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

aheze.substack.com

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

#311

Post by atribecalledqst »

Apocryphon wrote: post #269
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…

Hasn't iTunes been mediocre since the mid-2000s?

I used it for years (basically since its inception) without issue through High Sierra. The only really annoying thing they did in all that time, IMO, was remove the ability to easily view artwork. I still haven't figured out how to see artwork in larger than a thumbnail view.

I only recently upgraded to Monterey and I find Apple Music borderline unusable in comparison. There are lots of tiny little bugs like how if you sort a column it no longer holds your position in the library -- previous versions would ensure that the song you had highlighted remained highlighted and in view. There's larger bugs like how Home Sharing doesn't work with wireless headphones.

(I have no point of comparison with other programs like Foobar2k, I'm just comparing how bad Music itself has gotten over the years)

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

#312

Post by coeneedell »

geodel wrote: post #256
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.

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.

It’s more about the people making 30k a year putting up fencing and barely scraping by watching those 300k a year SWEs complain about how they’re wage slaves.

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

#313

Post by johnnyanmac »

dustincoates wrote: post #2

This is a great post, and it's good to hear from someone who is doing great things so early. I know HN is often down in self taught or bootcamp programmers, but I'm happy to see people who willed themselves through. On this point regarding the lack of leet code at Apple versus other big tech: > Is it a coincidence that Apple was the only Big Tech company that didn’t do layoffs? Yeah, I do think it's probably a coinci…

I don't think it's a coincidence. To my knoledge, Apple also wasn't trying to hire like crazy over the pandemic. So it's no surprise that when that "hot streak" ended they weren't affected as strongly.

And as others have said, Apple does rely much more strongly on contracting than the rest of the Big Tech.

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

#314

Post by Apocryphon »

atribecalledqst wrote: post #311
Apocryphon wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't iTunes been mediocre since the mid-2000s?

I used it for years (basically since its inception) without issue through High Sierra. The only really annoying thing they did in all that time, IMO, was remove the ability to easily view artwork. I still haven't figured out how to see artwork in larger than a thumbnail view. I only recently upgraded to Monterey and I find Apple Music borderline unusable in comparison. There are lots of tiny little bugs like how if y…

iTunes has been notoriously bloated for years, though maybe that's predominantly for Windows users.

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

#315

Post by returningfory2 »

sjf wrote: post #296
nlunbeck wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I've noticed over the past 5 or so years is a "hobby project" is increasingly becoming the standard. Your GitHub portfolio is almost as important as your resumé itself in many cases. It starts the conversation and grabs attention with potential employers, but doesn't act in lieu of a technical evaluation. Almost every competitive applicant at the intern level has some tool or webapp that they've built out e…

Do you actually have any evidence for this? While having zero personal projects is probably a red flag, in my last job search I saw almost no clicks on links to projects. From personal experience, most hiring managers are so busy they barely even read the resume. They are definitely not going to comb through someone's github submissions.

This has been my experience on the hiring side too. Nowadays almost all resumes have a link to GitHub, but 80%+ of the time the accounts have been dead for months/years. My favorite was a candidate whose GitHub was totally empty - they had just created an account, done nothing on it, and still included it in their resume!!

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

#316

Post by distant_hat »

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.

So the goal is to go from wageslave to wageslave owner?

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

#317

Post by gretch »

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?

> But when doing much better looks like that, what even is the point?

Cupertino is an hour away Santa Cruz beaches. 3 hours away from skiing (or boating) at lake tahoe. 1 hour away from one of the best NBA teams (GSW). 30 minutes away from Stanford. 1 hour away from Berkeley. Some of the best average temperatures in the country.

Maybe they live in a "shitbox fixer", maybe they don't.

You might consider that people like and care about those other properties though.

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

#318

Post by ignite »

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 with leet code is what it really measures is how long you have spent on leetcode. Yes, you can solve the problems if you have experience, but you are not going to look as good as someone who had done that specific problem on leetcode and could just write down the optimal answer.

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

#319

Post by aheze »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #310
zengid wrote: post #164

This should probably be titled "getting an internship" at apple?

I'm still confused on how the author got discovered. It's very impressive for what I assume is a 18-21 year old who hasn't even gone to college yet. Made a photos IOS app, got 600 likes, and happened to find the eye of someone at Apple. Good eye on the manager/employee, but it almost feels like winning the lottery.

Yeah it didn't happen overnight or anything. I've been posting for about a year straight with WIP screenshots and fancy animations (https://twitter.com/aheze0) and also I've been doing a bunch of side projects on GitHub (https://github.com/aheze). Someone from the SwiftUI team also reached out, but I was further along with Photos so I went with it.

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

#320

Post by noleetcode »

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…

Here's the difference: I bet you had time to think through the novel problems and didn't have someone hovering over your shoulder, demanding you come up with solutions within 20 - 30 minutes -or else-.
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