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

321–330 of 399 posts

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

#321

Post by Eisenstein »

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…

> If you work for a wage, you HAVE to work for somebody or you starve.

You really don't. There is no way you can starve in the USA unless you do it on purpose.

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

#322

Post by varjag »

hotnfresh wrote: post #143
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…

What’s funny is that in most positions the hard work has nothing to do with any of that. It’s communication, empathy, navigating people-problems and organizational dysfunction, and working with/around awful systems that you can’t change, while limiting their blast-radius to protect the business (and your own sanity). You can always just google how to invert a binary tree or whatever and get a solid answer in no time.…

Communication, empathy and navigating people is easy: there's a deluge of people capable of doing that. Writing code is hard. Not many people can code at all; even fewer are any good at it. This is why you can easily be unemployed after BA in Communications but have little problem getting a job after high school if you can code.

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

#323

Post by nottorp »

3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #63
smt88 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under Cook, Apple products have become bland and overpriced in most categories (the M_ processors are a huge exception), but it's also wildly successful. The stock price is 7x what it was when Cook took over. He's one of the most successful CEOs of all time. Unfortunately the only conclusion we can draw is that consumers don't care about: - software quality - bugs - voice assistants ...and do care about: - hardware q…

I don't agree customers don't care about bugs, software quality and voice assistants, you can hear them complaining in literally every forum for Apple users. An ecosystem has stickiness, so many things go wrong, that people strongly care about, but the overall equation still tips in favor of "I'll stay". The UI design went completely downhill in iOS7 with Forstall leaving and Ive taking over. I love Ive, but he's not…

> I don't agree customers don't care about bugs, software quality and voice assistants

I care but once in a while I have this project I need to run Windows 10 for and I'm reminded the grass is greener on my side.

Same for Android tbh.

Edit: to summarize, Apple is still the least shitty option.

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

#324

Post by nitely »

didibus wrote: post #252
yieldcrv wrote: post #43

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. 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 f…

How can you test all of that? through leetcode kinda questions you surely cannot. Maybe behavioral questions are close, but you would do those in both types of hiring processes, no?

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

#325

Post by slt2021 »

ryandrake wrote: post #309
slt2021 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people choose to live in bay area not because its housing situation, but despite of it. mainly because cutting edge R&D type technology has been developed in the area and alternatives to SV have not developed yet. its not even pay - I would say bay area pay is bad, because of cost of living & taxation. But opportunities for growth are unmatched in bay area

The point is you can't adequately judge whether a job counts as "wageslave" just from the salary. A $300K job where houses cost $2M is like a $30K job where houses cost $200K.

you are more than right, it is actually objectively worse.

because $300K will demand much much more than 30k job.

300k job leads to stress, anxiety, performance calibrations, mental breakdowns, overwork, competition, lack of job security etc.

30k job could be very relaxed, could be part-time gig where you work few hours in a week.

so work-life balance is really tilted worse for higher paying jobs

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

#327

Post by r00fus »

ryandrake wrote: post #308
Retric wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly, but a great deal of security only works because people never really tests it. There’s a few cases of people walking into ‘secure’ data centers plugging in their laptops only to realize they’re at the wrong company. People while swipe badges, act befuddled because it didn’t work, and then get let into the building. Or get out of an elevator with a bunch of people and just walk in as part of a crowd which hol…

The "badging" culture at Apple is pretty extreme. It is routine and totally expected for a low-level worker bee to watch and call out a VP behind him who fails to badge through any external or internally locked door. One of the highlights of my time there was once having to remind Craig Federighi that he forgot to badge into a secured area.

Also related to the "secret projects" culture there. Being high on the hierarchy doesn't matter to secret project roster. Security is that key to how Apple operates.

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

#329

Post by inconfident2021 »

I call this survivorship bias. No matter what you make, only few care enough. Find this few is hardest part. Because there are millions others doing the same damn thing.

Everyone has a kick for the survivorship bias. At the end it is just that.

How about other who made similar apps? How about all those aspiring game devs who actually put games, web developers who launched products or even some guys who made something apple would want?

The OP managed to get lucky.

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

#330

Post by crooked-v »

suresk wrote: post #287
Aurornis wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Javascript doesn't even have ASCII - every string is UTF-16.
Post reply on HN