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At the risk of sounding like Stockholm Syndrome, why is this hilarious? If you want to work at a top tech company, the bar is much higher. First round question
by trinovantes 6y ago
At the risk of sounding like Stockholm Syndrome, why is this hilarious? If you want to work at a top tech company, the bar is much higher.
First round questions cover standard CS undergrad curriculum and second round covers the depth of his background. I'd say he's lucky his second round is tailored towards his (presumably Python) background instead of his interviewer's background. Other than the question about HTTP2/1.1, nothing seem too absurd.
- akmarinov 6y agoWith this kind of knowledge why be a junior at Apple when you can be a senior somewhere else and presumably be better compensated?
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoBecause most companies view seniority as a function of your domain experience, not your broad knowledge of generic CS, so you won't be considered for Senior positions without the right amount of experience.
- kiallmacinnes 6y agoMost likely because they[1] wouldn't get a senior job elsewhere. "Senior" has only a little to do with technical experience, and a lot to do with what could generally be bucketed into "work experience". [1]: I'm talking in general, not about this specific person :)
- throw14082020 6y agoI've also found salary is not tied to interview difficulty. I've got really high job offers easily (3 hour on-site), and struggled to get the low paid ones because they're technical interview process is difficult/ boring (8 hour project work). Having said that, I think its more common to find higher salary paying jobs to be more selective/ difficult.
- tester34 6y agoI don't think this is a "senior level knowledge" Seniority comes mostly from experience 5/10 years Of course some companies give senior titles for people with 2-3 years of xp, but I think we can all agree that this is big "XD"
- akmarinov 6y agoSeniority based on time spent in the field is also a “XD”, though.
- tester34 6y agoOf course it's not perfect. If there was perfect proxy for good people then $BIG_TECH would pay barrow of money for this. 10 years of experience says that person probably have seen a lot of software / projects / decisions and stuff. Of course you could maintain one system for 10 years and struggle in new environment, but also there's difference between maintaining CRUD app for 10 years vs maintaining Linux kernel
- whatshisface 6y agoFor technical experience it's not a good indicator, for interpersonal experience it's spot on. It's easy to avoid doing anything technically difficult, but interpersonal situations arise unavoidably at a set rate, providing experience that you can't accelerate by having a weekend coding hobby.
- glintik 6y agoLots of questions are definitely for Senior level engineers or even devops, i.e. - "HTTP 2 vs HTTP 1.1". There is nothing useful for junior level developer to know the difference of such low level things. Anyway, junior engineer will have no chance to decide what HTTP protocol to use in his project in Apple. Another example - "NodeJS event loop internals". Nothing useful for junior, senior level+ is assumed, if you want squeeze out of maximum performance from NodeJS V8.
- tester34 6y ago
- danielscrubs 6y agoThe market has already spoken. Why would Apple settle for less when they don’t have to?
- ganstyles 6y agoYou're conflating "settle for less" with "knows more broad trivia."
- danielscrubs 6y agoDon’t you think the interviewer knows more about the job than the interviewees? Even if this might hurt our ego from time to time, it’s up to them.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoThis was for an entry level job at apple
- itsdrewmiller 6y agoIs that documented somewhere? The applicant clearly has presented at Pycon which doesn't seem likely for an entry level candidate.
- TheCoelacanth 6y agoApple probably pays more for a junior role than companies that would give a senior role to someone with no experience pay for a senior role.
- cnap 6y agoBecause most of the good free software hasn't been written by people at top tech companies. Because many people who pass these interviews write bad software.
- oblio 6y agoI'd consider RedHat a top tech company. And FAANG all contribute a fair chunk to FOSS.
- ryanbrunner 6y agoI think one thing to keep in mind is that this probably highly selects for "jack-of-all-trades" candidates while rejecting candidates that might have more knowledge / expertise in a particular area, when most likely the job is only going to require specialization in some of those areas. I'll discount the second interview since that seems heavily prompted from the interviewee's experience, but the first interview asks pretty in-depth questions (for a junior) in both C++ and web development. Chances are, developers aren't being hired to work on both - so why not focus on one or the other, rather than potentially kick great web developers out of the process because they don't know much C++ (or vice versa)?
- nonameiguess 6y agoI think this is the opposite of how FAANG or FAANG-like companies treat the hiring of SWEs. They don't want people to specialize in any particular area. They want engineers who can be freely moved to whatever product line or team has a need for years to come, possibly working on fairly greenfield stuff that nobody has pre-existing expertise on. But deep knowledge of the fundamentals of computing and software engineering are non-negotiable. They're looking to build a maximally deep bench even if you don't meet a specific immediate need they have. It's sort of like the dichotomy you see in pro sports draft philosophies, where some teams focus quite specifically on finding players who fill existing holes in the current roster and some teams just try to draft the most talented person possible even if they can't figure out what to do with them right away.
- _qulr 6y agoThe sports analogy is not great, because tech companies can't trade engineers to fill a need, and there are no multi-year contracts, so any engineer can quit at any time. There's also no hard industry-wide salary cap. With the salary cap, the best way to maximize your overall team performance is to get superstars under contract when they're young and underpaid, because a team can only afford a few veteran superstars. Also, sports teams have a hard roster limit, whereas big tech companies can hire as many employees as they like. The analogy breaks down in so many ways.
- ThePadawan 6y ago> First round questions cover standard CS undergrad curriculum Hard disagree. Out of the four bullet points, 1 and 3 are standard CS, but 2 and 4 are hands-on programming and engineering topics that you don't get from college. 5% of graduates might know about all these details, 95% won't. Of course that's fair if you want to be selective.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 908B64B197 6y agoA serious C++ course or embedded dev class should cover 2.
- ThePadawan 6y agoNeither of those were not part of my core curriculum (and IIRC, mostly taught at the EE department).