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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

#331

Post by foobiekr »

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.

Pretty much anyone who interviewed before the 2012 never did stupid code tricks like leetcode interviews. Instead, we asked how things actually worked.

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

#332

Post by hcks »

marliechiller wrote: post #179
jeffbee wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding 1 to an ASCII decimal strings is a great icebreaker and I always use it. It is not leetcode. It is a filter for people who have actually encountered computers before. Even though our industry is maturing there are still a huge number of candidates who present themselves without ever once having written a program. I find the question has a massive signal. Either the candidate aces it in 15 seconds, or they imme…

I have written countless programs but would not be able to answer that without first turning to google. You might have screened out plenty of valid applicants with this

What programs have you written?

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

#333

Post by jononor »

Eisenstein wrote: post #321
Clubber wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

5 million households in the USA constantly have poor food security. About double that had intermittently poor food security. I do not think they are doing it on purpose.

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

#334

Post by Eisenstein »

jononor wrote: post #333
Eisenstein wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

5 million households in the USA constantly have poor food security. About double that had intermittently poor food security. I do not think they are doing it on purpose.

And if they went to any hospital starving they would get fed.

Please note the literal use of the word 'starve'.

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

#335

Post by kmano8 »

asielen wrote: post #214
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…

This can also apply to networking and having a good narrative about your experience. Hiring managers will hire someone they already know or find themselves 9 times out of 10. Do something that gets noticed or get to know people and network. Sending out cold resumes will have the lowest success rate of those three options.

This is my experience. Path in the door for every job I've had since I finished undergrad in the mid-aughts: - 1st job .. I answered a craigslist ad. - 2nd .. HN who's hiring post. - 3rd .. reached out to an engineer on the team on linkedin. - 4th .. referral from ex-coworker's partner. - 5th .. browsed the website of the VC firm that's funded a few of my previous companies, and I reached out to the CEO on linkedin.

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

#336

Post by raydev »

sdfghswe wrote: post #62
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.

> 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.

I'm pretty sure I have some kind of skill having been in the industry for more than a decade, and jumped to higher paying jobs several times.

Even at the staff/senior staff/principal levels you will still have to face the same LC gauntlet they give to new grads.

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

#337

Post by nottorp »

EMM_386 wrote: post #291
gumby wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to defend "leetcode grinding" and its pathologies but TBF this is problematic: > "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. Sure, those statements (just use an existing library) are what you'll do in practice especiall…

> One is "do you know what's going on under the hood?" Why should I need to? Let's take Microsoft's .Net sort implemtation. It will intelligently determine which is the optimized sort given the conditions it's facing. Heapsort? Mergesort? Quicksort? Radix Sort. And the most-possibility optimized versions of each. This is what data scientists do. We don't need programmers standing at whiteboards writting BubbleShort a…

Uh oh. You realize you just stated you actually know sorting algorithms and even know enough to be able to decide to roll your own if needed?

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

#338

Post by remich »

varjag wrote: post #322
hotnfresh wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, it's relatively rare among software engineers. So, even if it's over-represented in the general population (which I'm skeptical of), having actual skill at that makes you leaps and bounds more effective than others, once you get up to senior+ level.

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

#339

Post by remich »

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.…

In fairness, the ratio of "just write code" to everything you listed above changes quite drastically as your seniority increases.

To be sure, there will always be some senior/staff/principal engineers who sit in a room by themselves and code all day without talking to anyone, but, typically, the more senior you get in an organization the more your job consists of things other than writing code. When you're a junior or a mid, however, writing code makes up the vast majority of your day.

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

#340

Post by slt2021 »

pb7 wrote: post #259
deckard1 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Living in Nebraska when you have the means to live in civilization is a punishment. Why would someone choose to live in a place where the nearest restaurant is a Denny’s 45 mins away?

do you seriously think that tenderloin, Oakland, richmond, hunter's point, bay view is civilization?
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