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Comment by Foobar8568 | Hacker News Reader

I bet Apple already tried and they refused due to NDA and non compete clauses, that or HR didn't validate their profile.

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I don't think being able to reverse engineer your project is actually a good qualification for hiring you, considering your employees don't need to do that.

Also, isn't she a high schooler/freshman? There's always internships but it's best to do other things before grinding those out.

If someone understands your codebase without your sources and docs - you can bet that they will also understand it with the help of those. Usually better, if the docs have any value.

And this is kind of a valuable skill, considering how many coders don't understand their codebase even with docs.

I did not follow parent’s reasoning either. They did something without any documentation at all.

It’s certainly true that such people are very capable, and would be good people to hire for many kinds of work. However corporate environments don’t typically like people who are willing to work around artificial restrictions. This particular skill set (which is what reverse engineering is) may even be (perceived as) a negative at a company like Apple.

Much of it (LLVM) is open source, and for the rest I don't think understanding the inputs and outputs is actually that closely related to being able to maintain the bits in the middle, or come up with new bits.

It's not a negative of course.

> I don't think being able to reverse engineer your project is actually a good qualification for hiring you,

Ask Mark Russinovich, now Azure CTO

I don't think any technical skills are a good way to pick someone for a leadership position.

So what is? The ability to bullshit everyone?

I would've said management experience.

Steve Jobs would disagree https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QplyFXgIx7Q

Most employees would probably be well served being able to reverse engineer things. Sure, you might have docs on how your graphics pipeline works, but then you’re probably going to be looking at commercial software that runs on it.

Prevention of competition to reverse engineer something is valuable sometimes

I hope she avoids working for someone else. Why does she need to have her inspiration crushed by the pettiness of corporate life?

Usually the reason is always the same: money. That is why people work in corporates.

Actually I think it’s more being unsure of what else to do in life and for want of a structure, and money is one of those things people are unsure of. However looking at her work to date, she can find money on her own terms. She seems to work well on her own terms in her own structure. The thing that could hurt her more than anything is working under someone else’s structure and terms.

I found that people more often start PhD if they don’t know what to do. But of course depends on quite many things.

I agree, her kind of people will find the money and better work without corprate bureocracy.

Too many people involved in technical hiring, and too many pointless interviews. It's likely anywhere they went to interview, the people there would have no idea how good they were in the first place.

What a waste of talent... why accomplish things in real life when you can grind leetcode to give the appearance of being able to accomplish things? /s

why bother appearing to accomplish anything when one could just opine anonymously on the interwebs?

If I were in their position then maybe applying to random jobs wouldn’t be the right strategy. Instead either ensure you have enough contact information available for leads to come in, or reach out to connections at companies to get warm introductions. It won’t work everywhere but it needn’t work everywhere.

You also need soft skills to work in a company. There are lots of people in the open source world who are technically brilliant arseholes.

Not saying that's the case here; just that "amazing programming" doesn't necessarily mean "Apple wants to employ them".

This. I am very often astounded with the straight up rude behavior of many "respected" in the open source world.

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