10 ms·

Apple Interview – 1995

238 points by iloverss 4y ago

sylens 4y ago
I really enjoyed this read. The author printing out his source code so he could have a physical artifact signifying the end of the journey for that game really resonated with me for some reason.
de6u99er 4y ago
Thank you so much for sharing.
kblev 4y ago
Funny how I'm reading this on an app called Glider
iloverss 4y ago
An ex-engineer recounts how they got a job at Apple in the 90's.
- smilespray 4y ago
  There are no ex-engineers, only recovering ones.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
>I should pause here and point out that an interview at Apple was an all-day affair. Pairs of engineers would meet with and interview me for perhaps an hour. The first pair of engineers might grill me on some esoteric topic like code design, afterwards the next pair of engineers would sit down and maybe cover programming language specific questions. This took place in 1995, and sounds pretty much exactly like a technical interview panel today. Were people similarly disgruntled about the process back then? The author certainly doesn’t come across that way.
- zerr 4y ago
  The content is the key difference - doesn't require months of leetcode grinding.
- notakio 4y ago
  I went through the Apple interview process in 2006, and would say that my experience was definitely not predominantly a "technical interview panel". It was an all-day event, to which they had flown me in to do, and though I was asked technical questions by some of the interviewers, many of them were more interested in how I handled stress, or solved "political issues". A couple of them were more interested in answering any questions I had about what working in the group was like, in a way trying to let me know what I was in for if I got the position. I got the position, and stayed there for 8 years. I remain relatively close to about 30% of the people that interviewed me to this day, and that concern for letting me know what I was signing up for was genuine. The stress of the job was at times pretty high, and keeping a cool head under circumstances where everything was going wrong was absolutely critical. I saw a number of people who came after me, leave before me for that very reason. Since then, I've walked out of interviews where I felt like they were wasting my time. But I've also often had the luxury of not really needing the jobs I've applied for, generally, so other people's mileage may vary widely. It's the employer's job to figure out whether you're a good fit for the position, but it is the potential employee's job to figure out whether you want the position in the first place. Being able to get an accurate read on what you're thinking about going into (and spending a sizable chunk of your daily life doing) can save you a world of hurt.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  No, people were not. What changed is the demand grew enormously and in response, as in every other business of life, a lot of people who only have passing interest in it got into it because it pays well. So now you have companies have to sort through huge pile of mediocre candidates. This causes the process to be very noisy, a lot of screwed incentives and a lot of false positives and negatives. Applicants are now hedging their bets and applying to multiple places means that they are unwilling to spend entire day in each one. And companies (those that do not understand how important hiring is) also have incentives to spend less effort on hiring. And developers became much more cynical. Partly because of high demand they are aware of. Partly because companies do not treat them well (like not giving raises at a rate their potential salary is appreciating as the market and their experience changes). And partly because new generations are just much more disillusioned. I had a person recently refuse to come to 2h interview. Apparently it was too much effort. Good riddance and thank you for saving my time. Good news is that good developers can still easily find a good job wherever they want. Bad news is that most people are not good developers and they don't even know about it because really good developers are so few and concentrated in relatively few places. In effect, most developers will never have a chance to work with one.
morley 4y ago
> though not the cleverest engineer, [I] was one that worked quickly to prototype new ideas and took on some of the gruntwork that not every engineer wanted to work on. This is basically all I want from anyone I work with.
- ozarker 4y ago
  I’m a young engineer and I’m always happy to take on the grunt work to help the team as long as I get a little time to help on big picture stuff as well. I’m worried that I might be looked down on by more senior engineers who might think I’m just trying to avoid the more brain challenging work
  - benreesman 4y ago
    A nothing is “someone else’s problem” is hallmark of the true pros. Intermediate folks might run into a broken build and be stuck until the build team can unfsck it. The OGs just fix it. Keep up the work.
  - ptsneves 4y ago
    Very well. Grunt work is very appreciated and it not only allows you to start working without pressure it endears you to the other senior engineers as a can-do person. As they will feel grateful and released from the grunt work they might even start doing direct mentoring. They also will start to get to know you, with all the benefits it brings. That has been my experience in both professional as well as open source development.
- baxtr 4y ago
  My first manager told me: Grunt work is also work. Someone needs to do it. He was spot on. What I observe with many founders I interact with is that they want to focus on the exciting stuff. Building the product etc. Most of them don’t want to be bothered with boring stuff like financial planning, which sometimes breaks their necks.
mpetrovich 4y ago
Anyone else remember playing Glider? As a young kid, I gladly lost countless hours trying to navigate a paper airplane through a Rube Goldberg mess of obstacles. What a fun, imaginative game. Would be cool if there was an emulated version somewhere. Or we could borrow the author’s book and transcribe it to a modern language, ha.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  I think I played Glider on an educational CD-ROM perhaps, even one about air and science? Or maybe it was just a shareware disc.
- tappdarden 4y ago
  You are in luck. author open-sourced it. https://github.com/softdorothy/GliderPRO https://github.com/softdorothy/GliderPRO also glider 4.0 is there also. Along with some of his other games.
- fizfaz 4y ago
  you can play several versions at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/software?query=glider&and[]=subject%3A%22Macintosh%22 https://archive.org/details/software?query=glider&and[]=subj...
- mproud 4y ago
  Hell yes! It showed up on at least a few Shareware diskette bundles back in the day.
magic_hamster 4y ago
This was a great read. Some commenters discussed the nature of the interview, and compared it to today. But personally I get this feeling that this was still in a time when software was developed mostly in bubbles. Knowing how to code was far less obvious back then than it is today, and knowing the right stack meant you could get hired on the spot. Also, I don't know of it's nostalgia, the way it's written or something else, but it feels like a lot of engineering stories from that period have a certain sense of pioneering or discovery, while it's definitely far reduced today.
- pierrefermat1 4y ago
  I think this is just an artifact of the pioneers/total body of engineers: having the numerator stay relatively unchanged but with the denominator exploding.
- rockostrich 4y ago
  There's a recent novel by Tamara Shopsin called "LaserWriter II" [1] that gives off that "sense of pioneering or discovery" feel for all ~200 of its pages. I highly recommend it if you're looking for a quickish read. [1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii
- asah 4y ago
  can confirm all this, and more. It wasn't until the late 2000s when programming became easy enough for the mainstream and you started to see "coding camps," upwork and the like. In the mid-90s, you had crazy demand for development but needed to be a brain surgeon to get hello world to work, let alone a website to be remotely reliable. There was no automated testing, let alone CI. Source control was sometimes used, sometimes not. There were LANs but there was no "web" let alone SaaS apps - there were maybe 1,000 websites and Yahoo! listed them all in a list. It was like Product Hunt, but even smaller. You almost have to wonder how anyone learned to code? and you'd be right for asking: it mostly happened in top-20 colleges and a handful of companies. I remember showing PhDs about PKZIP and having them not believe it was possible to compress data without losing information - I had to literally show them the (rough) algorithm. Truly, it was a time of magick. (I don't miss it: the pay sucked, people treated "programmers" like crap, it was often impossible to reproduce issues, and of course you could only work in an office with dedicated hardware. Compared with today, it felt like the stone age of software development.)
coldcode 4y ago
Funny I worked there in 95-96 for half a year as a contractor (DTS), and the interviews were fairly simple, the hardest thing was looking at a page of source code and finding all the bugs. Otherwise most people knew the Mac software I had lead or worked on, so it wasn't a big deal. I left because I didn't want to be there when Apple crapped out as seemed likely. Steve came back a year after I left. Oh well, I might have stayed there for 25 years too.
honkler 4y ago
I read it as – Engineer Sneed Art dot com I'm too far down the rabbithole

238 points by iloverss 4y ago

I really enjoyed this read. The author printing out his source code so he could have a physical artifact signifying the end of the journey for that game really resonated with me for some reason.

de6u99er 4y ago

Thank you so much for sharing.

kblev 4y ago

Funny how I'm reading this on an app called Glider

iloverss 4y ago

An ex-engineer recounts how they got a job at Apple in the 90's.

smilespray 4y ago
There are no ex-engineers, only recovering ones.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

>I should pause here and point out that an interview at Apple was an all-day affair. Pairs of engineers would meet with and interview me for perhaps an hour. The first pair of engineers might grill me on some esoteric topic like code design, afterwards the next pair of engineers would sit down and maybe cover programming language specific questions. This took place in 1995, and sounds pretty much exactly like a technical interview panel today. Were people similarly disgruntled about the process back then? The author certainly doesn’t come across that way.

zerr 4y ago
The content is the key difference - doesn't require months of leetcode grinding.
notakio 4y ago
I went through the Apple interview process in 2006, and would say that my experience was definitely not predominantly a "technical interview panel". It was an all-day event, to which they had flown me in to do, and though I was asked technical questions by some of the interviewers, many of them were more interested in how I handled stress, or solved "political issues". A couple of them were more interested in answering any questions I had about what working in the group was like, in a way trying to let me know what I was in for if I got the position. I got the position, and stayed there for 8 years. I remain relatively close to about 30% of the people that interviewed me to this day, and that concern for letting me know what I was signing up for was genuine. The stress of the job was at times pretty high, and keeping a cool head under circumstances where everything was going wrong was absolutely critical. I saw a number of people who came after me, leave before me for that very reason. Since then, I've walked out of interviews where I felt like they were wasting my time. But I've also often had the luxury of not really needing the jobs I've applied for, generally, so other people's mileage may vary widely. It's the employer's job to figure out whether you're a good fit for the position, but it is the potential employee's job to figure out whether you want the position in the first place. Being able to get an accurate read on what you're thinking about going into (and spending a sizable chunk of your daily life doing) can save you a world of hurt.
twawaaay 4y ago
No, people were not. What changed is the demand grew enormously and in response, as in every other business of life, a lot of people who only have passing interest in it got into it because it pays well. So now you have companies have to sort through huge pile of mediocre candidates. This causes the process to be very noisy, a lot of screwed incentives and a lot of false positives and negatives. Applicants are now hedging their bets and applying to multiple places means that they are unwilling to spend entire day in each one. And companies (those that do not understand how important hiring is) also have incentives to spend less effort on hiring. And developers became much more cynical. Partly because of high demand they are aware of. Partly because companies do not treat them well (like not giving raises at a rate their potential salary is appreciating as the market and their experience changes). And partly because new generations are just much more disillusioned. I had a person recently refuse to come to 2h interview. Apparently it was too much effort. Good riddance and thank you for saving my time. Good news is that good developers can still easily find a good job wherever they want. Bad news is that most people are not good developers and they don't even know about it because really good developers are so few and concentrated in relatively few places. In effect, most developers will never have a chance to work with one.

morley 4y ago

> though not the cleverest engineer, [I] was one that worked quickly to prototype new ideas and took on some of the gruntwork that not every engineer wanted to work on. This is basically all I want from anyone I work with.

ozarker 4y ago
I’m a young engineer and I’m always happy to take on the grunt work to help the team as long as I get a little time to help on big picture stuff as well. I’m worried that I might be looked down on by more senior engineers who might think I’m just trying to avoid the more brain challenging work
- benreesman 4y ago
  A nothing is “someone else’s problem” is hallmark of the true pros. Intermediate folks might run into a broken build and be stuck until the build team can unfsck it. The OGs just fix it. Keep up the work.
- ptsneves 4y ago
  Very well. Grunt work is very appreciated and it not only allows you to start working without pressure it endears you to the other senior engineers as a can-do person. As they will feel grateful and released from the grunt work they might even start doing direct mentoring. They also will start to get to know you, with all the benefits it brings. That has been my experience in both professional as well as open source development.
baxtr 4y ago
My first manager told me: Grunt work is also work. Someone needs to do it. He was spot on. What I observe with many founders I interact with is that they want to focus on the exciting stuff. Building the product etc. Most of them don’t want to be bothered with boring stuff like financial planning, which sometimes breaks their necks.

mpetrovich 4y ago

Anyone else remember playing Glider? As a young kid, I gladly lost countless hours trying to navigate a paper airplane through a Rube Goldberg mess of obstacles. What a fun, imaginative game. Would be cool if there was an emulated version somewhere. Or we could borrow the author’s book and transcribe it to a modern language, ha.

Apocryphon 4y ago
I think I played Glider on an educational CD-ROM perhaps, even one about air and science? Or maybe it was just a shareware disc.
tappdarden 4y ago
You are in luck. author open-sourced it. https://github.com/softdorothy/GliderPRO https://github.com/softdorothy/GliderPRO also glider 4.0 is there also. Along with some of his other games.
fizfaz 4y ago
you can play several versions at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/software?query=glider&and[]=subject%3A%22Macintosh%22 https://archive.org/details/software?query=glider&and[]=subj...
mproud 4y ago
Hell yes! It showed up on at least a few Shareware diskette bundles back in the day.

magic_hamster 4y ago

This was a great read. Some commenters discussed the nature of the interview, and compared it to today. But personally I get this feeling that this was still in a time when software was developed mostly in bubbles. Knowing how to code was far less obvious back then than it is today, and knowing the right stack meant you could get hired on the spot. Also, I don't know of it's nostalgia, the way it's written or something else, but it feels like a lot of engineering stories from that period have a certain sense of pioneering or discovery, while it's definitely far reduced today.

pierrefermat1 4y ago
I think this is just an artifact of the pioneers/total body of engineers: having the numerator stay relatively unchanged but with the denominator exploding.
rockostrich 4y ago
There's a recent novel by Tamara Shopsin called "LaserWriter II" [1] that gives off that "sense of pioneering or discovery" feel for all ~200 of its pages. I highly recommend it if you're looking for a quickish read. [1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii
asah 4y ago
can confirm all this, and more. It wasn't until the late 2000s when programming became easy enough for the mainstream and you started to see "coding camps," upwork and the like. In the mid-90s, you had crazy demand for development but needed to be a brain surgeon to get hello world to work, let alone a website to be remotely reliable. There was no automated testing, let alone CI. Source control was sometimes used, sometimes not. There were LANs but there was no "web" let alone SaaS apps - there were maybe 1,000 websites and Yahoo! listed them all in a list. It was like Product Hunt, but even smaller. You almost have to wonder how anyone learned to code? and you'd be right for asking: it mostly happened in top-20 colleges and a handful of companies. I remember showing PhDs about PKZIP and having them not believe it was possible to compress data without losing information - I had to literally show them the (rough) algorithm. Truly, it was a time of magick. (I don't miss it: the pay sucked, people treated "programmers" like crap, it was often impossible to reproduce issues, and of course you could only work in an office with dedicated hardware. Compared with today, it felt like the stone age of software development.)

coldcode 4y ago

Funny I worked there in 95-96 for half a year as a contractor (DTS), and the interviews were fairly simple, the hardest thing was looking at a page of source code and finding all the bugs. Otherwise most people knew the Mac software I had lead or worked on, so it wasn't a big deal. I left because I didn't want to be there when Apple crapped out as seemed likely. Steve came back a year after I left. Oh well, I might have stayed there for 25 years too.

honkler 4y ago

I read it as – Engineer Sneed Art dot com I'm too far down the rabbithole