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I interviewed at IBM for a position making Enterprise template apps for iPad working directly with Apple, and the main reason they said they passed on me was wh

I interviewed at IBM for a position making Enterprise template apps for iPad working directly with Apple, and the main reason they said they passed on me was while I had a good amount of Objective-C experience, I had only dabbled with Swift on my spare time and had difficulty answering a couple of the questions they grilled me on in Swift. They specifically said I should have had more professional Swift experience when they rejected me. Of course all the companies I worked for were being more conservative and hadn't yet made the leap to Swift yet, so getting that professional experience was pretty much impossible. But I guess if anyone can afford to be picky, it's IBM on a project working directly with Apple. So yeah, IBM is definitely gung-ho about Swift. Apple itself, possibly less so.

xenihn 10y ago
Just curious, what were some of the Swift questions?
- cableshaft 10y ago
  I don't remember most of the questions. I do remember being asked about basic things regarding optionals, about how it handles exceptions (Swift 2 had been announced like a week before the interview and changed how it did exceptions entirely to try-catch blocks, and I answered that, but then they were like "okay, how about in Swift 1", and I blanked, even though I put them into the toy app I was doing). Another was something like "In Swift, what are higher-order functions?", which I somehow only heard that term a couple of times before and didn't have fresh in my head, despite using higher-order functions in plenty of programming languages (C#, Python, Ruby, even in Objective-C). That one was a case of knowing the concept but not the term. I believe those two questions were the main ones that lead to the rejection, because I stumbled and didn't come across as confident there, but was otherwise pretty calm and answered the other questions well. I was in and out of there in 45 minutes, talked to one person who quizzed me on the names of UI objects on a given screen, and then the pop-quiz-style interview with two other people. I also stupidly didn't show them the app I had partially built in Swift, even though I brought an iPad with me. I think I even mentioned it, and they're like "You have it here?" and I said "It's not finished..." and they just started asking me more questions. It was a working puzzle game, but some of the logic for clearing matches was wonky at the time and was visibly broken so I was hesitant to show it.
fail2fail2ban 10y ago
IBM advertises jobs yet when qualified people show up, they are rejected. Either it's a way to look like they are reaching out to the public to satisfy the government so they can then go hire outside the US; or it's a way to let insiders get those positions after the applying public are rejected, all IMO. When I was in there, 99.999% of the people I met came in through acquisitions, not applying for a job and getting hired.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  A recruiter for IBM contacted me, actually. I didn't respond to an ad.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
koder2016 10y ago
They pretty much said you should've been on the Apple's Swift language development team :). I mean, the shit is like only 2 years old.

xenihn 10y ago

Just curious, what were some of the Swift questions?

cableshaft 10y ago
I don't remember most of the questions. I do remember being asked about basic things regarding optionals, about how it handles exceptions (Swift 2 had been announced like a week before the interview and changed how it did exceptions entirely to try-catch blocks, and I answered that, but then they were like "okay, how about in Swift 1", and I blanked, even though I put them into the toy app I was doing). Another was something like "In Swift, what are higher-order functions?", which I somehow only heard that term a couple of times before and didn't have fresh in my head, despite using higher-order functions in plenty of programming languages (C#, Python, Ruby, even in Objective-C). That one was a case of knowing the concept but not the term. I believe those two questions were the main ones that lead to the rejection, because I stumbled and didn't come across as confident there, but was otherwise pretty calm and answered the other questions well. I was in and out of there in 45 minutes, talked to one person who quizzed me on the names of UI objects on a given screen, and then the pop-quiz-style interview with two other people. I also stupidly didn't show them the app I had partially built in Swift, even though I brought an iPad with me. I think I even mentioned it, and they're like "You have it here?" and I said "It's not finished..." and they just started asking me more questions. It was a working puzzle game, but some of the logic for clearing matches was wonky at the time and was visibly broken so I was hesitant to show it.

fail2fail2ban 10y ago

IBM advertises jobs yet when qualified people show up, they are rejected. Either it's a way to look like they are reaching out to the public to satisfy the government so they can then go hire outside the US; or it's a way to let insiders get those positions after the applying public are rejected, all IMO. When I was in there, 99.999% of the people I met came in through acquisitions, not applying for a job and getting hired.

cableshaft 10y ago
A recruiter for IBM contacted me, actually. I didn't respond to an ad.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

koder2016 10y ago

They pretty much said you should've been on the Apple's Swift language development team :). I mean, the shit is like only 2 years old.