24 ms·

Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode

300 points by aheze 3y ago

dustincoates 3y ago
This is a great post, and it's good to hear from someone who is doing great things so early. I know HN is often down in self taught or bootcamp programmers, but I'm happy to see people who willed themselves through. On this point regarding the lack of leet code at Apple versus other big tech: > Is it a coincidence that Apple was the only Big Tech company that didn’t do layoffs? Yeah, I do think it's probably a coincidence. On the whole, a higher focus on leet code in hiring is probably a negative thing, but I doubt it has such big effects as to cause layoffs.
- jpgvm 3y ago
  I do think there is a large gap between truly self taught and bootcamp programmers. Most self taught programmers have bounced through several languages, frameworks and different attempts to "crack" programming. Bootcampers in my experience have a very narrow slice of knowledge and crucially almost no understanding. This is a generalisation and I'm sure there are counter examples but by and large this has been my experience. I actually prefer hiring and working with self taught programmers especially when it comes to juniors vs CS grads. They have less bad habits usually and a stronger appetite to work things out for themselves. Though this could be just my own bias having not graduated in a CS degree, anecdata and all that.
- boppo1 3y ago
  >I do think it's probably a coincidence I dunno, I don't think the size of their cash-on-hand account is luck.
  - dustincoates 3y ago
    I was speaking about the connection between leet code in hiring and layoffs. Unless you mean that there's a connection between leet code and cash on hand is due to not using leet code in interviews, in which case I'd love to hear that theory!
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  It depens on what they did before, because a lot of the big tech companies had a hiring spree in the years preceding the mini-crash.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I don't think it's a coincidence. To my knoledge, Apple also wasn't trying to hire like crazy over the pandemic. So it's no surprise that when that "hot streak" ended they weren't affected as strongly. And as others have said, Apple does rely much more strongly on contracting than the rest of the Big Tech.
eclectic29 3y ago
This is just "one" experience, certainly not the norm. Even as an experienced engineer of 15 yrs I'd to solve leetcode (LC) style problems on the whiteboard a few yrs go. For better or worse (depending on whose perspective you see), LC allows companies to judge you based on a common framework of solving algorithmic problems using computer science fundamentals (data structures and algorithms) in a language of your choice. Obviously, the problems vary in difficulty and many are trick problems which is what makes them frustrating, but it's the unwritten sad truth of this industry and I believe it's here to stay _if_ you're vying for very high salaries.
- pocketarc 3y ago
  I think it makes sense to use LC or something like it. Is there a better way to judge the 100 random developers who've applied to your position? - They may not have formal education, you can't judge on that. - They may not have active GitHub projects, you can't judge on that. - They may not be active on social media or have any kind of fame, you can't judge on that. - They may not have built anything they can show off like this `Find` app, you can't judge on that. So what can you judge them on? LC makes that pretty simple: "can they answer some standardised questions about algorithms and data structures, showing that they have at least some basic knowledge of what's going on in computers?" It's not without downsides, but I also struggle to see a better option that can scale to the armies of devs that Amazon, Google, etc, all hire.
  - djcapelis 3y ago
    It’s simple: don’t hire devs by the army.
    - Keyframe 3y ago
      it's not as simple, but sometimes is - as anything in life. You might not be networked well (for whatever the reason) and then you have to cast a wide net or go through hiring agencies to pull in candidates.. it's still going to be an unknown group.
    - 3y ago
nvarsj 3y ago
I know senior engineers at Apple who didn’t do a single technical interview. They got the role purely through networking like the OP did. Apple is pretty unique in this regard among big tech - teams have a lot of leeway in how they hire. On the flip side, I’m fairly sure the hardware / system software teams have rigorous hiring processes.
doomlaser 3y ago
When I was an intern, we had to pay $1200 a month for corporate housing, and they put 4 of us in a 2 bedroom apartment, walking distance from IL1 in Cupertino. They also gave the 4 of us 2 bikes. Apple's cafeteria may not be free, but at least they're paying for intern housing these days.
- BossingAround 3y ago
  That's horrible. If I needed more reasons to not work for Apple, this'd have definitely been a dealbreaker for me. Of course, Apple with their forced RTO and, in general, disdain for remote work, provides many reasons for me not to work for them anyways.
  - doomlaser 3y ago
    I wouldn't take it back. It was a singular experience in my career. I learned a lot. One of the cool things they did was have monthly talks for the interns from the executives. One of these was an off the cuff talk from Steve Jobs himself.
    - Austin_Conlon 3y ago
      What did he talk about?
suyash 3y ago
Nice to read this story - congrats to OP! More of this should be the norm not just for an 'intern' role where the bar is much lower but specially for senior engineers where experience on the relevant technologies should matter more.
toyg 3y ago
As long as you're young and willing to put the work in (which is demonstrated by building things like nice apps), the software industry will always have space for you. No commitments, high stamina, inexperience in contract negotiation, willingness to believe in corporate ideals, willingness to live in corporate accomodation... what's not to like? Microsoft and Apple were the first companies to understand this truth so deeply, so I'm not surprised Apple is still into these practices. If you are young, use them to your advantage; just - please go in with eyes wide open, because the industry doesn't really have your best interest at heart and never will.
sakex 3y ago
> I haven’t been to Google, so I’m not sure, but you might actually need LeetCode to get a job there You do
- sacnoradhq 3y ago
  Partially why I cooled the jets of SRE/SRM HR teams around 2016. The Googlyness was becoming less Googly classic formula and more political, corporate, and insane.
suyash 3y ago
Side question: Is it still true that if you work at Apple, you can't be doing side projects etc? I've heard some stories rules from Big tech companies specially Apple that they restrict heavily what can and can't be done even in your free time.
- amelius 3y ago
  Are most Applers even allowed to speak in forums like this one? Did OP follow the rules?
  - loxias 3y ago
    Based on what I know of the rules (which is out of date by roughly 10 years), no, OP did not follow them.
    - amelius 3y ago
      I don't know about others, but I feel that it must suck working for a company that is so closed that you can't even express yourself normally. And this while the company still reaps the benefits of society, like the results of hundreds of years of scientific advances, and of course open source software.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - yodsanklai 3y ago
    I've always found strange that we don't hear more about Apple in the comments here (tech, working conditions...), compared to other big companies. Are they so scared about Apple that they don't dare posting on an anonymous forum?
  - aheze 3y ago
    Well I just finished my internship so I'm more or less free, as long as I don't disclose anything confidential.
- rcarmo 3y ago
BossingAround 3y ago
On the whole, it might be easier to grind LC than to create many side projects that you actually care about. This is all about one's internal motivation. For example, I don't really want to code in my free time. I have long accepted that I don't care. I don't have energy for anything but small-size side projects. I do, on the other hand, like solving puzzles, so LC is somewhat preferable to me, out of the two choices. To each their own.
- thenoblesunfish 3y ago
  Agreed. And building your own greenfield project might actually be futher sway from most people's job than learning how to solve problems in a specific style..
retskrad 3y ago
Do Apple attract the best software engineers? If I were a talented hardware engineer, chip designer, hardware designer - I'd want to work at Apple because Apple attracts the best people in these fields. I imagine that Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon get the lion share of the best software engineers. No one has ever said Apple services, like the iCloud and Apple Music backend, or Siri, are quality piece of software engineering.
- lnsru 3y ago
  Best? Probably no. But the good ones willing to have high salary for sure. The best work for niche companies where they have comparable or even better conditions. Ex colleague just rejected offer from Apple and picked 30 person very specialized company.
- thebruce87m 3y ago
  The fact that you don’t think about them probably tells a story.
  - smt88 3y ago
    Siri is the worst piece of software I'm forced to interact with daily. iOS is also near the top. GP didn't seem to be saying they didn't think about that software. They were saying they didn't have a good reputation, which is true. Apple is actually astonishingly bad at software considering the amount of money they have to do it properly. Even Google eventually got Android to a place where it's very resilient and rarely buggy, but iOS has bugs for me almost daily where I have to reboot to fix it.
    - thebruce87m 3y ago
      I have no reason to doubt you, but that does not mirror my experience. I generally don’t have to think at all about iOS. It just silently does everything I need, including backups with no fuss. The only time I have to think is every three years when I upgrade, but that has always gone seamlessly. Siri being bad is probably more to do with data collection / privacy. I’ve not looked into it, but that’s my assumption.
eternalvoyage 3y ago
I think a combination of problem solving skill and experience with some specific language and/or framework is a great option for passing interviews. On some interviews, I only had to answer leetcode like problems. On others, I was grilled on the language or framework that the job requires. And the behavioral part always depends on the context.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Is a 3 month internship considered a job? I don't think it is; it's a great booster for one's career and an opportunity to get a fulltime / permanent position, but from the employer's point of view, it's a cheap trial period.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  As a teenager, yes, certainly it is. Other teenagers have a three month job as a lifeguard, or camp counselor, etc.
- aheze 3y ago
  It was paid decently, so by definition I guess? And there was free housing, definitely cost Apple a chunk of money.
- bsuvc 3y ago
  And they will almost certainly be leetcoded once they interview for a full time position.
SilverBirch 3y ago
I think the sort of more general point, rather than "build something great that someone at Apple notices", is that Graduate and Internship programmes are scale businesses. They get thousands of people applying and will hire atleast dozens, probably some FANG are hiring hundreds. So yes, we're all special snowflakes, but that's not what this process is for. It's about harsh rounds of easy to design problems to winnow the field. This totally changes when you're a specific candidate with skills Apple values. What this guy experienced wasn't an interview process. They had already decided to hire him before what he described as the interview process. They already know he's good, he experienced the talent acquisition process. The bit that happens when the company has already decided to hire you and is now doing everything it can to sell you on the job. If someone outside of recruiting contacts you about a job at a company, you will not experience a normal interview process, because they're already quite likely to want to hire you.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  This is a weird take because the whole point of the last decade of leetcode was that people with special skills or that built something great can't even get hired. which was dumb. but reinforced the supposed uniformity of that process. I'm glad people aren’t just continuing the practice simply because they experienced the practice.
  - sdfghswe 3y ago
    > This is a weird take because the whole point of the last decade of leetcode was that people with special skills or that built something great can't even get hired. No, it looks like you're missing the point. Leetcode is not for people with special skills. It's for people with NO SKILLS other than "can code". Well if the only thing you can do is write code, you better be really good at writing code.
    - Eddygandr 3y ago
      Didn't the guy who made Homebrew fail his interview at Google because he couldn't invert a binary tree? That's a guy who has built a popular product in the wild and can clearly code but failed because of the leetcode barrier at all IC levels.
KaiserPro 3y ago
The problem is that "leetcode" is a definitely a thing that exists in "FAANG" interviews. The biggest stumbling block with leetcode is that you shouldn't be programming like that in real life. "make a linked list" no, just use a library like everyone else. "Implement addition in python but with string inputs", "no you can't use the built in x" All of that "clever" shit should be filtered out at PR/MR/diff review time. All of this "clever shit" is exceptionally bad programming. We don't live in the 80s anymore. we don't need to make our own sort algorithms. just. use. a. Library.
- dkdbejwi383 3y ago
  It also doesn't resemble "real" work with regards to gathering requirements, clarifying ambiguity, weighing up trade-offs, making sure code is clear, etc. It tends to be a rote regurgitation exercise.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    > It tends to be a rote regurgitation exercise. where there are much greater selective pressures in India and China to excel at this than there are in the US, raising this irrelevant bar to absurd territory if you value your time
  - robryan 3y ago
    A lot of places will also do a desgin interview to cover this aspect of the job.
    - pavlov 3y ago
      Which raises the question of why do the other kind of interview at all. I mean the leetcode nonsense whose end state is often a theatrical performance: “I’m pretending to invent this clever algorithm on the fly although I’ve practiced it for weeks”. Is there any evidence that candidates who do well on design interviews but fumble on leetcode would be any worse at the actual job?
      - 3y ago
sacnoradhq 3y ago
Clickbait. This isn't a FTE with TC, it's an internship. Unlike Apple, most MANGs cut internships to functionally zero. You're never going to get a corporate coding job without multiple rounds of technical interview because common sense.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  > Unlike Apple, most MANGs cut internships to functionally zero. Uh, when are they supposed to have done that?
  - sacnoradhq 3y ago
    "Supposedly?" Because it happened around the time of layoffs and widespread cutbacks including degradation of microkitchens, closing of eateries, and cuts in benefits. The department I was at was cut to 1 intern amongst an org of ~300. I asked around and a similar situation exists at other megacorps. It's the classic failure of overshooting cutbacks, driving away talent, and harming future talent acquisition. This is generally an anti-pattern Apple avoids by neither overhiring nor doing layoffs and becoming gunshy with interns and hires. It's quite astute business acumen to avoid megacorporatitis.
tjpnz 3y ago
I realise this is a different scenario to op, but be wary of Apple recruiters claiming a LeetCode-lite or homework assignment driven process. My own experience interviewing for a hardware division role in Tokyo was that it's a complete lie.
usrbinbash 3y ago
> and you need LeetCode for backend. Interesting. I have never done a single leetcode question. 70% of my job is writing backend code in Golang and Python with the odd bit of C and shell scripting every now and then. What am I doing wrong?
- and0 3y ago
  Nothing! Quite the opposite. You've avoided the typical modern meat grinder approach to hiring devs. If you've been at the same company for 5-6 years or just slotted into a comfy niche then you'll have avoided it. Congrats
smt88 3y ago
The headline is a little misleading, although it's still an impressive accomplishment either way. It wasn't a job, it was an internship. OP is also planning to go to college. A more accurate (and less shocking) headline would be: "Getting an internship at Apple before going to college". It would indeed be surprising if Apple routinely hired FTEs with no undergraduate degree.
lawgimenez 3y ago
I don’t get it, I am not in the US. OP is an intern and what percentage will OP get a formal software engineering job after internship? It’s confusing
- aheze 3y ago
  A good percent, a bunch of full time people in my team used to be interns. But I could have started out as full time if I talked with my manager, I just didn’t want to get stuck in a big company without trying other stuff first
machdiamonds 3y ago
From what I've observed, companies lean on Leetcode primarily to discern one of two things about a candidate: 1. They're inherently adept at problem-solving and can navigate these challenges with negligible practice. 2. They've got the grit to persistently grind through even the most monotonous tasks. Companies are on the lookout for candidates exhibiting either of these traits. Personally, I'm not a fan of these interview styles.
boobalyboo 3y ago
[flagged]
- qaq 3y ago
  They have a decent product portfolio for company producing nothing of value
  - boobalyboo 3y ago
    [dead]
iguana_lawyer 3y ago
I’ll save you a click: be lucky
farseer 3y ago
Yes as a janitor, security guard or if you get lucky a receptionist or PA
- bennylava 3y ago
  [dead]
cebert 3y ago
The interview process for software engineers is needlessly complicated compared to other industries. Even if you’ve been successful working in the industry for years, you’re subjected to Leetcode and the interview grinder. There’s very little emphasis on the candidate, past experience and projects, and personal traits. We can do better.
decherneyge 3y ago
Heck yeah! That’s an awesome experience for you! Glad to see you went after something you wanted! I had a similar experience when I tumbled my resume and it landed me an internship at Tumblr. Thank you for sharing it and reminding us that there is always more than one path to success in the CS field.
walthamstow 3y ago
Nice work. I also learnt by doing instead of following endless tutorials and videos, took me 9-12 months and got hired in Dec 2021. Personally, I'd consider taking the joke reference to extreme pornography out of the article.
shever73 3y ago
The point about learning Swift and directly building an app is a good one. I was thinking recently that a general rule of thumb should be "don't learn a programming language unless you have a project in mind". I have learned so many languages, Swift included, that I just didn't have a project for. As a result, I either gave up or just forgot what I'd learned. I'm happy for OP that his hiring process went this way, wasn't this also how John Calhoun got into Apple?
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
I stopped reading after intern. I find LeetCode type sites good for warning up my brain in the morning. I start one or two every morning and it really good for batting practice. As a tool for hiring, Im not so sure. The same industry that will tell you how discriminatory standardize testing is, will also force you through a gauntlet of tests. Do as I say, not as I do tech.
inparen 3y ago
This is n = 1. What is usual hiring process followed at apple ? If everyone start practicing leetcode and similar questions used in interview, then whole filtering talent process seems moot.
- hnfong 3y ago
  There's no "usual" hiring process at Apple, at least for the technical questions asked there isn't. There's generally no centralized hiring process.
robbywashere_ 3y ago
Leetcode interviews are a zero interest rate phenomenon.
- neon_electro 3y ago
  Praying you are right and it's just a lagging indicator
vpastore 3y ago
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r0m4n0 3y ago
I think most people here understand that this is a great story but not a realistic approach to how to get into big tech. The part that had me laugh a bit is: > Is it a coincidence that Apple was the only Big Tech company that didn’t do layoffs? I will say no it’s not a coincidence but it’s a direct relationship to growth and spend, like any heartless corp. Apple continued to have the growth curve they wanted so they didn’t need to. One day that will not be the case and they will fire people to keep it. The company is owned by shareholders
- pb7 3y ago
  Apple also uses contractors for core products way more than other big companies and letting those go doesn’t make headlines.
rvz 3y ago
Looks like the majority of HNers commenting here are showing clear signs of envy or resentment over this person's achievement. That's all I need to know about HN right here. So you know what? Massive congratulations to this student being so good that they don't need to take a LeetCode interview. Leetcode is not the only way. Perhaps the ones that do have to take the coding interview probably haven't built something interesting themselves... Either way, Leetcode, Hackerrank tests for hiring etc are all garbage. Great that this student's work speaks for itself enough to get an internship at Apple. Well done for them!
stevebmark 3y ago
A nice story, and a unique situation from someone who obviously shouldn’t be giving anyone advice.
- hesdeadjim 3y ago
  I guess it serves as a reminder that anything is possible, however (extremely) unlikely.
- zyang 3y ago
  Luck is a part of life. I guess the key takeaway here to focus on your craft and showcase your work.
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  I dunno it’s actually not too atypical. My team is half graduates and half drop outs.
  - _jal 3y ago
    Yep. I also personally managed to drop out of both high school and college.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  I found this quote interesting and worth sharing: > I remember that my manager specifically pointed out that he didn’t care about where I went to school or my GPA — he said something like “it only matters what you can do.”
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    Both which school you go to and your GPA try to be proxies for what you can do. They are probably even reasonably good proxies (for some jobs). But on the other hand too many people rely on them, so as a manager you can get great hires by finding brilliant people who are undervalued on those metrics, and thus not as strongly fought over on the market. And of course at some point in your career nobody should be asking for your GPA or school anymore because by then there should be much better ways to communicate your ability.
georgeburdell 3y ago
Team dependent hiring is not “unique” to Apple, as the author posits. This used to be the norm before Google. It is fairly well known that Apple has a “hire different” approach that heavily values specific experience, which frustrates the Leetcode monkeys on Blind
- ladberg 3y ago
  I think "unique among big tech companies" and "used to be the norm" can both be true! It definitely has pros and cons though: I've worked on a handful of teams at Apple and was very lucky to have been able to work on super fun and interesting stuff on all of them, but an outsider confronted with 1000+ vague listings on jobs.apple.com is effectively playing the lottery of whether they'll get to interview for a team that's a good match for them.
- ecshafer 3y ago
  I can't speak for Apple. But team specific hiring does have some big downsides. It allows some managers to brings friends / family in that are not really qualified. I once worked with a team that every single person on the team lived in the same town, and had some personal connection to the manager, they were not good. Without some standardization or minimum bar, it leaves teams to figure out how they hire, and that might not be good.
Invictus0 3y ago
Apple recruiters HATE him! Get in with this 1 weird trick!
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Speaking from experience the problem with landing in at a FAANG without having gone through the usual Google-style interview process and all the academic pre-reqs and so on that everyone else around you went through is that, depending on your personality type and experience, the imposter syndrome can just go off the charts. I came into Google through an acquire, and one where the usual interview process was waived. They needed us to continue working on the thing we worked on, and they went through our job histories and talked to our mgmt and slotted us where we would fit and for people that didn't "fit" they were mostly given 1-2 year contracts instead. And while I lasted there 10 years after that, it really didn't do me any favours. Going through the process and succeeding would have been far better for me. A lot of people around me at Google had imposter syndrome, but I was an actual imposter; didn't do the interview, and didn't have a CS degree. Made worse by the fact that I was a site (Waterloo) where the vast majority of people -- including all the mgmt and site leads -- went through the rather rigorous program at U Waterloo, and were damn proud of it, and so ... Just sayin', this is not a path I'd recommend. Google in particular is kind of run like a big university. Complete with their own equivalents of thesis committees (promo/calibration etc. etc.), an obsession with publish-or-perish, and campus cafeterias (and even equivalent of dorms). And their interview process is highly highly biased towards recent college grads who studied hard and recently in their algorithms and datastructures classes and are ready to whiteboard that up with confidence... It's a shared culture, with a high degree of conformity (that most of the people there wouldn't see/admit-to because of their conformance.) I'm glad to hear Apple doesn't fit that mould entirely? Myself, at Google... if the money hadn't been so far beyond what I could get elsewhere, I would have walked after 6 months to a year.
paxys 3y ago
Eh, you didn't get a "job" you got an internship. The hiring process for that is obviously more lax than for a full time position.
- sithlord 3y ago
  its generally not, because they fully want to convert you to fte. sure, they have extra time to see you work before the conversion, but its still very expensive to host interns, especially ones you aren't confident in converting.
- olnluis 3y ago
  Eh, well I'd like to agree, I know more than a few people that had harder internship interviews compared to their fulltime ones. Luck is definitely a factor in interviews. You can never be fully prepared even if you 100% match the posted job requirements, so you better hope your interview relates to stuff you are prepared for.... This is, of course, just anecdote, but one of them was a good friend who failed their internship interview and passed a fulltime interview just 6 months later, both at Google... so there wasn't that much of a skill difference in-between.
- deleted 3y ago
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mmmeff 3y ago
I hung up on my Apple interviewer last year for giving me a horrendous leetcode question. I asked the interviewer if it was typical work for someone working on the iCloud web app platform and he lied through his teeth, swearing it was. I’ve got better shit to do.
pkteison 3y ago
Going to college is still the most successful route towards landing an interview. My managers generally won’t let me schedule an interview with somebody with no degree, even with personal recommendations. And all of my coworkers have college degrees. I hope people don’t read stories like this and draw general conclusions based on rare outliers.
- cortesoft 3y ago
  Even if they have years of experience in the industry? I understand for people without experience, but it seems crazy to not hire someone who has been doing the work for 20 years just because they don’t have a degree.
- monocasa 3y ago
  That's pretty uncommon in the industry to wholesale only allow those with degrees. I've even seen people without degrees in defense and aerospace, probably the most hard ass niche concerning degrees.
BrianHenryIE 3y ago
Nice to see the app that highlights dietary restrictions in real-time in the camera view. I tried to make that in 2017, before Apple had their own OCR API. It was using Tesseract (via gali8/Tesseract-OCR-iOS) but the performance just wasn't quite there yet.
zengid 3y ago
This should probably be titled "getting an internship" at apple?
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I'm still confused on how the author got discovered. It's very impressive for what I assume is a 18-21 year old who hasn't even gone to college yet. Made a photos IOS app, got 600 likes, and happened to find the eye of someone at Apple. Good eye on the manager/employee, but it almost feels like winning the lottery.
  - aheze 3y ago
    Yeah it didn't happen overnight or anything. I've been posting for about a year straight with WIP screenshots and fancy animations (https://twitter.com/aheze0 https://twitter.com/aheze0) and also I've been doing a bunch of side projects on GitHub (https://github.com/aheze https://github.com/aheze). Someone from the SwiftUI team also reached out, but I was further along with Photos so I went with it.
sakopov 3y ago
Do tech companies still do old-school interviews where you just sit down with the hiring manager and talk about tech? I just did a few interview rounds, at some relatively obscure SAAS companies, after a very, very long break and they were all leetcode-type challenges. Is this the new norm?
- conor- 3y ago
  You might find this helpful https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
jd24 3y ago
ehh... feels like click bait. when people say "job" they generally refer to fte, not internship.
jokethrowaway 3y ago
The barrier to get an internship is generally lower than getting a FT position. The author of Brew got famously asked by Google to reverse a binary tree and failed the interview. The actual answer to avoid leetcoding is to go through the frontend engineer route in the companies which don't leetcode frontend engineers. From my experience everyone else ask for leetcoding. Good for you found a preferential way in but from what I've seen process generally trumps on bringing friends in.
jhatemyjob 3y ago
Similar thing happened to me, except I was 3 years into college, and I turned down the offer because someone gave me the horrible career advice that Apple is evil and you should never work for FAANG. Now it's 8 years later. I am working at another FAANG, working on something far less interesting than I would have at Apple, have way less money, and am probably 5 years behind where I would have been if I took the job
didibus 3y ago
> Some teams might ask you to do LeetCode, but in my case, I didn’t even have a technical interview I'm a bit surprised and in denial about this. Maybe this was exceptional hiring practice during the COVID craze which has also resulted in most of the recent layoffs? I say that simply because I've personally and of everyone I know, have never encountered an interview that didn't involve that.
- pulisse 3y ago
  It's not so surprising: The position was just an internship, and the hiring manager was already familiar with the work product of the candidate (the app that drew their attention in the first place).
  - didibus 3y ago
    Oh, internship, I missed that, because part of the article is behind some sign-up wall. That detail is so important, should be in the title. Internships are the exception. Good grades, good projects to show, sometimes connections, and a bit of luck is what you need. Then good performance during the internship and being on a team that still has head count to make an offer at the end of it. But internships tend to be ageist. If you're too old, or are past that fresh out of school phase, you probably won't qualify for them.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Apple is an incredibly heterogeneous company and conditions from interview practices to tech stacks vary incredibly from team to team.
  - didibus 3y ago
    Yes, but I speak from experience at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. Where I have personally worked for, applied too, or know people who did both. To be fair, and somewhat surprisingly, I never have personally or know anyone that applied at Apple. So I do have a gap in first hand experience withe regards to Apple specifically. Still, I would be very surprised if it was so different. And as another commenter responded to me, it wasn't, the position was for an internship, so it makes sense now.
thenoblesunfish 3y ago
As usual I feel I have to defend leetcode, despite the problems you can read in other comments. I learned a lot doing those problems, and they gave me the chance to demonstrate my talent and dedication directly, despite my resume in an adjacent field. Leetcode may be necessary, but in my case it certainly wasn't sufficient, and I am ultimately very happy with having done it.
bsuvc 3y ago
Question for those involved in hiring: Do you have DEI metrics and objectives and if so, does that factor into the interview process and style?
nottorp 3y ago
> Well, not at Apple. I was there from 8 to 8, to catch the shuttle. Hmm? More reality distortion field?
- aheze 3y ago
  Work hours was more like 9-5 but I got breakfast at the cafeteria in the morning, and went to the gym after work
inconfident2021 3y ago
I call this survivorship bias. No matter what you make, only few care enough. Find this few is hardest part. Because there are millions others doing the same damn thing. Everyone has a kick for the survivorship bias. At the end it is just that. How about other who made similar apps? How about all those aspiring game devs who actually put games, web developers who launched products or even some guys who made something apple would want? The OP managed to get lucky.

300 points by aheze 3y ago

This is a great post, and it's good to hear from someone who is doing great things so early. I know HN is often down in self taught or bootcamp programmers, but I'm happy to see people who willed themselves through. On this point regarding the lack of leet code at Apple versus other big tech: > Is it a coincidence that Apple was the only Big Tech company that didn’t do layoffs? Yeah, I do think it's probably a coincidence. On the whole, a higher focus on leet code in hiring is probably a negative thing, but I doubt it has such big effects as to cause layoffs.

jpgvm 3y ago
I do think there is a large gap between truly self taught and bootcamp programmers. Most self taught programmers have bounced through several languages, frameworks and different attempts to "crack" programming. Bootcampers in my experience have a very narrow slice of knowledge and crucially almost no understanding. This is a generalisation and I'm sure there are counter examples but by and large this has been my experience. I actually prefer hiring and working with self taught programmers especially when it comes to juniors vs CS grads. They have less bad habits usually and a stronger appetite to work things out for themselves. Though this could be just my own bias having not graduated in a CS degree, anecdata and all that.
boppo1 3y ago
>I do think it's probably a coincidence I dunno, I don't think the size of their cash-on-hand account is luck.
- dustincoates 3y ago
  I was speaking about the connection between leet code in hiring and layoffs. Unless you mean that there's a connection between leet code and cash on hand is due to not using leet code in interviews, in which case I'd love to hear that theory!
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
It depens on what they did before, because a lot of the big tech companies had a hiring spree in the years preceding the mini-crash.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
I don't think it's a coincidence. To my knoledge, Apple also wasn't trying to hire like crazy over the pandemic. So it's no surprise that when that "hot streak" ended they weren't affected as strongly. And as others have said, Apple does rely much more strongly on contracting than the rest of the Big Tech.

eclectic29 3y ago

This is just "one" experience, certainly not the norm. Even as an experienced engineer of 15 yrs I'd to solve leetcode (LC) style problems on the whiteboard a few yrs go. For better or worse (depending on whose perspective you see), LC allows companies to judge you based on a common framework of solving algorithmic problems using computer science fundamentals (data structures and algorithms) in a language of your choice. Obviously, the problems vary in difficulty and many are trick problems which is what makes them frustrating, but it's the unwritten sad truth of this industry and I believe it's here to stay _if_ you're vying for very high salaries.

pocketarc 3y ago
I think it makes sense to use LC or something like it. Is there a better way to judge the 100 random developers who've applied to your position? - They may not have formal education, you can't judge on that. - They may not have active GitHub projects, you can't judge on that. - They may not be active on social media or have any kind of fame, you can't judge on that. - They may not have built anything they can show off like this `Find` app, you can't judge on that. So what can you judge them on? LC makes that pretty simple: "can they answer some standardised questions about algorithms and data structures, showing that they have at least some basic knowledge of what's going on in computers?" It's not without downsides, but I also struggle to see a better option that can scale to the armies of devs that Amazon, Google, etc, all hire.
- djcapelis 3y ago
  It’s simple: don’t hire devs by the army.
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    it's not as simple, but sometimes is - as anything in life. You might not be networked well (for whatever the reason) and then you have to cast a wide net or go through hiring agencies to pull in candidates.. it's still going to be an unknown group.
  - 3y ago

nvarsj 3y ago

I know senior engineers at Apple who didn’t do a single technical interview. They got the role purely through networking like the OP did. Apple is pretty unique in this regard among big tech - teams have a lot of leeway in how they hire. On the flip side, I’m fairly sure the hardware / system software teams have rigorous hiring processes.

doomlaser 3y ago

When I was an intern, we had to pay $1200 a month for corporate housing, and they put 4 of us in a 2 bedroom apartment, walking distance from IL1 in Cupertino. They also gave the 4 of us 2 bikes. Apple's cafeteria may not be free, but at least they're paying for intern housing these days.

BossingAround 3y ago
That's horrible. If I needed more reasons to not work for Apple, this'd have definitely been a dealbreaker for me. Of course, Apple with their forced RTO and, in general, disdain for remote work, provides many reasons for me not to work for them anyways.
- doomlaser 3y ago
  I wouldn't take it back. It was a singular experience in my career. I learned a lot. One of the cool things they did was have monthly talks for the interns from the executives. One of these was an off the cuff talk from Steve Jobs himself.
  - Austin_Conlon 3y ago
    What did he talk about?

suyash 3y ago

Nice to read this story - congrats to OP! More of this should be the norm not just for an 'intern' role where the bar is much lower but specially for senior engineers where experience on the relevant technologies should matter more.

toyg 3y ago

As long as you're young and willing to put the work in (which is demonstrated by building things like nice apps), the software industry will always have space for you. No commitments, high stamina, inexperience in contract negotiation, willingness to believe in corporate ideals, willingness to live in corporate accomodation... what's not to like? Microsoft and Apple were the first companies to understand this truth so deeply, so I'm not surprised Apple is still into these practices. If you are young, use them to your advantage; just - please go in with eyes wide open, because the industry doesn't really have your best interest at heart and never will.

sakex 3y ago

> I haven’t been to Google, so I’m not sure, but you might actually need LeetCode to get a job there You do

sacnoradhq 3y ago
Partially why I cooled the jets of SRE/SRM HR teams around 2016. The Googlyness was becoming less Googly classic formula and more political, corporate, and insane.

suyash 3y ago

Side question: Is it still true that if you work at Apple, you can't be doing side projects etc? I've heard some stories rules from Big tech companies specially Apple that they restrict heavily what can and can't be done even in your free time.

amelius 3y ago
Are most Applers even allowed to speak in forums like this one? Did OP follow the rules?
- loxias 3y ago
  Based on what I know of the rules (which is out of date by roughly 10 years), no, OP did not follow them.
  - amelius 3y ago
    I don't know about others, but I feel that it must suck working for a company that is so closed that you can't even express yourself normally. And this while the company still reaps the benefits of society, like the results of hundreds of years of scientific advances, and of course open source software.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- yodsanklai 3y ago
  I've always found strange that we don't hear more about Apple in the comments here (tech, working conditions...), compared to other big companies. Are they so scared about Apple that they don't dare posting on an anonymous forum?
- aheze 3y ago
  Well I just finished my internship so I'm more or less free, as long as I don't disclose anything confidential.
rcarmo 3y ago

BossingAround 3y ago

On the whole, it might be easier to grind LC than to create many side projects that you actually care about. This is all about one's internal motivation. For example, I don't really want to code in my free time. I have long accepted that I don't care. I don't have energy for anything but small-size side projects. I do, on the other hand, like solving puzzles, so LC is somewhat preferable to me, out of the two choices. To each their own.

thenoblesunfish 3y ago
Agreed. And building your own greenfield project might actually be futher sway from most people's job than learning how to solve problems in a specific style..

retskrad 3y ago

Do Apple attract the best software engineers? If I were a talented hardware engineer, chip designer, hardware designer - I'd want to work at Apple because Apple attracts the best people in these fields. I imagine that Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon get the lion share of the best software engineers. No one has ever said Apple services, like the iCloud and Apple Music backend, or Siri, are quality piece of software engineering.

lnsru 3y ago
Best? Probably no. But the good ones willing to have high salary for sure. The best work for niche companies where they have comparable or even better conditions. Ex colleague just rejected offer from Apple and picked 30 person very specialized company.
thebruce87m 3y ago
The fact that you don’t think about them probably tells a story.
- smt88 3y ago
  Siri is the worst piece of software I'm forced to interact with daily. iOS is also near the top. GP didn't seem to be saying they didn't think about that software. They were saying they didn't have a good reputation, which is true. Apple is actually astonishingly bad at software considering the amount of money they have to do it properly. Even Google eventually got Android to a place where it's very resilient and rarely buggy, but iOS has bugs for me almost daily where I have to reboot to fix it.
  - thebruce87m 3y ago
    I have no reason to doubt you, but that does not mirror my experience. I generally don’t have to think at all about iOS. It just silently does everything I need, including backups with no fuss. The only time I have to think is every three years when I upgrade, but that has always gone seamlessly. Siri being bad is probably more to do with data collection / privacy. I’ve not looked into it, but that’s my assumption.

eternalvoyage 3y ago

I think a combination of problem solving skill and experience with some specific language and/or framework is a great option for passing interviews. On some interviews, I only had to answer leetcode like problems. On others, I was grilled on the language or framework that the job requires. And the behavioral part always depends on the context.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

Is a 3 month internship considered a job? I don't think it is; it's a great booster for one's career and an opportunity to get a fulltime / permanent position, but from the employer's point of view, it's a cheap trial period.

lazyasciiart 3y ago
As a teenager, yes, certainly it is. Other teenagers have a three month job as a lifeguard, or camp counselor, etc.
aheze 3y ago
It was paid decently, so by definition I guess? And there was free housing, definitely cost Apple a chunk of money.
bsuvc 3y ago
And they will almost certainly be leetcoded once they interview for a full time position.

SilverBirch 3y ago

I think the sort of more general point, rather than "build something great that someone at Apple notices", is that Graduate and Internship programmes are scale businesses. They get thousands of people applying and will hire atleast dozens, probably some FANG are hiring hundreds. So yes, we're all special snowflakes, but that's not what this process is for. It's about harsh rounds of easy to design problems to winnow the field. This totally changes when you're a specific candidate with skills Apple values. What this guy experienced wasn't an interview process. They had already decided to hire him before what he described as the interview process. They already know he's good, he experienced the talent acquisition process. The bit that happens when the company has already decided to hire you and is now doing everything it can to sell you on the job. If someone outside of recruiting contacts you about a job at a company, you will not experience a normal interview process, because they're already quite likely to want to hire you.

yieldcrv 3y ago
This is a weird take because the whole point of the last decade of leetcode was that people with special skills or that built something great can't even get hired. which was dumb. but reinforced the supposed uniformity of that process. I'm glad people aren’t just continuing the practice simply because they experienced the practice.
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  > This is a weird take because the whole point of the last decade of leetcode was that people with special skills or that built something great can't even get hired. No, it looks like you're missing the point. Leetcode is not for people with special skills. It's for people with NO SKILLS other than "can code". Well if the only thing you can do is write code, you better be really good at writing code.
  - Eddygandr 3y ago
    Didn't the guy who made Homebrew fail his interview at Google because he couldn't invert a binary tree? That's a guy who has built a popular product in the wild and can clearly code but failed because of the leetcode barrier at all IC levels.

KaiserPro 3y ago

The problem is that "leetcode" is a definitely a thing that exists in "FAANG" interviews. The biggest stumbling block with leetcode is that you shouldn't be programming like that in real life. "make a linked list" no, just use a library like everyone else. "Implement addition in python but with string inputs", "no you can't use the built in x" All of that "clever" shit should be filtered out at PR/MR/diff review time. All of this "clever shit" is exceptionally bad programming. We don't live in the 80s anymore. we don't need to make our own sort algorithms. just. use. a. Library.

dkdbejwi383 3y ago
It also doesn't resemble "real" work with regards to gathering requirements, clarifying ambiguity, weighing up trade-offs, making sure code is clear, etc. It tends to be a rote regurgitation exercise.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  > It tends to be a rote regurgitation exercise. where there are much greater selective pressures in India and China to excel at this than there are in the US, raising this irrelevant bar to absurd territory if you value your time
- robryan 3y ago
  A lot of places will also do a desgin interview to cover this aspect of the job.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    Which raises the question of why do the other kind of interview at all. I mean the leetcode nonsense whose end state is often a theatrical performance: “I’m pretending to invent this clever algorithm on the fly although I’ve practiced it for weeks”. Is there any evidence that candidates who do well on design interviews but fumble on leetcode would be any worse at the actual job?
    - 3y ago

sacnoradhq 3y ago

Clickbait. This isn't a FTE with TC, it's an internship. Unlike Apple, most MANGs cut internships to functionally zero. You're never going to get a corporate coding job without multiple rounds of technical interview because common sense.

lazyasciiart 3y ago
> Unlike Apple, most MANGs cut internships to functionally zero. Uh, when are they supposed to have done that?
- sacnoradhq 3y ago
  "Supposedly?" Because it happened around the time of layoffs and widespread cutbacks including degradation of microkitchens, closing of eateries, and cuts in benefits. The department I was at was cut to 1 intern amongst an org of ~300. I asked around and a similar situation exists at other megacorps. It's the classic failure of overshooting cutbacks, driving away talent, and harming future talent acquisition. This is generally an anti-pattern Apple avoids by neither overhiring nor doing layoffs and becoming gunshy with interns and hires. It's quite astute business acumen to avoid megacorporatitis.

tjpnz 3y ago

I realise this is a different scenario to op, but be wary of Apple recruiters claiming a LeetCode-lite or homework assignment driven process. My own experience interviewing for a hardware division role in Tokyo was that it's a complete lie.

usrbinbash 3y ago

> and you need LeetCode for backend. Interesting. I have never done a single leetcode question. 70% of my job is writing backend code in Golang and Python with the odd bit of C and shell scripting every now and then. What am I doing wrong?

and0 3y ago
Nothing! Quite the opposite. You've avoided the typical modern meat grinder approach to hiring devs. If you've been at the same company for 5-6 years or just slotted into a comfy niche then you'll have avoided it. Congrats

smt88 3y ago

The headline is a little misleading, although it's still an impressive accomplishment either way. It wasn't a job, it was an internship. OP is also planning to go to college. A more accurate (and less shocking) headline would be: "Getting an internship at Apple before going to college". It would indeed be surprising if Apple routinely hired FTEs with no undergraduate degree.

lawgimenez 3y ago

I don’t get it, I am not in the US. OP is an intern and what percentage will OP get a formal software engineering job after internship? It’s confusing

aheze 3y ago
A good percent, a bunch of full time people in my team used to be interns. But I could have started out as full time if I talked with my manager, I just didn’t want to get stuck in a big company without trying other stuff first

machdiamonds 3y ago

From what I've observed, companies lean on Leetcode primarily to discern one of two things about a candidate: 1. They're inherently adept at problem-solving and can navigate these challenges with negligible practice. 2. They've got the grit to persistently grind through even the most monotonous tasks. Companies are on the lookout for candidates exhibiting either of these traits. Personally, I'm not a fan of these interview styles.

boobalyboo 3y ago

[flagged]

qaq 3y ago
They have a decent product portfolio for company producing nothing of value
- boobalyboo 3y ago
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iguana_lawyer 3y ago

I’ll save you a click: be lucky

farseer 3y ago

Yes as a janitor, security guard or if you get lucky a receptionist or PA

bennylava 3y ago
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cebert 3y ago

The interview process for software engineers is needlessly complicated compared to other industries. Even if you’ve been successful working in the industry for years, you’re subjected to Leetcode and the interview grinder. There’s very little emphasis on the candidate, past experience and projects, and personal traits. We can do better.

decherneyge 3y ago

Heck yeah! That’s an awesome experience for you! Glad to see you went after something you wanted! I had a similar experience when I tumbled my resume and it landed me an internship at Tumblr. Thank you for sharing it and reminding us that there is always more than one path to success in the CS field.

walthamstow 3y ago

Nice work. I also learnt by doing instead of following endless tutorials and videos, took me 9-12 months and got hired in Dec 2021. Personally, I'd consider taking the joke reference to extreme pornography out of the article.

shever73 3y ago

The point about learning Swift and directly building an app is a good one. I was thinking recently that a general rule of thumb should be "don't learn a programming language unless you have a project in mind". I have learned so many languages, Swift included, that I just didn't have a project for. As a result, I either gave up or just forgot what I'd learned. I'm happy for OP that his hiring process went this way, wasn't this also how John Calhoun got into Apple?

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

I stopped reading after intern. I find LeetCode type sites good for warning up my brain in the morning. I start one or two every morning and it really good for batting practice. As a tool for hiring, Im not so sure. The same industry that will tell you how discriminatory standardize testing is, will also force you through a gauntlet of tests. Do as I say, not as I do tech.

inparen 3y ago

This is n = 1. What is usual hiring process followed at apple ? If everyone start practicing leetcode and similar questions used in interview, then whole filtering talent process seems moot.

hnfong 3y ago
There's no "usual" hiring process at Apple, at least for the technical questions asked there isn't. There's generally no centralized hiring process.

robbywashere_ 3y ago

Leetcode interviews are a zero interest rate phenomenon.

neon_electro 3y ago
Praying you are right and it's just a lagging indicator

vpastore 3y ago

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r0m4n0 3y ago

I think most people here understand that this is a great story but not a realistic approach to how to get into big tech. The part that had me laugh a bit is: > Is it a coincidence that Apple was the only Big Tech company that didn’t do layoffs? I will say no it’s not a coincidence but it’s a direct relationship to growth and spend, like any heartless corp. Apple continued to have the growth curve they wanted so they didn’t need to. One day that will not be the case and they will fire people to keep it. The company is owned by shareholders

pb7 3y ago
Apple also uses contractors for core products way more than other big companies and letting those go doesn’t make headlines.

rvz 3y ago

Looks like the majority of HNers commenting here are showing clear signs of envy or resentment over this person's achievement. That's all I need to know about HN right here. So you know what? Massive congratulations to this student being so good that they don't need to take a LeetCode interview. Leetcode is not the only way. Perhaps the ones that do have to take the coding interview probably haven't built something interesting themselves... Either way, Leetcode, Hackerrank tests for hiring etc are all garbage. Great that this student's work speaks for itself enough to get an internship at Apple. Well done for them!

stevebmark 3y ago

A nice story, and a unique situation from someone who obviously shouldn’t be giving anyone advice.

hesdeadjim 3y ago
I guess it serves as a reminder that anything is possible, however (extremely) unlikely.
zyang 3y ago
Luck is a part of life. I guess the key takeaway here to focus on your craft and showcase your work.
birdyrooster 3y ago
I dunno it’s actually not too atypical. My team is half graduates and half drop outs.
- _jal 3y ago
  Yep. I also personally managed to drop out of both high school and college.
GeekyBear 3y ago
I found this quote interesting and worth sharing: > I remember that my manager specifically pointed out that he didn’t care about where I went to school or my GPA — he said something like “it only matters what you can do.”
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Both which school you go to and your GPA try to be proxies for what you can do. They are probably even reasonably good proxies (for some jobs). But on the other hand too many people rely on them, so as a manager you can get great hires by finding brilliant people who are undervalued on those metrics, and thus not as strongly fought over on the market. And of course at some point in your career nobody should be asking for your GPA or school anymore because by then there should be much better ways to communicate your ability.

georgeburdell 3y ago

Team dependent hiring is not “unique” to Apple, as the author posits. This used to be the norm before Google. It is fairly well known that Apple has a “hire different” approach that heavily values specific experience, which frustrates the Leetcode monkeys on Blind

ladberg 3y ago
I think "unique among big tech companies" and "used to be the norm" can both be true! It definitely has pros and cons though: I've worked on a handful of teams at Apple and was very lucky to have been able to work on super fun and interesting stuff on all of them, but an outsider confronted with 1000+ vague listings on jobs.apple.com is effectively playing the lottery of whether they'll get to interview for a team that's a good match for them.
ecshafer 3y ago
I can't speak for Apple. But team specific hiring does have some big downsides. It allows some managers to brings friends / family in that are not really qualified. I once worked with a team that every single person on the team lived in the same town, and had some personal connection to the manager, they were not good. Without some standardization or minimum bar, it leaves teams to figure out how they hire, and that might not be good.

Invictus0 3y ago

Apple recruiters HATE him! Get in with this 1 weird trick!

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

Speaking from experience the problem with landing in at a FAANG without having gone through the usual Google-style interview process and all the academic pre-reqs and so on that everyone else around you went through is that, depending on your personality type and experience, the imposter syndrome can just go off the charts. I came into Google through an acquire, and one where the usual interview process was waived. They needed us to continue working on the thing we worked on, and they went through our job histories and talked to our mgmt and slotted us where we would fit and for people that didn't "fit" they were mostly given 1-2 year contracts instead. And while I lasted there 10 years after that, it really didn't do me any favours. Going through the process and succeeding would have been far better for me. A lot of people around me at Google had imposter syndrome, but I was an actual imposter; didn't do the interview, and didn't have a CS degree. Made worse by the fact that I was a site (Waterloo) where the vast majority of people -- including all the mgmt and site leads -- went through the rather rigorous program at U Waterloo, and were damn proud of it, and so ... Just sayin', this is not a path I'd recommend. Google in particular is kind of run like a big university. Complete with their own equivalents of thesis committees (promo/calibration etc. etc.), an obsession with publish-or-perish, and campus cafeterias (and even equivalent of dorms). And their interview process is highly highly biased towards recent college grads who studied hard and recently in their algorithms and datastructures classes and are ready to whiteboard that up with confidence... It's a shared culture, with a high degree of conformity (that most of the people there wouldn't see/admit-to because of their conformance.) I'm glad to hear Apple doesn't fit that mould entirely? Myself, at Google... if the money hadn't been so far beyond what I could get elsewhere, I would have walked after 6 months to a year.

paxys 3y ago

Eh, you didn't get a "job" you got an internship. The hiring process for that is obviously more lax than for a full time position.

sithlord 3y ago
its generally not, because they fully want to convert you to fte. sure, they have extra time to see you work before the conversion, but its still very expensive to host interns, especially ones you aren't confident in converting.
olnluis 3y ago
Eh, well I'd like to agree, I know more than a few people that had harder internship interviews compared to their fulltime ones. Luck is definitely a factor in interviews. You can never be fully prepared even if you 100% match the posted job requirements, so you better hope your interview relates to stuff you are prepared for.... This is, of course, just anecdote, but one of them was a good friend who failed their internship interview and passed a fulltime interview just 6 months later, both at Google... so there wasn't that much of a skill difference in-between.
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mmmeff 3y ago

I hung up on my Apple interviewer last year for giving me a horrendous leetcode question. I asked the interviewer if it was typical work for someone working on the iCloud web app platform and he lied through his teeth, swearing it was. I’ve got better shit to do.

pkteison 3y ago

Going to college is still the most successful route towards landing an interview. My managers generally won’t let me schedule an interview with somebody with no degree, even with personal recommendations. And all of my coworkers have college degrees. I hope people don’t read stories like this and draw general conclusions based on rare outliers.

cortesoft 3y ago
Even if they have years of experience in the industry? I understand for people without experience, but it seems crazy to not hire someone who has been doing the work for 20 years just because they don’t have a degree.
monocasa 3y ago
That's pretty uncommon in the industry to wholesale only allow those with degrees. I've even seen people without degrees in defense and aerospace, probably the most hard ass niche concerning degrees.

BrianHenryIE 3y ago

Nice to see the app that highlights dietary restrictions in real-time in the camera view. I tried to make that in 2017, before Apple had their own OCR API. It was using Tesseract (via gali8/Tesseract-OCR-iOS) but the performance just wasn't quite there yet.

zengid 3y ago

This should probably be titled "getting an internship" at apple?

johnnyanmac 3y ago
I'm still confused on how the author got discovered. It's very impressive for what I assume is a 18-21 year old who hasn't even gone to college yet. Made a photos IOS app, got 600 likes, and happened to find the eye of someone at Apple. Good eye on the manager/employee, but it almost feels like winning the lottery.
- aheze 3y ago
  Yeah it didn't happen overnight or anything. I've been posting for about a year straight with WIP screenshots and fancy animations (https://twitter.com/aheze0 https://twitter.com/aheze0) and also I've been doing a bunch of side projects on GitHub (https://github.com/aheze https://github.com/aheze). Someone from the SwiftUI team also reached out, but I was further along with Photos so I went with it.

sakopov 3y ago

Do tech companies still do old-school interviews where you just sit down with the hiring manager and talk about tech? I just did a few interview rounds, at some relatively obscure SAAS companies, after a very, very long break and they were all leetcode-type challenges. Is this the new norm?

conor- 3y ago
You might find this helpful https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

jd24 3y ago

ehh... feels like click bait. when people say "job" they generally refer to fte, not internship.

jokethrowaway 3y ago

The barrier to get an internship is generally lower than getting a FT position. The author of Brew got famously asked by Google to reverse a binary tree and failed the interview. The actual answer to avoid leetcoding is to go through the frontend engineer route in the companies which don't leetcode frontend engineers. From my experience everyone else ask for leetcoding. Good for you found a preferential way in but from what I've seen process generally trumps on bringing friends in.

jhatemyjob 3y ago

Similar thing happened to me, except I was 3 years into college, and I turned down the offer because someone gave me the horrible career advice that Apple is evil and you should never work for FAANG. Now it's 8 years later. I am working at another FAANG, working on something far less interesting than I would have at Apple, have way less money, and am probably 5 years behind where I would have been if I took the job

didibus 3y ago

> Some teams might ask you to do LeetCode, but in my case, I didn’t even have a technical interview I'm a bit surprised and in denial about this. Maybe this was exceptional hiring practice during the COVID craze which has also resulted in most of the recent layoffs? I say that simply because I've personally and of everyone I know, have never encountered an interview that didn't involve that.

pulisse 3y ago
It's not so surprising: The position was just an internship, and the hiring manager was already familiar with the work product of the candidate (the app that drew their attention in the first place).
- didibus 3y ago
  Oh, internship, I missed that, because part of the article is behind some sign-up wall. That detail is so important, should be in the title. Internships are the exception. Good grades, good projects to show, sometimes connections, and a bit of luck is what you need. Then good performance during the internship and being on a team that still has head count to make an offer at the end of it. But internships tend to be ageist. If you're too old, or are past that fresh out of school phase, you probably won't qualify for them.
Apocryphon 3y ago
Apple is an incredibly heterogeneous company and conditions from interview practices to tech stacks vary incredibly from team to team.
- didibus 3y ago
  Yes, but I speak from experience at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. Where I have personally worked for, applied too, or know people who did both. To be fair, and somewhat surprisingly, I never have personally or know anyone that applied at Apple. So I do have a gap in first hand experience withe regards to Apple specifically. Still, I would be very surprised if it was so different. And as another commenter responded to me, it wasn't, the position was for an internship, so it makes sense now.

thenoblesunfish 3y ago

As usual I feel I have to defend leetcode, despite the problems you can read in other comments. I learned a lot doing those problems, and they gave me the chance to demonstrate my talent and dedication directly, despite my resume in an adjacent field. Leetcode may be necessary, but in my case it certainly wasn't sufficient, and I am ultimately very happy with having done it.

bsuvc 3y ago

Question for those involved in hiring: Do you have DEI metrics and objectives and if so, does that factor into the interview process and style?

nottorp 3y ago

> Well, not at Apple. I was there from 8 to 8, to catch the shuttle. Hmm? More reality distortion field?

aheze 3y ago
Work hours was more like 9-5 but I got breakfast at the cafeteria in the morning, and went to the gym after work

inconfident2021 3y ago

I call this survivorship bias. No matter what you make, only few care enough. Find this few is hardest part. Because there are millions others doing the same damn thing. Everyone has a kick for the survivorship bias. At the end it is just that. How about other who made similar apps? How about all those aspiring game devs who actually put games, web developers who launched products or even some guys who made something apple would want? The OP managed to get lucky.