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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

#341

Post by kaashif »

slt2021 wrote: post #325
ryandrake wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean, not necessarily. A 300k job at a tech company may be less stressful than e.g. a 150k job at a non tech company with a toxic culture.

To be clear, it can be true, there are lots of stressful high paying jobs, my point is that it's not necessarily true.

I know low paid people with stressful jobs and highly paid people with less stress.

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

#342

Post by HWR_14 »

stcroixx wrote: post #277
slt2021 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a feature, not a bug. Companies absolutely want people with minimum outside job responsiblities, so that they can work them during the day, and pagerduty them during the night when stuff breaks. or overwork with boat load of feature requests and bug fixes and Ops workload - this is the reason why faang's offices are so fancy, have free food, laundry, massage, and bunch of other stuff. These fancy offices are…

I did it for 10 years with 4 kids. Multiple startups. Very few work off hours and none did in my experience.

Did you found a startup with 4 kids, or were you an early hire, or just one of several worker bees?

Serious question, not rhetorical, in case it doesn't come across.

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

#343

Post by didibus »

nitely wrote: post #324
didibus wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Leetcode questions have their own set of issues. Just wanted to say, not sure a portfolio of personal projects is all that better either.

A candidate that has a good portfolio and can pass an algorithm and design interview, and described prior work experience on projects that seemed involved is your best bet of course.

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

#344

Post by remich »

jebarker wrote: post #89
PaulRobinson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is though how do you evaluate for real work without a portfolio of experience? Real work projects take weeks - perhaps months - to design, build, review and release. How do you test for that, really? I agree leetcode style interviews are artificial, but I think they persist because few people have identified and popularised effective alternatives. At least with leetcode you've shown people in front of you…

This seems like a better way to evaluate real-world coding skills. Did you use it in a standard 45-60 min interview or as a take home problem? It seems like it'd take a decent amount of time to read the requirements and just introduce the task.

In a current hiring loop my company is doing for a senior, we have a take home divided into a series of steps, with explicit instructions that say that completion of the entire exercise is not necessary to advance (and we mean it).

The take home serves two purposes: (1) should the candidate progress to the in person interviews? (2) if the candidate stumbles in the in person coding, can I deduce from the take home that they do actually know what they're doing, and the stumbling was a side effect of interview anxiety?

I can tell a lot even from an incomplete take home, about whether someone is likely to do well on the in person interviews, but I mostly find it extremely valuable for (2), as a tiebreaker.

It hasn't happened yet in this cycle, but I can imagine a situation where someone turned in a fantastic take home and then brain farted during the in person coding, and, thanks to the take home, got hired.

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

#345

Post by remich »

neon_electro wrote: post #234
kaashif wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Please timebox to an hour" is a bit dodgy though. If one candidate really does that, but the rest give it an extra 2 or 3 hours, that 1 hour candidate will probably be at a disadvantage.

Thank you for mentioning this. I always find myself going further back and forth with employers who allow a take-home exercise but ask that it be time-boxed nonetheless; it's difficult to try to unpack how they're trying to communicate what kind of time pressure a role experiences, and that if I took longer than their expected time box, does that look bad just because I needed some more time to understand the problem…

I don't think most employers are out there looking at the timestamps on your commits to see if you really completed it within the timebox or not -- I certainly wouldn't.

I don't think that candidates who spend less time or turn in incomplete take homes are necessarily at a disadvantage. Sooo much can be discerned from a take home even if it's not finished. I can evaluate a candidate's familiarity with modern syntax, how they organize functions, how readable their code is, whether or not they used ChatGPT/CoPilot or copy/pasted from an online tutorial (surprisingly easy to discern when you're evaluating many submissions), and so on.

All of that tells me a lot about how well someone functions as an engineer, as well as what level they're operating at, and it doesn't require the completion of the take home problem.

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

#346

Post by hotnfresh »

remich wrote: post #339
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.…

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 o…

I was thinking about “just writing code” with the communication and empathy parts, especially, in fact, though you’re right that they also apply (differently, though I’m not sure if it’s more) to more-senior work.

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

#347

Post by remich »

Aurornis wrote: post #271
comprev wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a feature. FAANG want dedicated engineers who don't have the distraction of family and/or sick relatives. They don't want people who need to finish _promptly_ each day to put their kids to bed. They want their pound of flesh in exchange for a high salary and ability to add "Worked at FAANG" on their CV. If you have the time and dedication to grind leetcode for months the you've passed their requirement.

> FAANG want dedicated engineers who don't have the distraction of family and/or sick relatives. This is hilariously out of touch. Most of the FAANG people I know have kids. Nearly all of their managers have families. The one person I know who has two special needs kids specifically sought out a FAANG job for the stability, compensation, and work life balance it afforded.

Yeah, this sounds more like a late-00s startup mentality than anything else. Maybe the FAANGs were this once upon a time, but nowadays they are firmly in "stable grownup job" territory.

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

#348

Post by remich »

slt2021 wrote: post #201
pavlov wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which raises the question of why do the other kind of interview at all. I mean the leetcode nonsense whose end state is often a theatrical performance: “I’m pretending to invent this clever algorithm on the fly although I’ve practiced it for weeks”. Is there any evidence that candidates who do well on design interviews but fumble on leetcode would be any worse at the actual job?

Leetcode is simply testing whether you studied Computer Science, took Data Structures & Algorithms course, and read the CLR book on algos and practices it. Nothing else. This is really freshman level cs work. very simple. people who cannot leetcode - a simple data structures & algorithms inteview - cannot understand runtime nuances of what they write. This is how you end up with N+1 algorithms and exponential runtime…

You don't need to be good at leetcode to make a performant and well written frontend. You don't even need to know data structures, algorithms, or Big O notation.

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

#349

Post by kaashif »

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.

This is incorrect. If my income and expenses both increase by 10x, my savings increase by 10x. After just a few years of saving, I have the option of moving somewhere cheaper and living like a king.

It's not like your savings and investments are adjusted for the cost of living when you move.

In the extreme case, you can earn as much as possible and accumulate enough to live on indefinitely in a cheap country. This is obviously better than just earning a low salary in the cheap country for the same amount of time.

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

#350

Post by slt2021 »

kaashif wrote: post #349
ryandrake wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is incorrect. If my income and expenses both increase by 10x, my savings increase by 10x. After just a few years of saving, I have the option of moving somewhere cheaper and living like a king. It's not like your savings and investments are adjusted for the cost of living when you move. In the extreme case, you can earn as much as possible and accumulate enough to live on indefinitely in a cheap country. This is…

if your income 10x and you are on the wage - then that means you are either will have to work 10x more hours - or work 10x more intensively/efficiently, which leads to its own burnout and issues.

main point being is that if your income doubles, your savings rate will double, but your work related stress will double, and arguably your health (mental and physical) will deteriorate at 2x faster rate

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