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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

#391

Post by kaashif »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #375
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.

I often ask for them to version control and send me a zip of the git repo, so I can look at commit histories. Yes, they can fake that, sure, but I can normally tell a lot about a dev from that, and actually if I see 4-5 commits over an hour perhaps with some wrong turns, that pushes the candidate up in my estimation than somebody with 1-2 commits that don't tell a story, but does show a complete solution - which is m…

When I'm actually writing code and hashing out a solution over the course of a single hour in my job, I'm not going to commit the wrong turns.

What you're really asking for is a candidate to spend extra time inventing a convincing git history.

I really think the only way this actually works is if the problem is on a page which you can only view after you start a timer or something.

Or do it on site and watch them.

This is all high pressure but if you really want to time box, there can't be a way around it.

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

#392

Post by kaashif »

deckard1 wrote: post #386
gretch wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 li…

> Cupertino is ... a lot of hour drives away from everything? London or Tokyo it is not. > Maybe they live in a "shitbox fixer", maybe they don't. I was being rather generous at $2M on a $300k salary. Let's just assume the spouse makes that much too. Where do you place the odds of getting a nice house at, in that area? Of a similar quality that would run around $200-400k in the rest of the country. It's the suburbs.…

> You're just planning for some tomorrow that usually never comes for most people.

That's odd, my impression is that a lot of people go to the Bay, save a lot, then leave.

Do we have any statistics on this?

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

#393

Post by jen20 »

comprev wrote: post #254
fnands wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cynical part of thinks that that might be a feature, not a bug.

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.

This certainly does not match my FAANG experience.

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

#395

Post by woobilicious »

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…

But you can't do any of this and expect to get recognized.

No ones gonna hire you because you spent a decade and have a half finished game engine written Haskell.

All of that freedom is fake and some even in contradiction with each other.

You cannot take your time, or you pick a larger scope project, you will eventually run out of savings, or get questions from family members about why your job search is taking so long.

If you filter out everything but smaller scope projects then you have a far smaller subset of projects that aren't as unique because everyone else has done them. If you just graduated from University, you lack experience with project management and as the saying goes, write what you know, and so that'll limit yourself to video games or web and that one niche subject you took at Uni.

This advice feels like what you would get from a rock-star who was young and stupid and naive and very lucky telling a kid that if he just makes music and sticks it out he'll get scouted by a record label, When in reality he just was lucky enough to market pop-derivative music at gigs, while not realizing the kid likes to make music from sampled traffic noise and his favorite album is Music for Airports.

This is a high risk endeavour and you either need to make conscious decisions that mitigate risk heavily and are compatible with your personality, and the end goal of being financially secure.

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

#396

Post by hnfong »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #377
didibus wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even earlier than I thought. It be interesting to know when the practice started, by what company and all the history behind it. But it does seem like it's been around a long time at this point.

As described in that book, definitely Google. I wouldn’t be surprised if the canonical coding interview as we know it today started at Google, but there is also the infamous technique used by Joel Spolesky, FitBizz or something like that.

I interviewed for Google in 2007. Got asked a bunch of typical coding questions, which some people might label "leetcode style", but they were questions you'd see in 1st/2nd year CS homework assignments.

But then, one interviewer asked about a graph theory problem which the first step was to first find all the strongly connected components and group them to one, and then required a couple more non-obvious proofs of specific properties of the graph to get to the solution. Definitely significantly harder than the typical "leetcode hard" questions.

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

#397

Post by hnfong »

inparen wrote: post #85

This is n = 1. What is usual hiring process followed at apple ? If everyone start practicing leetcode and similar questions used in interview, then whole filtering talent process seems moot.

There's no "usual" hiring process at Apple, at least for the technical questions asked there isn't. There's generally no centralized hiring process.

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

#398

Post by 4m1rk »

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.

With the current significant amount of noise on the supply side, there's no alternative for them. Even the finest resumes can't replace the confidence you receive from an existing experience. This experience could come from collaborating with someone previously or observing a well-executed job done by them.

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

#399

Post by teunispeters »

returningfory2 wrote: post #315
sjf wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!!

All my GH contributions have been to private/corporate work. sigh yet another barrier. All my contributions before that were before github existed. Since then, I don't know what to work on in public as it's not actually that obvious where to find interesting problems when web is not one's domain. But I guess that's the perils of being an older programmer.
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