10 ms·

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

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.
    - sdfghswe 3y ago
      You sound like you're trying to make a point. Make a point.
      - 121789 3y ago
        I agree. Every hiring process will have false negatives. Pointing out every one doesn’t invalidate the effectiveness of the process
        thejazzman 3y ago
        Effective for whom? And at doing what? SV is full of mediocre engineers; so it fails at guaranteeing you got yourself a star. And I don't think anyone needs more anecdotes to think great candidates lose for arbitrary/subjective/misunderstanding/random reasons -- I'm 15y into my career with a degree from CMU; I am treated like royalty everywhere I work ... and yet I still absolutely dread, hate and repeatedly have bad experiences interviewing for jobs. I've considered switching careers numerous times because of the emotional distress I go through just interviewing. And that's before we even talk about the insane amount of time every prospective employer demands of you!
        MichaelZuo 3y ago
        Who's forcing you to stay in SV? If it's making you so stressed out as you claim, then the obvious step, to me, would be a change of scenery.
        HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
        > insane amount of time every prospective employer demands of you I have worked an average of 40-hour/week jobs for my entire 30-year career. What's this "demand" nonsense?
        brookside 3y ago
        I believe parent is talking about time demands of the interview process, not the job.
  - angarg12 3y ago
    I'm a Machine Learning Engineer with 5+ years of experience at FAANG. I have designed and built real time ML systems that support millions of QPS with < 10 ms latency. I also have a variety of other skills. And yet I can't escape leetcode interviews. In fact I recently sent a spree of CVs and got automated rejection emails for most of them. I don't buy your take.
    - thereisnojesus 3y ago
      This is privilege if you think 3 CVs is a lot. I applied for 100 yesterday.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        I feel like 100/day is swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction. I apply like 3-5/week and I feel like that's a lot. Granted I don't live in a tech hub so my options are limited but 100/day feels like you're just spamming aimlessly and wasting your energy on quantity instead of quality.
      - wonderwonder 3y ago
        OP said spree, not 3
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
        At 100 resumes/day it's hard to believe that you're optimizing them for the position or for that matter, doing anything other than shotgunning. You're far more likely to get 100 rejections doing this than if you research a handful of the positions and send targeted resumes to those.
  - raydev 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure I have some kind of skill having been in the industry for more than a decade, and jumped to higher paying jobs several times. Even at the staff/senior staff/principal levels you will still have to face the same LC gauntlet they give to new grads.
- curiousllama 3y ago
  The comment you're replying to is saying there's 2 processes, and it matters which one you're in. System A optimizes for min(p(hire|bad_candidate)). System B optimizes for max(p(hire|good_candidate)). System A has resume screens, long lead times, and Leetcode out the wazoo. System B has a few convos, short lead times, and review of actual previous work product. Horror stories come from great candidates in system A. This article is describing how to get into system B.
  - jkaptur 3y ago
    Well, it describes what it's like to be in system B. All it says about how to get in is to build something (good? great? flashy?) and hope someone notices. This clearly does work sometimes, but it's not necessarily the best advice for everyone.
    - curiousllama 3y ago
      Yea fair point, totally agree. Big selection bias. Still, I think a lot of folks could benefit from thinking through "how do I get into system B?" - because those skills are tremendously helpful in System A, too.
    - ska 3y ago
      Build good things and develop a good network of people who know what you can do. A lot of hires, even in companies like this, happen more from conversations that resumes and job postings. As a hiring lead, there are a small handful of people I know well that I would try to create a job for immediately if they emailed me they wanted to join. As an employee, many job's I've had started something like that.
      - jkaptur 3y ago
        Yep. Also learn like 5 data structures and 7 algorithms in case the relevant manager can't just unilaterally hire you.
    - zem 3y ago
      there's an old joke about a company owner who would routinely throw half of every stack of resumes he received straight into the bin, because "who wants unlucky people working here?". i think a large part of why it's funny is because it really does take a considerable amount of luck to get hired at all, and especially through the system B process.
- didibus 3y ago
  To be honest, building something on your own time is very different, in that, it's much easier. You start from scratch, you can pick something you're interested in building and maybe also feel you can succeed at. You make up your own requirements, as you see please, so things aren't ambiguous or changing in requirements constantly. There's no prior legacy constraints, there's no time constraints, it doesn't require finding ways to deliver faster by leveraging other developers. You get to spend as much time as you need, go watch tutorials, take a hiatus, come back to it when refreshed, fail multiple times and try again, etc. You can choose the programming language, framework, library ecosystem, that you're more familiar with and comfortable with. And so on. So having someone that can show some cool personal projects I've found isn't always a great way to know if they'll be good in a work environment and on a team.
  - nitely 3y ago
    How can you test all of that? through leetcode kinda questions you surely cannot. Maybe behavioral questions are close, but you would do those in both types of hiring processes, no?
    - didibus 3y ago
      Leetcode questions have their own set of issues. Just wanted to say, not sure a portfolio of personal projects is all that better either. A candidate that has a good portfolio and can pass an algorithm and design interview, and described prior work experience on projects that seemed involved is your best bet of course.
  - woobilicious 3y ago
    But you can't do any of this and expect to get recognized. No ones gonna hire you because you spent a decade and have a half finished game engine written Haskell. All of that freedom is fake and some even in contradiction with each other. You cannot take your time, or you pick a larger scope project, you will eventually run out of savings, or get questions from family members about why your job search is taking so long. If you filter out everything but smaller scope projects then you have a far smaller subset of projects that aren't as unique because everyone else has done them. If you just graduated from University, you lack experience with project management and as the saying goes, write what you know, and so that'll limit yourself to video games or web and that one niche subject you took at Uni. This advice feels like what you would get from a rock-star who was young and stupid and naive and very lucky telling a kid that if he just makes music and sticks it out he'll get scouted by a record label, When in reality he just was lucky enough to market pop-derivative music at gigs, while not realizing the kid likes to make music from sampled traffic noise and his favorite album is Music for Airports. This is a high risk endeavour and you either need to make conscious decisions that mitigate risk heavily and are compatible with your personality, and the end goal of being financially secure.
intelVISA 3y ago
can confirm, it's as simple PG says "just build something people want" it will open many doors :)
- zerr 3y ago
  Why would you want to become a wage slave if you've already built something that people want (thus can monetize it yourself)?
  - tylerfontaine 3y ago
    HN moment. Software jobs, especially at the kinds of FAANG companies largely being discussed here, are quite a stretch for the term "wageslave." Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, even those who've tried it before.
    - zerr 3y ago
      Golden handcuffs if you will :)
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    Building is the easy part.
  - kaashif 3y ago
    Using the word "wageslave" to describe 300k TC office workers is out of touch at best and downright offensive at worst.
    - ericsoderstrom 3y ago
      I do think it's still true in my experience that someone with the the capabilities to build useful things on their own tend to not stay very long at these giant companies, unless for specific visa reasons
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
CoastalCoder 3y ago
There a wonderful Corecursive podcast [0] that touches on unexpected ways to work with Apple. [0] https://corecursive.com/shipping-graphing-calculator/ https://corecursive.com/shipping-graphing-calculator/
- ajkjk 3y ago
  Got a summary for those of us who can't listen right now?
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    Guy long-term sneaks into Apple buildings to get his passion project shipped with Apple's first PowerPC Macs. But my summary really doesn't do the interview justice. Highly worth listening to.
    - KerrAvon 3y ago
      Note that the Graphing Calculator story is not something that could work after approximately the turn of the century. Security tightened up considerably sometime around then.
      - Retric 3y ago
        Possibly, but a great deal of security only works because people never really tests it. There’s a few cases of people walking into ‘secure’ data centers plugging in their laptops only to realize they’re at the wrong company. People while swipe badges, act befuddled because it didn’t work, and then get let into the building. Or get out of an elevator with a bunch of people and just walk in as part of a crowd which holds the doors for each other.
        ryandrake 3y ago
        The "badging" culture at Apple is pretty extreme. It is routine and totally expected for a low-level worker bee to watch and call out a VP behind him who fails to badge through any external or internally locked door. One of the highlights of my time there was once having to remind Craig Federighi that he forgot to badge into a secured area.
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
I can confirm that AWS has done this as well, I know of at least 1 person who has been hired in this manner, and it was because they were excellent OSS contributors.
asielen 3y ago
This can also apply to networking and having a good narrative about your experience. Hiring managers will hire someone they already know or find themselves 9 times out of 10. Do something that gets noticed or get to know people and network. Sending out cold resumes will have the lowest success rate of those three options.
- kmano8 3y ago
  This is my experience. Path in the door for every job I've had since I finished undergrad in the mid-aughts: - 1st job .. I answered a craigslist ad. - 2nd .. HN who's hiring post. - 3rd .. reached out to an engineer on the team on linkedin. - 4th .. referral from ex-coworker's partner. - 5th .. browsed the website of the VC firm that's funded a few of my previous companies, and I reached out to the CEO on linkedin.
- 4m1rk 3y ago
  With the current significant amount of noise on the supply side, there's no alternative for them. Even the finest resumes can't replace the confidence you receive from an existing experience. This experience could come from collaborating with someone previously or observing a well-executed job done by them.
flashgordon 3y ago
Most of this is correct - But Faangs have also been having their managers (eg EMs and PMs) do reach outs to make it look authentic - only to forward you to a recruiter and a standard 6 hour interview round (I know because I am not special and have fallen and almost fallen for this trap dozens of times)
- ChipSkylark 3y ago
  Always nice when the startup CEO emails you directly via CRM automation about your unique potential at the company and when you agree to chat he hands you off to the "senior technical recruiter". Always makes me feel extra special :)
jackson1442 3y ago
As a data point on the scale of internships, Amazon hired approximately 15,000 interns last summer (not including winter interns). While I don't have a number for how many get full time offers, a large portion do since the internship serves as on-the-job training.

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.
  - sdfghswe 3y ago
    You sound like you're trying to make a point. Make a point.
    - 121789 3y ago
      I agree. Every hiring process will have false negatives. Pointing out every one doesn’t invalidate the effectiveness of the process
      - thejazzman 3y ago
        Effective for whom? And at doing what? SV is full of mediocre engineers; so it fails at guaranteeing you got yourself a star. And I don't think anyone needs more anecdotes to think great candidates lose for arbitrary/subjective/misunderstanding/random reasons -- I'm 15y into my career with a degree from CMU; I am treated like royalty everywhere I work ... and yet I still absolutely dread, hate and repeatedly have bad experiences interviewing for jobs. I've considered switching careers numerous times because of the emotional distress I go through just interviewing. And that's before we even talk about the insane amount of time every prospective employer demands of you!
        MichaelZuo 3y ago
        Who's forcing you to stay in SV? If it's making you so stressed out as you claim, then the obvious step, to me, would be a change of scenery.
        HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
        > insane amount of time every prospective employer demands of you I have worked an average of 40-hour/week jobs for my entire 30-year career. What's this "demand" nonsense?
        brookside 3y ago
        I believe parent is talking about time demands of the interview process, not the job.
- angarg12 3y ago
  I'm a Machine Learning Engineer with 5+ years of experience at FAANG. I have designed and built real time ML systems that support millions of QPS with < 10 ms latency. I also have a variety of other skills. And yet I can't escape leetcode interviews. In fact I recently sent a spree of CVs and got automated rejection emails for most of them. I don't buy your take.
  - thereisnojesus 3y ago
    This is privilege if you think 3 CVs is a lot. I applied for 100 yesterday.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      I feel like 100/day is swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction. I apply like 3-5/week and I feel like that's a lot. Granted I don't live in a tech hub so my options are limited but 100/day feels like you're just spamming aimlessly and wasting your energy on quantity instead of quality.
    - wonderwonder 3y ago
      OP said spree, not 3
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
      At 100 resumes/day it's hard to believe that you're optimizing them for the position or for that matter, doing anything other than shotgunning. You're far more likely to get 100 rejections doing this than if you research a handful of the positions and send targeted resumes to those.
- raydev 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure I have some kind of skill having been in the industry for more than a decade, and jumped to higher paying jobs several times. Even at the staff/senior staff/principal levels you will still have to face the same LC gauntlet they give to new grads.
curiousllama 3y ago
The comment you're replying to is saying there's 2 processes, and it matters which one you're in. System A optimizes for min(p(hire|bad_candidate)). System B optimizes for max(p(hire|good_candidate)). System A has resume screens, long lead times, and Leetcode out the wazoo. System B has a few convos, short lead times, and review of actual previous work product. Horror stories come from great candidates in system A. This article is describing how to get into system B.
- jkaptur 3y ago
  Well, it describes what it's like to be in system B. All it says about how to get in is to build something (good? great? flashy?) and hope someone notices. This clearly does work sometimes, but it's not necessarily the best advice for everyone.
  - curiousllama 3y ago
    Yea fair point, totally agree. Big selection bias. Still, I think a lot of folks could benefit from thinking through "how do I get into system B?" - because those skills are tremendously helpful in System A, too.
  - ska 3y ago
    Build good things and develop a good network of people who know what you can do. A lot of hires, even in companies like this, happen more from conversations that resumes and job postings. As a hiring lead, there are a small handful of people I know well that I would try to create a job for immediately if they emailed me they wanted to join. As an employee, many job's I've had started something like that.
    - jkaptur 3y ago
      Yep. Also learn like 5 data structures and 7 algorithms in case the relevant manager can't just unilaterally hire you.
  - zem 3y ago
    there's an old joke about a company owner who would routinely throw half of every stack of resumes he received straight into the bin, because "who wants unlucky people working here?". i think a large part of why it's funny is because it really does take a considerable amount of luck to get hired at all, and especially through the system B process.
didibus 3y ago
To be honest, building something on your own time is very different, in that, it's much easier. You start from scratch, you can pick something you're interested in building and maybe also feel you can succeed at. You make up your own requirements, as you see please, so things aren't ambiguous or changing in requirements constantly. There's no prior legacy constraints, there's no time constraints, it doesn't require finding ways to deliver faster by leveraging other developers. You get to spend as much time as you need, go watch tutorials, take a hiatus, come back to it when refreshed, fail multiple times and try again, etc. You can choose the programming language, framework, library ecosystem, that you're more familiar with and comfortable with. And so on. So having someone that can show some cool personal projects I've found isn't always a great way to know if they'll be good in a work environment and on a team.
- nitely 3y ago
  How can you test all of that? through leetcode kinda questions you surely cannot. Maybe behavioral questions are close, but you would do those in both types of hiring processes, no?
  - didibus 3y ago
    Leetcode questions have their own set of issues. Just wanted to say, not sure a portfolio of personal projects is all that better either. A candidate that has a good portfolio and can pass an algorithm and design interview, and described prior work experience on projects that seemed involved is your best bet of course.
- woobilicious 3y ago
  But you can't do any of this and expect to get recognized. No ones gonna hire you because you spent a decade and have a half finished game engine written Haskell. All of that freedom is fake and some even in contradiction with each other. You cannot take your time, or you pick a larger scope project, you will eventually run out of savings, or get questions from family members about why your job search is taking so long. If you filter out everything but smaller scope projects then you have a far smaller subset of projects that aren't as unique because everyone else has done them. If you just graduated from University, you lack experience with project management and as the saying goes, write what you know, and so that'll limit yourself to video games or web and that one niche subject you took at Uni. This advice feels like what you would get from a rock-star who was young and stupid and naive and very lucky telling a kid that if he just makes music and sticks it out he'll get scouted by a record label, When in reality he just was lucky enough to market pop-derivative music at gigs, while not realizing the kid likes to make music from sampled traffic noise and his favorite album is Music for Airports. This is a high risk endeavour and you either need to make conscious decisions that mitigate risk heavily and are compatible with your personality, and the end goal of being financially secure.

intelVISA 3y ago

can confirm, it's as simple PG says "just build something people want" it will open many doors :)

zerr 3y ago
Why would you want to become a wage slave if you've already built something that people want (thus can monetize it yourself)?
- tylerfontaine 3y ago
  HN moment. Software jobs, especially at the kinds of FAANG companies largely being discussed here, are quite a stretch for the term "wageslave." Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, even those who've tried it before.
  - zerr 3y ago
    Golden handcuffs if you will :)
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Building is the easy part.
- kaashif 3y ago
  Using the word "wageslave" to describe 300k TC office workers is out of touch at best and downright offensive at worst.
  - ericsoderstrom 3y ago
    I do think it's still true in my experience that someone with the the capabilities to build useful things on their own tend to not stay very long at these giant companies, unless for specific visa reasons
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago

CoastalCoder 3y ago

There a wonderful Corecursive podcast [0] that touches on unexpected ways to work with Apple. [0] https://corecursive.com/shipping-graphing-calculator/ https://corecursive.com/shipping-graphing-calculator/

ajkjk 3y ago
Got a summary for those of us who can't listen right now?
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  Guy long-term sneaks into Apple buildings to get his passion project shipped with Apple's first PowerPC Macs. But my summary really doesn't do the interview justice. Highly worth listening to.
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    Note that the Graphing Calculator story is not something that could work after approximately the turn of the century. Security tightened up considerably sometime around then.
    - Retric 3y ago
      Possibly, but a great deal of security only works because people never really tests it. There’s a few cases of people walking into ‘secure’ data centers plugging in their laptops only to realize they’re at the wrong company. People while swipe badges, act befuddled because it didn’t work, and then get let into the building. Or get out of an elevator with a bunch of people and just walk in as part of a crowd which holds the doors for each other.
      - ryandrake 3y ago
        The "badging" culture at Apple is pretty extreme. It is routine and totally expected for a low-level worker bee to watch and call out a VP behind him who fails to badge through any external or internally locked door. One of the highlights of my time there was once having to remind Craig Federighi that he forgot to badge into a secured area.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

I can confirm that AWS has done this as well, I know of at least 1 person who has been hired in this manner, and it was because they were excellent OSS contributors.

asielen 3y ago

This can also apply to networking and having a good narrative about your experience. Hiring managers will hire someone they already know or find themselves 9 times out of 10. Do something that gets noticed or get to know people and network. Sending out cold resumes will have the lowest success rate of those three options.

kmano8 3y ago
This is my experience. Path in the door for every job I've had since I finished undergrad in the mid-aughts: - 1st job .. I answered a craigslist ad. - 2nd .. HN who's hiring post. - 3rd .. reached out to an engineer on the team on linkedin. - 4th .. referral from ex-coworker's partner. - 5th .. browsed the website of the VC firm that's funded a few of my previous companies, and I reached out to the CEO on linkedin.
4m1rk 3y ago
With the current significant amount of noise on the supply side, there's no alternative for them. Even the finest resumes can't replace the confidence you receive from an existing experience. This experience could come from collaborating with someone previously or observing a well-executed job done by them.

flashgordon 3y ago

Most of this is correct - But Faangs have also been having their managers (eg EMs and PMs) do reach outs to make it look authentic - only to forward you to a recruiter and a standard 6 hour interview round (I know because I am not special and have fallen and almost fallen for this trap dozens of times)

ChipSkylark 3y ago
Always nice when the startup CEO emails you directly via CRM automation about your unique potential at the company and when you agree to chat he hands you off to the "senior technical recruiter". Always makes me feel extra special :)

jackson1442 3y ago

As a data point on the scale of internships, Amazon hired approximately 15,000 interns last summer (not including winter interns). While I don't have a number for how many get full time offers, a large portion do since the internship serves as on-the-job training.