon as it was clear they lied about their abil…

> In nearly 20 years of doing this I’ve have never had one of these dreaded fake developers make it through the resume screen, initial phone call, and a conversation with an engineer....And if I did, we’d just fire them as soon as it was clear they lied about their ability.

I've spent most of the last 25 years working independently. A large number of the 'fakers' (or just... currently-low-skilled) don't apply to large companies with screening processes. They build custom one-off software/websites/etc for small businesses. Those small business people have no ability to judge skills or quality. Some of the tech folks doing that may, at some point, try to apply 'up' in to larger companies, moving away from independent/freelance, and some of those may get weeded out.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#37

Post by jsjohnst »

sarchertech wrote: post #13
twawaaay wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> telling someone to interview for two hours, having them decide that of all the offers of interviews they had yours was least interesting with the highest barrier to entry, and you deciding they were at fault isn’t going to help you deal with the modern realities of software But that is not my goal. My goal is hire as good developers as I can retain. I don't care about people bitching and moaning that the process is…

> I don't care about people bitching and moaning that the process is too arduous. Actually, I am happy about it because I can efficiently swipe left on them. And that’s how you know there isn’t really a shortage of developers. My wife works in a field with a real shortage. When she gets interviewed, they fly her out and spend 2 days showing her around, taking her out, and trying to convince her to work for them.

> When she gets interviewed, they fly her out and spend 2 days showing her around, taking her out, and trying to convince her to work for them.

This exact scenario has happened around a half dozen times for me as a software engineer over the past twenty years. Basically any time I’m considering a company based in another US state, they fly me out for interviews, at least take me to dinner (if not some larger group outing), and then have someone show me around the city the next day trying to convince me to move there.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#38

Post by mikelevins »

chrchang523 wrote: post #29
mikelevins wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at Apple in 1987, and it was an all-day interview, but it wasn't much like the technical interviews I've done in more recent years--the ones characterized by brain teasers and whiteboard coding. There was none of that in my Apple interviews. They made me an offer and I worked there for ten years. Now, we can't conclude from that whether Apple has adopted whiteboarding and brain teasers generally. In tho…

It sounds like you're misevaluating your technical interview performance. You can feel like you're "bombing" an interview, while still performing above expectation. Some interviewers ask hard technical questions, don't expect most candidates to complete them within the allotted time, and give "hire" recommendations for some (but of course not all) that don't.

I can see why it sounds that way. Let me supply some context.

I cannot answer any question in conversation with a stranger unless the answer is something I happen to know off the top of my head, or the question is about what I can see or feel or remember in the moment. It's related to a general sort of cognitive disability I have that shows up in several other ways.

For example, if I'm driving and you engage me in conversation, we will get lost. Every time.

If I'm playing a multiplayer game with voice chat, and people are talking to me, I will lose.

There are just certain cognitive activities that I cannot combine successfully. The presence of a stranger in conversation forcibly occupies all of my attention. I am unable to think about anything other than interpreting the stranger's utterances and preparing my own. If I try to, for example, answer questions about FizzBuzz that require me to actually think about how things work, my mind goes completely blank.

"I'm trying to think, but nothing happens."

I presume that in each case where I received an offer, it was because the team had information from other channels that made me attractive. I know it for a fact in a couple of cases.

So in recent years I've mostly relied on those other channels, and just skipped the so-called technical interview. All it's going to tell you about me is that I can't do what you want me to in a technical interview.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#39

Post by mikelevins »

twodave wrote: post #35
mikelevins wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at Apple in 1987, and it was an all-day interview, but it wasn't much like the technical interviews I've done in more recent years--the ones characterized by brain teasers and whiteboard coding. There was none of that in my Apple interviews. They made me an offer and I worked there for ten years. Now, we can't conclude from that whether Apple has adopted whiteboarding and brain teasers generally. In tho…

I can’t speak for anybody who made you an offer, of course, but often these kinds of problems are just another way to witness first hand how the candidate goes about solving problems. Failing to solve the problem given a short window of time is indeed not relevant, but your problem solving process is _extremely_ relevant. I’ve spent a lot of time fixing crap because some engineer was engaging in “magical thinking” th…

I covered this in another reply, but if you use this process to see how I solve problems, you will conclude that I don't. You will witness me doing nothing, because I can't do anything in that circumstance.

Re: Apple Interview – 1995

#40

Post by twawaaay »

jseban wrote: post #17
twawaaay wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> telling someone to interview for two hours, having them decide that of all the offers of interviews they had yours was least interesting with the highest barrier to entry, and you deciding they were at fault isn’t going to help you deal with the modern realities of software But that is not my goal. My goal is hire as good developers as I can retain. I don't care about people bitching and moaning that the process is…

Your goal is to enable your business to make more money, that requires hiring enough competent people that can do the work that needs to be done, to make that money. Sometimes that work is really not especially interesting, or challenging. Nobody is going to love it, or be passionate about it, and it really doesn't require a person to be more than average in terms of skill, because it's just not that technically diff…

I am not pretending to be unicorn by keeping high hiring standards.

It is a reflection on our strategy. Our strategy is that, long term, is better to have smaller, tight knit community of highly intelligent, capable and motivated people than try to throw masses of lower paid employees at the problem.

We are fighting complexity and having large team of constantly rotating people that never seem to bear responsibility for their decisions is one of the worst things you can do.

I prefer to spend more time on hiring, find people I am satisfied with and then pay them well so that they are not looking to change their job in two years as most IT seems to be doing nowadays. Retention is a hugely underestimated success factor.

Post reply on HN