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Leaving Apple Inc
- jorblumesea 9y agoIt's not Apple, very few employees get the career growth they want internally. Almost always raises and advancements happen by leaving and coming back (or not). Good luck! Enjoy your time off.
- ShannonChenCHN 9y agoGood point, but making changes is not bad, right?
- humanrebar 9y agoAnd, to be fair, only exceptional organizations let you keep pace with your experience both in responsibility and in salary. It's much more typical for advancement to come through political moves and/or attrition (your boss quits, you're the backup, so now you're the boss).
- notacoward 9y ago> It's much more typical for advancement to come through political moves and/or attrition (your boss quits, you're the backup, so now you're the boss). Therefore, making your boss want to quit is an effective career strategy. The more ruthless you are, the more likely you are to advance. Over time, the upper echelons get filled with sociopaths. That's not theory, BTW. I've seen it play out too many times.
- eljimmy 10y agoCurious why you quit before securing a new job elsewhere? Did you just want some time off work?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sumoboy 9y agoI'd guess a poor performance review getting kicked to the curb. The mediocre skills to move internally seem about right why he never got an engineering gig.
- minimaxir 9y agoOP here: Time off is a genuine plus (I haven't taken a real vacation in the past 5 years), but I do legitimately need more time to focus on interviewing/networking.
- jkarneges 9y agoPersonally, I take time off between jobs as a rule. After childhood, it's the only way breaks over 3 weeks are possible. This assumes demand for engineers is still high. It's been awhile since I've done this.
- funnyfacts365 9y agoMove to the EU where 4 weeks vacation is the rule?
- vetinari 9y agoNot in one lump, though.
- Kurtz79 9y agoIt is definitely possible in some countries/companies. Using "EU" as a blanket term is misleading, as always.
- amyjess 9y agoCertainly in Sweden, where virtually the entire country takes off the month of July.
- funnyfacts365 9y agoOr France, in August...
- kk_cz 9y agoWhy not? It depends on your agreement with employer. In my previous work I had a colleague who used to vanish to Himalayas for at least a month every year.
- vetinari 9y agoAs you said, it depends on your agreement with the employer. It's not given by the law. By the same token, you can have 4 or more weeks of vacation in the US - if the employer agrees. In practice, most of the employees do not even ask for 4 weeks at one. Most of them want a week during Christmas, a week during winter for skying, a week in the summer, etc. In some cases, the company can make you to take mandatory vacation at the time when they need it, and of course it is taken out of your four weeks. Car makers, for example, often shut down the entire plant in the summer and everyone gets their vacation then. So the vacation time is not that clear-cut, not even in EU.
- aakilfernandes 10y agoBeen excellent seeing your posts on here and Reddit over the past few years. Best of luck!
- mattnewton 9y ago> However, after a few years, I realized that my technical skill growth was stalling, so I looked for an an internal transfer to another department, ideally in a data analysis/software engineering role. > Having received no responses internally, I realized I would have to expand my search to outside of Apple. I literally just went through this exact same process, coming from Apple, and looking for Machine Learning/ Data scientist roles. Only people hiring internally wanted graduate degree credentials in the field. I hope you find what you are looking for! Some time off to work on side projects to skill up and get a portfolio was my plan A before I accepted an offer. It worries me as a shareholder though.. These are just anecdotes and I don't know if they actually represent a trend, but in my case I wish Apple was better about internal transfers. Edit: you are living the dream and I am definitely going to follow this blog to vicariously learn. Congrats on having the balls to just do it.
- jjtheblunt 9y agoIdentical story for me : left Apple after >6 yrs in hardware, parallelizing optimizing compiler history, excellent reviews, impossible to find transfers internally to leverage grad experience, and internal rules were forcing stagnation, so I left, and don't regret it, though believe in Apple long term too.
- mattnewton 9y agoI really want Apple to succeed. My experience was they genuinely had their hearts in the right place and I want to be able to buy high-quality, privacy-conscious hardware and software, something of a rarity these days.
- mercurysmessage 9y agoI'm not so certain that Apple is as privacy conscious as they are touting themselves to be. Apple still collects data from it's users.
- mattnewton 9y ago
- arcanus 9y agoCurious if you considered getting a Masters in data science or a related technical field, when you found that an impediment to your preferred career path.
- shubhamjain 9y ago> At the end of my senior year, I received an e-mail from a Software QA Manager at Apple (who followed my comments at the bottom of TechCrunch articles) inviting me for an on-site interview. Can anyone tell me how common is it in the Bay Area to get opportunities based on your online presence? In India, I have seen that being well connected on LinkedIn is the most significant factor in getting contacted by technical recruiters. Although, blogs and projects are nice to have, but doesn't necessarily mean you'll have more offers on hand.
- snewk 9y agonot in the bay area, but a US startup where i once worked found quite a few candidates by scouring stackoverflow and contacting people who consistently gave valuable responses.
- eropple 9y agoNot in the Bay, because I like being able to afford living, but in Boston--and probably a solid 10-15% of my business as a consultant comes from Hacker News posts. Not just devops stuff, either; not too long ago I consulted on something much more general software-dev after being noticed with a one-off post about something or other.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoNot in the Bay, because I like being able to afford living Nice. There are times, when things are in one of their gross phases here, that that is literally the only reason I stick around. Nice. Arg, I was going to engage, but just... whatever. Ok yeah, it's impossible to live in the bay, HN is gross and only valuable for money, the world sucks. Sorry, it's not even you. It's just this running joke of dissing on HN in passing (not even a solid critique or actionable complaint) that's getting a bit old. It seems like a common sentiment, but I know this is just randomness/selection bias doing its thing. But it's slightly frustrating when the disses are sandwiched around the substance, so there's no way to even respond to them without by definition being off-topic. So you end up getting a free, cheap shot. Anecdotally, the mods work their butts off, so if there's something specific that you're hoping will change, they're more than willing to listen. Especially if the community starts collectively nodding in agreement. Though usually it's better to express this in a tangentially-related topic.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kevlar1818 9y ago> I still intend to continue blogging, not as a hobby but in a more purposeful way... > ... > Data analysis live-streaming with augmented functionality on Twitch. No thank you.
- nstj 9y agoTell him what you really think! I'd hope that anyone putting themselves out there in a manner such as the OP did and in a forum of some of their most respected peers would be treated with grace.
- nindalf 9y agoIf you're going to criticise, at least provide him with more substantial feedback. A "no thank you" doesn't help him, but explaining why livestreaming isn't your cup of tea would be better. If you think that no, you don't have the time to type out a full sentence like "sorry, I prefer screencasts that have fluff edited out" or "I prefer text because the information density is much higher", then maybe you should say nothing at all.
- minimaxir 9y agoOP here: What did you have in mind? I myself am not a fan of the layouts typically popular for games (see: https://twitter.com/badlayouts https://twitter.com/badlayouts), which is why I have a few different things in mind.
- Animats 9y agoA training video, full-screen of the program, with voice-over, might be more useful. For something like that, the user needs to be able to read the text on screen. We don't need to see a talking head.
- kevlar1818 9y agoTo respond to all the comments below: You're right. My response was not helpful and I should not have responded. This sort of thing is simply "not my cup of tea", and I was not adding to the conversation. May this be a reminder to myself and others that this place is not Reddit. (That's a good thing.)
- easilyBored 9y agoI am now actively looking for a data analyst/software engineering job within San Francisco. If you are interested or if you know of companies who are looking for qualified people, please send me an email He's probably worth more to a company if he works in marketing. What a brilliant way to market himself.
- puranjay 9y agoI haven't ever read his blog or followed him online, but the moment I landed on the site, saw his name and picture, I recognized him immediately - "Hey, that's the Max Woolf from TechCrunch comments!" I remember about 4-5 years ago when you couldn't read a single TechCrunch article without a witty comment from Max. He even mentions how he got interviews after someone found his comments on TechCrunch. Max is a very smart marketer with strong communication skills. IMO, he would be more of an asset in a role that leveraged these skills along with his technical knowledge
- hkmurakami 9y agoDeveloper evangelist?
- puranjay 9y agoI'm thinking more of a growth focused role where he can use data science + copy/content.
- etnos 9y agoThe real bummer here, is that this happens in every single major company. For the most part, to get a career jump you need to go look somewhere else other than you actual company.
- johnwheeler 9y agoI love the way you format your py code. clean and super easy to read. https://github.com/minimaxir/facebook-page-post-scraper/blob/master/get_fb_posts_fb_group.py https://github.com/minimaxir/facebook-page-post-scraper/blob...
- dirtyaura 9y agoIt seems pretty standard to me. Curious, what is there that you especially like? I only noticed a couple things that is different from what I usually see (and write): - newline after function declarations - assigments with `= x if pred else y` style and trailing \ formatting
- johnwheeler 9y agoMostly the liberal code spacing and the comments. I tend to omit both. I like how comments > 1 line have newlines before and after them.
- avar 9y agoThis is obviously just some guy's mostly throwaway code, but FWIW it's got the type of comments I don't find useful at all when reading code. I.e. comments that purely duplicate what can be trivially inferred from code: # retrieve data data = json.loads(request_until_succeed(url)) Not ambiguous, but better done by just naming the function in such a way that it's obvious that it's the thing retrieving the data. And: num_processed = 0 # keep a count on how many we've processed Is another example of a comment that doesn't compliment the code, but just distracts the reader from information they could equally, more accurately & more briefly have gotten from reading the corresponding code.
- gjm11 9y agoI think there's a place for the "# retrieve data" sort of comment. Suppose you're skimming rather than reading the code, either trying to get a high-level overview of what it does or looking for the particular bit of it where a particular thing happens. Then, sure, you could just read all the code; but most of us can skim-read a small quantity of text faster than a larger quantity of code. In a syntax-colouring editor it's easy to ignore everything but the comments, and if the top-level structure of what's happening is sketched in the comments that's helpful. How helpful depends, of course, on the style of the code; in particular, it gets less helpful as the length of functions/methods goes down, and in the limit of "ravioli code" where everything is decomposed into 3-line methods whose main task is calling other 3-line methods, it doesn't help at all and the sort of comment you need to help with skimming is an overview of how the pieces fit together. At the other extreme, if you have the sort of 1000-line function that's quite common in e.g. numerical code, these structure-sketching comments can be invaluable.
- ComodoHacker 9y ago>After years of building up my portfolio, it became apparent that most outside recruiters I talked with never looked at my blog/GitHub, despite a strong emphasis of both on my résumé. Interesting. Could someone with HR experience elaborate, what recruiters are actually looking at?
- theparanoid 9y agotop half of your resume's first page. I'm not joking.
- UweSchmidt 9y agonot a recruiter, but: - HR people usually won't have the technical skills needed to evaluate blog articles, let alone code on GitHub - a certain % of the recruiters is interested in a more superficial hiring process. It's about getting candidates with resumes to interviews, not about evaluating just how much machine learning expertise someone really has and how this matches with the exact problem set the client company may have. (If you now think that this means there is an opportunity for real technical recruiting, then please, go for it! Identify which programming(-related) tasks are suitable for beginners. Find exiting and rewarding work for top candidates ...)
- marsrover 9y agoI'm not a recruiter but I always ask the person interviewing me if they've looked at my personal projects and/or GitHub. The answer is usually (9 out of 10 times) no. I put a good amount of time into my personal projects and while I didn't make them only to get an interview it seems like such a huge oversight on behalf of the potential employer to not even look at what I might be able to build. It's also disappointing that they don't look.
- NTDF9 9y agoDoes anyone else feel like OP is having to do waaay too much to land a job?
- draw_down 9y agoThat, plus all the companies bellyaching about how hard it is to recruit, should tell you all you need to know about our industry.
- NTDF9 9y agoI have been pretty vocal about how retarded their hiring processes are, including on hacker news. You should see how many downvotes and comments I get from people supporting current hiring processes. I sometimes wonder if people working in these companies are genuinely deluded about how stupid their processes are.
- jccalhoun 9y agoI don't know anything about what it is like to get a job in the tech industry in the bay area but I am surprised that working at Apple for a few years doesn't make it much easier to get a job.
- wheaties 9y agoThat's because "we only hire the best." Also "we have not invested in our own hiring process so it's a total crap shoot but we aren't even cognizant of this fact."
- ryanSrich 9y agoActually no. The industry has changed a great deal in just the last 5 years. I think the days of just having Google or Apple on your resume and getting another gig are over. The only thing having a high profile company on your resume says is that you likely need a high salary. It's just cheaper to higher the new CS grad for $80k year.
- discreteevent 9y ago
- stillhere 9y agoEveryone is obsessed with being a software engineer who writes code but I love QA and all it represents. I started off as a QA and now write code but the experience made me a better engineer than virtually everyone who did not start off with QA. Trying to get a code writing job from a QA background is really hard. The developers who interview you tend to have this air of arrogance like people who started off in QA must be there because they could not write code. Actually, since I was not writing code all day I never grew tired of it and was more inspired to write programs on my own free time than them. I feel like this poor little QA with his feelings of inadequacy let the other elitist developers get to him.
- chitti_babu 9y agoI wish you the best of luck with your job search. FWIW, I would totally hire you!