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Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

There a wonderful Corecursive podcast [0] that touches on unexpected ways to work with Apple.

[0] https://corecursive.com/shipping-graphing-calculator/

Got a summary for those of us who can't listen right now?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Also related to the "secret projects" culture there. Being high on the hierarchy doesn't matter to secret project roster. Security is that key to how Apple operates.

Reminds me of a privacy training I had to do at Apple. They made a point in the invite to be on time because they had a lot to cover and lateness would not be tolerated. A VP rolled in 2 minutes late and tried the “do you know who I am” thing. The instructor basically said “I don’t care. You are late. Go away and reschedule for another time”. I loved that he could just shut down a VP like that.

That was a _very_ different time.

You can just read his story (which has been on HN several times): http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

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.

> 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.

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.

You sound like you're trying to make a point. Make a point.

I agree. Every hiring process will have false negatives. Pointing out every one doesn’t invalidate the effectiveness of the process

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!

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.

> 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?

I believe parent is talking about time demands of the interview process, not the job.

ah!

If you can’t invert a binary tree, how can I trust you to change my website’s favicon?!

You would be surprised how hard it would be to invert a binary tree, or really just what the question is asking for, if you didn't at least study up on the concept in the last decade. It is conventional enough to sound mundane, but how often are we inverting binary trees in practice?

It came out that by inverting a binary tree just meant swapping the left and right children of all nodes of the tree. It's pretty much 'can you iterate through a tree?' which comes up a surprising amount.

Sure, but try coming up with that without even remembering what invert meant (it isn't a word that is commonly used in practice outside of CS education and l00tcode). Most of the problem in l00tcode question is just figuring out what is being asked for, not in doing the ask. That's why studying and understanding lots of l00tcode problems as prep is very effective (even if you haven't seen the problem, the problem is probably adjacent and you can understand it more quickly during the interview).

'Invert' is a pretty common word.

Yes, but the common slang it is used for isn't the meaning we are using for l00tcode questions.

There isn't one meaning in leetcode questions; it could mean a bunch of things. That's why you ask questions in an interview.

The common meaning isn’t slang. The (multiple!) math/CS senses of the word are jargon. Which is fine—nothing wrong with jargon—but their existence doesn’t make the ordinary sense slang.

Yes but is it Referring to the additive or multiplicative inverse?

Or maybe it’s making the tree upside down, so all leaves become roots, and the root becomes a leaf. But when we do that, do we just invert all the edges or transform the whole tree?

Maybe it’s referring to changing a red-black tree into a green-white tree? Or turning a splay tree into a merge tree?

It can mean a lot of things, so you ask questions.

Howell (the homebrew 'google didn't hire me because of inverting a binary tree' guy) confirmed that they meant swapping right and left children of all nodes.

you can always ask interviewer - define invert what does it mean - and interviewer in 100% cases will explain and even provide test cases.

in fact any candidate that doesnt ask clarifying questions and goes deep into coding right away - has a chance of going into wrong direction and is flagged as red flag.

As an interviewer I always lookout for candidates that dont ask questions, dont start with test cases, assume in their mind what is their understanding of ideal solution - and start coding. These are very inexperienced people who do that

To be fair, Homebrew is great product design, but actually pretty janky software engineering. Anyone who's had it wreck their PATH a couple of times isn't going to be an automatic yes vote on a technical screen.

As if average FAANG quality in customer-facing software is better.

If that’s the hang-up on hiring him, they need to get the log out of their own eyes first, because shifting to the quality level of Homebrew would be a big improvement for a whole lot of their software.

Yes, we are aware companies hire privileged losers instead of skilled employees

Long ago, I switched to MacPorts because its path and directory story is better, and I didn't find myself having to run chown to fix things.

But inverting a binary tree is trivial. It’s not like finding the shortest path in a graph, or something similar that requires recalling an algorithm on the spot. Go and look at the actual problem if you don’t believe me.

It's amusing the answers so far are mostly all "well this is an easy question and he should have gotten it." I actually agree with that, but even so, he got rejected by Google but did get a job at Apple, which is what this article is about, and that seems like a far more relevant fact to me.

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.

This is privilege if you think 3 CVs is a lot. I applied for 100 yesterday.

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.

OP said spree, not 3

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yep. Also learn like 5 data structures and 7 algorithms in case the relevant manager can't just unilaterally hire you.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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)

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 :)

can confirm, it's as simple PG says "just build something people want"

it will open many doors :)

Why would you want to become a wage slave if you've already built something that people want (thus can monetize it yourself)?

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.

Golden handcuffs if you will :)

Building is the easy part.

Using the word "wageslave" to describe 300k TC office workers is out of touch at best and downright offensive at worst.

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

depends entirely on the person. The startup life isn't for everyone, especially people with families that value stability and life balance over the idea of millions.

ah, yes. The American Dream of living in a 50 year old shitbox fixer that costs $2M in the suburbs of Cupertino.

If you can make that much remote out in Nebraska then sure, fine.

There are people doing a lot worse. But when doing much better looks like that, what even is the point?

Living in Nebraska when you have the means to live in civilization is a punishment. Why would someone choose to live in a place where the nearest restaurant is a Denny’s 45 mins away?

Quiet and peaceful, cleaner air, you can play loud music and stomp around without upsetting neighbors, and for many people most of their time is spent on a computer anyway.

The quality of my life is not defined by stomping around or playing loud music. It’s having access to and making use of amenities. What the hell good is money to me if I have no goods and services to spend it on?

Maybe most of your time is spent on a computer.

The quality of my life is not defined by how close I am to fast food diners or other frivolous goods and services.

Neither is mine, which is why I live in a place that has amazing restaurants with cuisines from all around the world. There's nothing frivolous about food or any other good or service that enhances one's quality of life.

Air quality is better in San Francisco than Omaha by the way. If you want peace and quiet, you have world class nature less than an hour’s drive away instead of the endless corn fields flat as a pancake for hours in any direction.

do you seriously think that tenderloin, Oakland, richmond, hunter's point, bay view is civilization?

Do you really think your extreme examples are the average experience outside of Nebraska?

Well these are more affordable places in sf, not everyone is techie millionaire, you know.

and Nebraska has nice places too, especially if you have a family.

Try to raise a family with 5 kids in sf, and compare to Omaha. I would pick Omaha 10 out of 10 times, if I was not a millionaire

>Try to raise a family with 5 kids

What am I, a farmer? I would pick not doing that 10 out of 10 times regardless of how much money I had.

so we can agree that people can have their own preferences in lifestyle and critique of other people's lifestyle is not mature behavior

Let’s see where this conversation started.

>ah, yes. The American Dream of living in a 50 year old shitbox fixer that costs $2M in the suburbs of Cupertino.

So you’re right, folks living outside of metropolitan areas need to work on their insecurities and learn to be nicer to people that prioritize other things in life.

Insecurity?

More like well-justified feeling of intellectual superiority, of being able to afford 5000 sq ft home with few acres of land, and raise a family with 5 kids on a single income, and not having kids wade their way through poop and needles on the way to school, not having to smell urine and marijuana on the streets of neighborhood

Lincoln and Omaha would like a word

people choose to live in bay area not because its housing situation, but despite of it.

mainly because cutting edge R&D type technology has been developed in the area and alternatives to SV have not developed yet. its not even pay - I would say bay area pay is bad, because of cost of living & taxation.

But opportunities for growth are unmatched in bay area

The point is you can't adequately judge whether a job counts as "wageslave" just from the salary. A $300K job where houses cost $2M is like a $30K job where houses cost $200K.

you are more than right, it is actually objectively worse.

because $300K will demand much much more than 30k job.

300k job leads to stress, anxiety, performance calibrations, mental breakdowns, overwork, competition, lack of job security etc.

30k job could be very relaxed, could be part-time gig where you work few hours in a week.

so work-life balance is really tilted worse for higher paying jobs

I mean, not necessarily. A 300k job at a tech company may be less stressful than e.g. a 150k job at a non tech company with a toxic culture.

To be clear, it can be true, there are lots of stressful high paying jobs, my point is that it's not necessarily true.

I know low paid people with stressful jobs and highly paid people with less stress.

This is incorrect. If my income and expenses both increase by 10x, my savings increase by 10x. After just a few years of saving, I have the option of moving somewhere cheaper and living like a king.

It's not like your savings and investments are adjusted for the cost of living when you move.

In the extreme case, you can earn as much as possible and accumulate enough to live on indefinitely in a cheap country. This is obviously better than just earning a low salary in the cheap country for the same amount of time.

if your income 10x and you are on the wage - then that means you are either will have to work 10x more hours - or work 10x more intensively/efficiently, which leads to its own burnout and issues.

main point being is that if your income doubles, your savings rate will double, but your work related stress will double, and arguably your health (mental and physical) will deteriorate at 2x faster rate

That’s not how any of this works.

> But when doing much better looks like that, what even is the point?

Cupertino is an hour away Santa Cruz beaches. 3 hours away from skiing (or boating) at lake tahoe. 1 hour away from one of the best NBA teams (GSW). 30 minutes away from Stanford. 1 hour away from Berkeley. Some of the best average temperatures in the country.

Maybe they live in a "shitbox fixer", maybe they don't.

You might consider that people like and care about those other properties though.

> Cupertino is ...

a lot of hour drives away from everything? London or Tokyo it is not.

> Maybe they live in a "shitbox fixer", maybe they don't.

I was being rather generous at $2M on a $300k salary. Let's just assume the spouse makes that much too. Where do you place the odds of getting a nice house at, in that area? Of a similar quality that would run around $200-400k in the rest of the country. It's the suburbs. You're going to be inside your home more than you would in a city.

> You might consider that people like and care about those other properties though.

The point is $300k in SV isn't living large. You save more for retirement or to move out. Great. But you still have to leave to realize that benefit. You're just planning for some tomorrow that usually never comes for most people.

> You're just planning for some tomorrow that usually never comes for most people.

That's odd, my impression is that a lot of people go to the Bay, save a lot, then leave.

Do we have any statistics on this?

Most new Apple hires are not in Cupertino. It’s “full”.

Seems everyday on Blind there's a few posts from mid 30s folks reporting ~$3M NW and wondering if it's enough to retire on.

>downright offensive at worst

People are so easily offended these days.

Having said that, if you work for a company and you get fired and blacklisted, you still don't eat. If you work for a wage, you HAVE to work for somebody or you starve. If you work for somebody, that somebody has a lot of sway over how your life looks. Better be good at kissin' ass.

Also, if you don't think the US healthcare industry will take every penny of your life's earnings upon your eventual and inevitable deterioration, you're fooling yourself.

FWIW, I'm a wage slave too.

You’re a wage slave when you work for yourself too, probably even more so. You can’t even completely take a week or two off in most cases. Your work eats your entire life.

>You’re a wage slave when you work for yourself too, probably even more so.

It certainly can be like that especially early on. Hopefully you would grow enough to hire good people to manage the business. If you work for somebody though, that will never happen.

>It certainly can be like that especially early on.

All the slavery with none of the wage.

>If you work for somebody though, that will never happen.

The alternative to starting a business that you'll hope will be self-sustaining and still earn you a respectable living is to work for the highest bidder, invest, and become financially independent. Odds of the latter are much higher for the average software engineer than the former.

There’s also quite a few jobs where programmers can automate away a good portion of their work

So the goal is to go from wageslave to wageslave owner?

> If you work for a wage, you HAVE to work for somebody or you starve.

You really don't. There is no way you can starve in the USA unless you do it on purpose.

5 million households in the USA constantly have poor food security. About double that had intermittently poor food security. I do not think they are doing it on purpose.

And if they went to any hospital starving they would get fed.

Please note the literal use of the word 'starve'.

Huh, its like calling couch potato is offensive to someone is offensive who watch TV and sit in couch all day because their TV is 77" OLED, couch is full grain leather and beer artisanal.

If someone with 300K+ TC gets offended by this term, playing world's smallest violin for those snowflakes would be most appropriate.

Offensive as in “offensive to real wage slaves”

It’s more about the people making 30k a year putting up fencing and barely scraping by watching those 300k a year SWEs complain about how they’re wage slaves.

Running your own business kinda sucks. I did it and failed and it was extremely painful. Now I’m building my dream product working for a philanthropist who pays my wages. SO MUCH easier than doing it myself.

Your hilarious perspective on highly paid FAANG jobs aside: because now that you’ve made it and demonstrated there is a target market it’s trivial for the billion dollar company to make their own version and eat your breakfast. If they’re offering you the chance to join them as they do so it’s very often in your interest to do it.

> you've already built something that people want (thus can monetize it yourself)

The part in brackets isn't something to hand wave about. Depends a lot on how you want to spend your time, also.

If you care about achieving a particular mission, you could view joining a large funded organization as an opportunity to achieve that mission with higher likelihood or speed.

For example, if you had an idea about planting trees via drones and a big company said "come to our company and we can get this launched at scale as early as 2026". Then you think about how long it would take to do it on your own and you'd still have to convince investors and hire people and stuff.

If at the end of the day, what you care about is planting more trees quickly, you should probably join that big company. (of course there are risks too, where they cancel the project or divert its direction).

And also, not every startup found cares about achieving some grandiose mission. Some just want to get rich which is totally fine.

Decoupling an income from the time spend on work.

Something I've noticed over the past 5 or so years is a "hobby project" is increasingly becoming the standard. Your GitHub portfolio is almost as important as your resumé itself in many cases. It starts the conversation and grabs attention with potential employers, but doesn't act in lieu of a technical evaluation. Almost every competitive applicant at the intern level has some tool or webapp that they've built out extensively.

Do you actually have any evidence for this? While having zero personal projects is probably a red flag, in my last job search I saw almost no clicks on links to projects. From personal experience, most hiring managers are so busy they barely even read the resume. They are definitely not going to comb through someone's github submissions.

This has been my experience on the hiring side too. Nowadays almost all resumes have a link to GitHub, but 80%+ of the time the accounts have been dead for months/years. My favorite was a candidate whose GitHub was totally empty - they had just created an account, done nothing on it, and still included it in their resume!!

That’s… what I was afraid of.

I’m hiring too, but few of my applicants include a GH link. I’ve never seen a GL link, much less Gitea, etc.

And mind you, I’m looking. Hard. I’ll often Google the person to see if I can find a GH account for them. I hit rarely, and it’s weird.

Today one of my applicants had a GH profile and a README, a couple dozen projects in various stages of abandonment, etc, and I was deliriously happy.

I’m not very experienced in hiring (this is the first opening that I’ve written the JD for, reviewed the applications, wrote the tech interview questions, etc), but we’re clearly doing something wrong. We have a few great applicants (mostly from here and Reddit) and a whole lot of low-effort, low-value noise.

All my GH contributions have been to private/corporate work. sigh yet another barrier. All my contributions before that were before github existed. Since then, I don't know what to work on in public as it's not actually that obvious where to find interesting problems when web is not one's domain. But I guess that's the perils of being an older programmer.

True -- many hrs are too busy to look at projects, but from talking to peers/colleagues I can't think of more than a few people in my space that don't have at least something pinned on their gh. Many of them do this for the sole reason of having something to "stand out" to potential employers. I imagine it varies based on the companies to which you're applying -- smaller companies tended to care a lot, larger ones hardly even asked about my resumé.

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.

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.

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