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Comment by akmarinov | Hacker News Reader

With this kind of knowledge why be a junior at Apple when you can be a senior somewhere else and presumably be better compensated?

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Most likely because they[1] wouldn't get a senior job elsewhere.

"Senior" has only a little to do with technical experience, and a lot to do with what could generally be bucketed into "work experience".

[1]: I'm talking in general, not about this specific person :)

I've also found salary is not tied to interview difficulty. I've got really high job offers easily (3 hour on-site), and struggled to get the low paid ones because they're technical interview process is difficult/ boring (8 hour project work). Having said that, I think its more common to find higher salary paying jobs to be more selective/ difficult.

I don't think this is a "senior level knowledge"

Seniority comes mostly from experience 5/10 years

Of course some companies give senior titles for people with 2-3 years of xp, but I think we can all agree that this is big "XD"

Seniority based on time spent in the field is also a “XD”, though.

Of course it's not perfect.

If there was perfect proxy for good people then $BIG_TECH would pay barrow of money for this.

10 years of experience says that person probably have seen a lot of software / projects / decisions and stuff.

Of course you could maintain one system for 10 years and struggle in new environment, but also there's difference between maintaining CRUD app for 10 years vs maintaining Linux kernel

For technical experience it's not a good indicator, for interpersonal experience it's spot on. It's easy to avoid doing anything technically difficult, but interpersonal situations arise unavoidably at a set rate, providing experience that you can't accelerate by having a weekend coding hobby.

Lots of questions are definitely for Senior level engineers or even devops, i.e. - "HTTP 2 vs HTTP 1.1". There is nothing useful for junior level developer to know the difference of such low level things. Anyway, junior engineer will have no chance to decide what HTTP protocol to use in his project in Apple.

Another example - "NodeJS event loop internals". Nothing useful for junior, senior level+ is assumed, if you want squeeze out of maximum performance from NodeJS V8.

>Lots of questions are definitely for Senior level engineers or even devops, i.e. - "HTTP 2 vs HTTP 1.1"

I think this kind of question just shows whether you're interested in web or not, because I bet that you could read differences between those two in 10min from some summary or RFCs.

Everything depends on how deep understanding between those two you had to show.

Even if you know differences between HTTP 1 and 2 it will not help you with web developement at all. In some rare cases web engineer can get performance boost for client to load data more quickly, but usually nobody cares about this.

A lot of SV companies seem to give "senior" out like candy

Apple probably pays more for a junior role than companies that would give a senior role to someone with no experience pay for a senior role.

Because most companies view seniority as a function of your domain experience, not your broad knowledge of generic CS, so you won't be considered for Senior positions without the right amount of experience.

This was for an entry level job at apple

Is that documented somewhere? The applicant clearly has presented at Pycon which doesn't seem likely for an entry level candidate.

The market has already spoken. Why would Apple settle for less when they don’t have to?

You're conflating "settle for less" with "knows more broad trivia."

Don’t you think the interviewer knows more about the job than the interviewees?

Even if this might hurt our ego from time to time, it’s up to them.

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