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Much of this seems to be asking questions about things the candidate has experience in? We don't know what either job they applied for was nor what was on their

Much of this seems to be asking questions about things the candidate has experience in? We don't know what either job they applied for was nor what was on their CV.

dan-robertson 6y ago
Yeah strongly agree with this. I suspect there is missing context in the tweet. It might have been that the position was something like “engineer on some language runtime/compilers team,” or that the candidates cv had a bunch of stuff about low level python/c++ implementation details. Another reasonable hypothesis is that the candidate was just very strong and kept getting asked more questions. Eg maybe they are asked some question about c++ semantics or stl and this develops into discussing details of vtables and suchlike. Or maybe they are asked a general question about python performance and this develops in the expected direction towards discussion of the GIL, and then further into discussion of other runtime details. It feels totally random that there’s some discussion of tail recursion next to knapsack problem. That feels to me like eg the candidate or interviewer makes some reference to it and there’s some discussion, rather than the interview being about tail recursion. Similarly, maybe the interview was maybe about 0/1 knapsack but the candidate solved it faster than expected and discussion moved on to fractional knapsack and then random time fillers. Also note that there’s a few points where there isn’t much discussion. Maybe a different candidate could have had a lot more interesting things to say about the system design question about ratelimiters. Maybe I’m wrong and this is illustrative of Apple’s minimum standards, but I would guess that it’s some very strong candidate who’s doing a lot of technical interviews and writing down experiences.
0x008 6y ago
Came here to say this. Despite everyone being like "oh my god it is so much skill needed for a junior position", we should be asking ourselves if that was maybe because the application had an exceptional CV? From the twitter post it seems like most of what they asked during the 4hours was something the application had proficient experience in. Seems like a rather comfortable experience?
- stu2b50 6y ago
  >Seems like a rather comfortable experience? Indeed, people are freaking out about it, but honestly going down your resume and elaborating on each piece sounds like heaven compared to fast paced white board coding challenges.

Much of this seems to be asking questions about things the candidate has experience in? We don't know what either job they applied for was nor what was on their CV.

dan-robertson 6y ago

Yeah strongly agree with this. I suspect there is missing context in the tweet. It might have been that the position was something like “engineer on some language runtime/compilers team,” or that the candidates cv had a bunch of stuff about low level python/c++ implementation details. Another reasonable hypothesis is that the candidate was just very strong and kept getting asked more questions. Eg maybe they are asked some question about c++ semantics or stl and this develops into discussing details of vtables and suchlike. Or maybe they are asked a general question about python performance and this develops in the expected direction towards discussion of the GIL, and then further into discussion of other runtime details. It feels totally random that there’s some discussion of tail recursion next to knapsack problem. That feels to me like eg the candidate or interviewer makes some reference to it and there’s some discussion, rather than the interview being about tail recursion. Similarly, maybe the interview was maybe about 0/1 knapsack but the candidate solved it faster than expected and discussion moved on to fractional knapsack and then random time fillers. Also note that there’s a few points where there isn’t much discussion. Maybe a different candidate could have had a lot more interesting things to say about the system design question about ratelimiters. Maybe I’m wrong and this is illustrative of Apple’s minimum standards, but I would guess that it’s some very strong candidate who’s doing a lot of technical interviews and writing down experiences.

0x008 6y ago

Came here to say this. Despite everyone being like "oh my god it is so much skill needed for a junior position", we should be asking ourselves if that was maybe because the application had an exceptional CV? From the twitter post it seems like most of what they asked during the 4hours was something the application had proficient experience in. Seems like a rather comfortable experience?

stu2b50 6y ago
>Seems like a rather comfortable experience? Indeed, people are freaking out about it, but honestly going down your resume and elaborating on each piece sounds like heaven compared to fast paced white board coding challenges.