[HN Gopher] Apple Interview - 1995
___________________________________________________________________
Apple Interview - 1995
Author : iloverss
Score : 212 points
Date : 2022-07-26 08:53 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.engineersneedart.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.engineersneedart.com)
| coldcode wrote:
| Funny I worked there in 95-96 for half a year as a contractor
| (DTS), and the interviews were fairly simple, the hardest thing
| was looking at a page of source code and finding all the bugs.
| Otherwise most people knew the Mac software I had lead or worked
| on, so it wasn't a big deal. I left because I didn't want to be
| there when Apple crapped out as seemed likely.
|
| Steve came back a year after I left. Oh well, I might have stayed
| there for 25 years too.
| sylens wrote:
| I really enjoyed this read. The author printing out his source
| code so he could have a physical artifact signifying the end of
| the journey for that game really resonated with me for some
| reason.
| morley wrote:
| > though not the cleverest engineer, [I] was one that worked
| quickly to prototype new ideas and took on some of the gruntwork
| that not every engineer wanted to work on.
|
| This is basically all I want from anyone I work with.
| ozarker wrote:
| I'm a young engineer and I'm always happy to take on the grunt
| work to help the team as long as I get a little time to help on
| big picture stuff as well. I'm worried that I might be looked
| down on by more senior engineers who might think I'm just
| trying to avoid the more brain challenging work
| ptsneves wrote:
| Very well. Grunt work is very appreciated and it not only
| allows you to start working without pressure it endears you
| to the other senior engineers as a can-do person. As they
| will feel grateful and released from the grunt work they
| might even start doing direct mentoring. They also will start
| to get to know you, with all the benefits it brings. That has
| been my experience in both professional as well as open
| source development.
| benreesman wrote:
| A nothing is "someone else's problem" is hallmark of the true
| pros. Intermediate folks might run into a broken build and be
| stuck until the build team can unfsck it. The OGs just fix
| it.
|
| Keep up the work.
| baxtr wrote:
| My first manager told me: Grunt work is also work. Someone
| needs to do it. He was spot on.
|
| What I observe with many founders I interact with is that they
| want to focus on the exciting stuff. Building the product etc.
| Most of them don't want to be bothered with boring stuff like
| financial planning, which sometimes breaks their necks.
| iloverss wrote:
| An ex-engineer recounts how they got a job at Apple in the 90's.
| smilespray wrote:
| There are no ex-engineers, only recovering ones.
| [deleted]
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >I should pause here and point out that an interview at Apple was
| an all-day affair. Pairs of engineers would meet with and
| interview me for perhaps an hour. The first pair of engineers
| might grill me on some esoteric topic like code design,
| afterwards the next pair of engineers would sit down and maybe
| cover programming language specific questions.
|
| This took place in 1995, and sounds pretty much exactly like a
| technical interview panel today. Were people similarly
| disgruntled about the process back then? The author certainly
| doesn't come across that way.
| notakio wrote:
| I went through the Apple interview process in 2006, and would
| say that my experience was definitely not predominantly a
| "technical interview panel". It was an all-day event, to which
| they had flown me in to do, and though I was asked technical
| questions by some of the interviewers, many of them were more
| interested in how I handled stress, or solved "political
| issues". A couple of them were more interested in answering any
| questions I had about what working in the group was like, in a
| way trying to let me know what I was in for if I got the
| position.
|
| I got the position, and stayed there for 8 years. I remain
| relatively close to about 30% of the people that interviewed me
| to this day, and that concern for letting me know what I was
| signing up for was genuine. The stress of the job was at times
| pretty high, and keeping a cool head under circumstances where
| everything was going wrong was absolutely critical. I saw a
| number of people who came after me, leave before me for that
| very reason.
|
| Since then, I've walked out of interviews where I felt like
| they were wasting my time. But I've also often had the luxury
| of not really _needing_ the jobs I 've applied for, generally,
| so other people's mileage may vary widely.
|
| It's the employer's job to figure out whether you're a good fit
| for the position, but it is the potential employee's job to
| figure out whether you want the position in the first place.
| Being able to get an accurate read on what you're thinking
| about going into (and spending a sizable chunk of your daily
| life doing) can save you a world of hurt.
| rockyj wrote:
| I would take a 1 day multiple round interview any day.
| Nowadays, it is like -
|
| - Recruiter reaches out on LinkedIn. You reply.
|
| - Call with recruiter, repeat every thing in resume. Recruiter
| says ok, sometimes they just say we were looking for X years in
| Python to a JS programmer.
|
| - First call with a manager (after 1 week) to check fit.
|
| - Take home programming assignment (spend 4-6 hours on
| weekend).
|
| - If code review is ok, another call to discuss the solution or
| improve it (1 hr, after 2 weeks).
|
| - Last call with senior manager (1 hr, another week wait)
|
| - HR offer
|
| All in all, it takes around 6 weeks and multiple calls (not to
| mention doing this for multiple offers). Worst case - you fail
| at the last round, or code is rejected due to some crazy reason
| and yes, even after all this you get a 10% raise :D
| yodsanklai wrote:
| My experience is:
|
| - recruiter calls and brief about interview process
|
| - take screening interview (algorithm)
|
| - go on site for 5 more interviews (algorithms, system
| design, behavior)
|
| - failed, and study leetcode for 2 years
|
| - reiterate
|
| -> 100% raise, $10000 sign-on bonus
|
| Overall, this is the best ROI of my whole life
| rockyj wrote:
| Maybe possible in the US. Have not experienced this in any
| other place.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I work in Europe. This is quite standard for big tech
| companies. Of course, pay raise depends where you're
| coming from.
| lapcat wrote:
| > The author certainly doesn't come across that way.
|
| 1) The author got the job.
|
| 2) The author has kept that job ever since, for over 25 years.
|
| Perhaps that was the last job interview the author ever had, in
| 1995? So there would be little reason for the author to come
| across as disgruntled in 2022 about 1995. Though the author
| does go on and on about the "Andy" interviewer...
|
| There's a certain irony to this, because Apple itself was
| flailing and failing in 1995, unable to produce its own new
| operating system, and had to acquire NeXT and Steve Jobs to
| come back and save the company from bankruptcy. So Apple's
| hiring process was not necessarily producing results.
| joezydeco wrote:
| I think the "Andy" interviewer was key, and was a set up the
| whole time to see how the candidate would really perform
| under stress:
|
| 1) Previous interviewers set up Andy as the toughest part of
| the interview, preloading the stress.
|
| 2) Andy comes last, when the candidate is tired
|
| 3) Andy hits you with that wall of stress. Doesn't matter
| what it is. The candidate gave Andy an easy task by admitting
| he was weak on something right away.
|
| The answer didn't matter as long as you didn't fold.
| lapcat wrote:
| Uh, that sounds sociopathic and sadistic. No thanks.
|
| Seriously, I would run away as fast as possible from a
| potential employer who plays abusive mind games with
| potential employees.
| joezydeco wrote:
| This is Apple. I personally read it as "we're making sure
| you can handle Steve Jobs if he walks into the room"
| lapcat wrote:
| Except this was 1995, and Steve Jobs was not in any room
| at Apple. In fact, Jobs left Apple in 1985.
| duxup wrote:
| Kinda depends on who it is and how it goes.
|
| Provided I'm a significant way through the hiring process
| spending a day in person with people who seem relevant to he
| job would be fine provided I liked the company / had confidence
| in the process / liked the job.
|
| A family member recently applied for a job and got invites for
| 12 hours of meetings over 2.5 weeks. No sense of where they
| were in the hiring process. No significant questions had been
| answered about the job. At least half the people in the invite
| were not directly involved with the job / HR types ....
|
| I think what people get upset about is how seemingly meandering
| these interviews are now / interviewing with people who don't
| know jack squat and so on.
| mikelevins wrote:
| I interviewed at Apple in 1987, and it was an all-day
| interview, but it wasn't much like the technical interviews
| I've done in more recent years--the ones characterized by brain
| teasers and whiteboard coding. There was none of that in my
| Apple interviews. They made me an offer and I worked there for
| ten years.
|
| Now, we can't conclude from that whether Apple has adopted
| whiteboarding and brain teasers generally. In those days Apple
| did interviews the way they did everything else: each group at
| the company did things their own way. I don't know whether
| that's true anymore; I left Apple in 1998. All I know is that I
| interviewed with them again four or five years ago, and that
| was a lot of interviews over a couple of days, but still no
| whiteboarding or brain teasers.
|
| The first time I encountered what is now referred to as the
| technical interview was at Microsoft in about 1990 or 1991. I
| bombed it. Turns out I'm worthless at whiteboarding and brain
| teasers. They gave me an offer, anyway. Two, in fact. I turned
| down both. Microsoft would have made me a lot of money, but I
| didn't want to work for those guys.
|
| That pattern repeated several times over the years: bomb
| technical interview; get offer anyway. Finally I just stopped
| doing it. I don't like it and I don't think it measures
| anything relevant to my work. If it did, why would I get offers
| after bombing those parts of interviews? Why would most of my
| employers be people I've worked for before? Why would they ask
| me to work for them again?
|
| So, generally speaking, I just don't do those kinds of
| interviews anymore. If you believe in them for hiring, knock
| yourself out. We're not a match.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > In those days Apple did interviews the way they did
| everything else: each group at the company did things their
| own way. I don't know whether that's true anymore;
|
| It's still true.
| chrchang523 wrote:
| It sounds like you're misevaluating your technical interview
| performance. You can feel like you're "bombing" an interview,
| while still performing above expectation. Some interviewers
| ask hard technical questions, don't expect most candidates to
| complete them within the allotted time, and give "hire"
| recommendations for some (but of course not all) that don't.
| antihero wrote:
| I think a good interview puts you in a position where you
| are struggling and out of your expertise - being able to
| demonstrate you have a solution for a bunch of stuff is
| less important than being able to demonstrate how you do
| when you don't know and have to figure it out.
| FabHK wrote:
| As a rule, when interviewing, I want to get to the
| boundary of a candidate's knowledge quickly. Questions
| they ace provide not much information (once it is
| established that they ace them), questions where they're
| totally out of their depth neither.
|
| A bit provides maximum information when the chances for
| 0/1 are fifty/fifty.
|
| So, agree with the sentiment
|
| > a good interview puts you in a position where you are
| struggling and out of your expertise
|
| as long as you are still at the boundary of your
| expertise, and have a realistic chance to make some
| progress.
| Ntrails wrote:
| > Questions they ace provide not much information (once
| it is established that they ace them), questions where
| they're totally out of their depth neither.
|
| Agreed. The aim, for me, is to watch someone (try to)
| solve a problem and communicate about it. Ideally I'd
| like the question to rely on some previously unknown
| concept to see them pick up a new idea and run with it.
| sylens wrote:
| One of the best interview questions I ever had started
| with the interviewer asking me a fairly routine technical
| question, to which I gave a standard and acceptable
| answer. He then said, "Okay but what if I took away your
| ability to do X, Y, and Z - how would that change
| things?" He did that a few more times in different
| variations to really see how my answers would change
| especially as the tools/processes I would be forced to
| use started to stray from what I knew well.
| mikelevins wrote:
| In the general case, maybe you're right. In my specific
| case, "struggling" and "out of your expertise" doesn't
| describe it. It doesn't matter whether your question
| deals with my expertise or not; if it's technical and it
| requires me to actually think about it, I will be unable
| to answer in an interview setting. My mind will be
| completely blank.
|
| Now, that's just me. Maybe I'm completely unique. Maybe
| there aren't any other programmers like me, and maybe
| nobody has to care about my individual quirks.
|
| I don't have to care about them, either, because there
| seem to be enough people in the world who want to hire
| me. The only attention I need to pay to it is avoiding
| technical interviews to the extent that I can.
| mikelevins wrote:
| I can see why it sounds that way. Let me supply some
| context.
|
| I cannot answer any question in conversation with a
| stranger unless the answer is something I happen to know
| off the top of my head, or the question is about what I can
| see or feel or remember in the moment. It's related to a
| general sort of cognitive disability I have that shows up
| in several other ways.
|
| For example, if I'm driving and you engage me in
| conversation, we will get lost. Every time.
|
| If I'm playing a multiplayer game with voice chat, and
| people are talking to me, I will lose.
|
| There are just certain cognitive activities that I cannot
| combine successfully. The presence of a stranger in
| conversation forcibly occupies all of my attention. I am
| unable to think about anything other than interpreting the
| stranger's utterances and preparing my own. If I try to,
| for example, answer questions about FizzBuzz that require
| me to actually think about how things work, my mind goes
| completely blank.
|
| "I'm trying to think, but nothing happens."
|
| I presume that in each case where I received an offer, it
| was because the team had information from other channels
| that made me attractive. I know it for a fact in a couple
| of cases.
|
| So in recent years I've mostly relied on those other
| channels, and just skipped the so-called technical
| interview. All it's going to tell you about me is that I
| can't do what you want me to in a technical interview.
| muststopmyths wrote:
| Interesting. I have this exact same problem. I gave up
| applying for regular jobs eventually as it was so
| demoralizing. Only work contracts through contacts now.
| It pays the bills, so I can't really complain I suppose
| mikelevins wrote:
| It's nice to know that I'm not the only one.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| You're definitely not. I often hear people describe it as
| multitasking. My wife excels at multitasking but I
| perform better having my complete concentration on a
| specific task (the one exception being listening to
| music).
|
| I can't even have the TV on for "background noise" like
| some people like to because you can guarantee it will
| completely take my focus away from whatever else I'm
| trying to concentrate on.
| mikelevins wrote:
| Yeah, no tv and no music for me. Too distracting. I'm a
| musician, too, which just makes it worse.
| benreesman wrote:
| This is the best argument I've heard against whiteboard /
| leetcode interviews. A lot of people have trouble talking
| and coding at the same time, it doesn't make them less
| smart.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| In most interviews, if you say something like "Im just
| going to code in silence and we can talk about this
| later" is going to be well accepted.
| mikelevins wrote:
| How about, "I'm just going to take this question home to
| my office and work on it while out of all contact on no
| specific schedule so that I am not involuntarily
| preoccupied by my perception of a stranger watching me?"
|
| No? I thought not. That's why I simply avoid those kinds
| of hiring processes.
| corrral wrote:
| I'm pretty sure choking is behind _most_ of the "LOL I
| caught a faker" stories from interviewers. I think it's
| far more common than people who've somehow been employed
| multiple places and can "talk the talk" but can't
| actually handle a for-loop. Most of them are just
| choking, under a very particular kind of pressure that's
| pretty much only ever encountered in interviews[0] and
| certain academic situations.
|
| Like, there's the trope of the kid being called to the
| blackboard and not being able to solve some trivial
| problem even though they're not an idiot--and it's based
| in reality. IDK why we assume that reaction must be rare
| among adults.
|
| [0] In _certain kinds_ of tech interviews, to be
| specific. Somehow most of the rest of the white-collar
| and professional world gets by just fine without these
| kinds of hazing rituals.
| [deleted]
| twodave wrote:
| I can't speak for anybody who made you an offer, of course,
| but often these kinds of problems are just another way to
| witness first hand how the candidate goes about solving
| problems. Failing to solve the problem given a short window
| of time is indeed not relevant, but your problem solving
| process is _extremely_ relevant. I've spent a lot of time
| fixing crap because some engineer was engaging in "magical
| thinking" that the cost of not doing such screening is clear.
| Brain teasers can be hit or miss, so I don't particularly
| like giving those to candidates (though as an interviewee I
| loved them), but you can get a great idea of someone's
| appetite for doing the mental work of problem solving through
| a thoughtfully-designed code screening.
| no_wizard wrote:
| This is the claim, of course, that solving the problem is
| not what matters.
|
| However, in practice, it is what matters, There is a
| "minimum" threshold (I can attest to this because I've been
| on the other side having to conduct them) where you more or
| less, must finish at least with some viable answer - even
| if unrefined - or you won't be moving on, full stop
| twodave wrote:
| I mean, sure, if you boycott the question you probably
| won't move on. But I'm not sure I want to work with
| someone unwilling to be curious or participate in
| problem-solving together. To me this filter is a positive
| effect of the test. In the interviews I've given I'll
| even handhold an applicant through to the optimal
| solution if need be, because to be perfectly honest I'd
| much rather have a coworker who is enthusiastic about
| learning and shows the ability to collaborate than
| someone who can write code but refuses to do so in a
| social setting (i.e. an interview). I want someone that I
| can have an intelligent conversation with because _I need
| my ideas validated, too_.
| corrral wrote:
| > refuses to do so in a social setting (i.e. an
| interview).
|
| Interviews are _very_ different from working together
| collaboratively. They 're very different from presenting
| work to or working with a client or stakeholder, too, and
| even very different from a sales presentation. The space
| of things that might come up is effectively unbound, how
| you're being judged is wildly uncertain, you _are_ being
| judged, and you know almost nothing about the people you
| 're "working with". As practiced in software, they're
| closer to being called in to give a thesis defense
| without knowing in advance which thesis you'll be
| defending--and also everyone in the room is a stranger,
| and also you have no clue which aspects of your
| performance are being judged or by what criteria, and
| even know _for a fact_ that some of the people conducting
| these have completely opposite opinions about which
| behaviors are desirable and which are "red flags".
| mikelevins wrote:
| I covered this in another reply, but if you use this
| process to see how I solve problems, you will conclude that
| I don't. You will witness me doing nothing, because I can't
| do anything in that circumstance.
| twodave wrote:
| Edit: nevermind, you already wrote about this elsewhere.
| Leaving the below here for context.
|
| I'm curious, is this more of a social block or is it
| specifically the work medium (e.g. a whiteboard) that
| gets you blocked? I personally would happily let you use
| a laptop with whatever tooling you're most comfortable
| with, for instance. IMO whiteboards are okay for
| communicating high level architecture/ideas but abysmal
| at writing complex solutions (and IMO whiteboards imply
| you ought to have memorized the thing because of how
| punishing it is to need to rearrange content).
| twawaaay wrote:
| No, people were not.
|
| What changed is the demand grew enormously and in response, as
| in every other business of life, a lot of people who only have
| passing interest in it got into it because it pays well.
|
| So now you have companies have to sort through huge pile of
| mediocre candidates. This causes the process to be very noisy,
| a lot of screwed incentives and a lot of false positives and
| negatives.
|
| Applicants are now hedging their bets and applying to multiple
| places means that they are unwilling to spend entire day in
| each one. And companies (those that do not understand how
| important hiring is) also have incentives to spend less effort
| on hiring.
|
| And developers became much more cynical. Partly because of high
| demand they are aware of. Partly because companies do not treat
| them well (like not giving raises at a rate their potential
| salary is appreciating as the market and their experience
| changes). And partly because new generations are just much more
| disillusioned.
|
| I had a person recently refuse to come to 2h interview.
| Apparently it was too much effort. Good riddance and thank you
| for saving my time.
|
| Good news is that good developers can still easily find a good
| job wherever they want.
|
| Bad news is that most people are not good developers and they
| don't even know about it because really good developers are so
| few and concentrated in relatively few places. In effect, most
| developers will never have a chance to work with one.
| hasmolo wrote:
| i don't think you're wrong, i just think you may have lost
| sight of some external factors. in 1995, the market was
| naturally filled with folks interested in computers more
| organically. now, software writing is the modern "factory
| floor" worker bee position. interestingly, a huge part of the
| field can't accept that we aren't especially unique or smart,
| just able to tell a computer how to process inputs. we take
| this need to feel as if we are a part of the intellectual
| class, based on a rose colored glasses view of a time 20 to
| 30 years ago when the only people that worked on software
| were all staff+ enigneers. then we create this perverse
| concept of a "real" engineer, and that engineer is just way
| more willing to aquiesce to _any_ thing you do, and therefore
| is a "team player".
|
| telling someone to interview for two hours, having them
| decide that of all the offers of interviews they had yours
| was least interesting with the highest barrier to entry, and
| you deciding they were at fault isn't going to help you deal
| with the modern realities of software, and how far we've come
| for our idealized version of where we came from
| twawaaay wrote:
| > telling someone to interview for two hours, having them
| decide that of all the offers of interviews they had yours
| was least interesting with the highest barrier to entry,
| and you deciding they were at fault isn't going to help you
| deal with the modern realities of software
|
| But that is not my goal.
|
| My goal is hire as good developers as I can retain.
|
| I don't care about people bitching and moaning that the
| process is too arduous. Actually, I am happy about it
| because I can efficiently swipe left on them. If somebody
| does not care enough to work for us to put in couple of
| hours of work then they are very likely not a good
| candidate anyway.
|
| And if they have to apply to a huge number of companies to
| get a job there is probably some problem with them. I
| mean... a lot of companies are happy to put a warm body in
| a chair. If you can't find a job as a developer in this
| economy then you have to take a serious look at what you
| are doing wrong.
| grog454 wrote:
| >If somebody does not care enough to work for us to put
| in couple of hours of _work_ then they are very likely
| not a good candidate anyway. [emphasis mine]
|
| You compensate candidates for their time? I certainly
| assume you are compensated to interview incoming
| candidates, but its unusual for the candidate to be
| compensated (though not unheard of).
|
| I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I also get
| the impression having not been on the other side of the
| process recently has biased your viewpoint significantly.
| Please correct me if I'm wrong in my assumptions /
| impressions.
| twawaaay wrote:
| Interviewing is a mutual process. The company invests
| time and resources into finding employees and candidates
| invest time and resources into finding a good place for
| them to work.
|
| I see no reason to compensate the candidate for the time
| they spend on interviewing and when companies do this I
| see it as a desperate marketing gimmick.
|
| Now, I assume all is done honestly. I put up an honest
| job offer, I explain the interviewing process upfront, I
| try not to waste candidate's time and certainly I do not
| ask people to do any take home exercises.
|
| And since I started to do all interviewing remotely there
| is even less cost to the candidate -- basically they only
| need to spend couple of hours on interview alone and no
| travel.
|
| I also try to put largest filters at the beginning of the
| process so that if you pass first interview it means you
| are likely on a good path to get the job. This works both
| ways, incidentally -- as I would prefer to spend more
| time with candidates that are promising.
| flutas wrote:
| Do you interview one single person at a time for the job?
|
| That's what has killed my desire for interviews with
| certain companies at times when they bring up long
| interviews as the next steps.
|
| If I have a company say "the next round will be 3 hours
| of interviews, we're going to wrap up this round on all
| candidates then move on" I will 100% drop the interview
| process and not move forward.
|
| On the other hand, if a company tells me "the next round
| will be 3 hours of interviews, you're currently the only
| candidate we are interviewing for this role" or "we're
| interviewing multiple people but have multiple roles
| open" I will gladly continue the process. (This is a
| question I always ask in interviews.)
|
| It essentially comes down to "why waste my time
| continuing with a company when the end result could be
| 'oh we found someone that we feel is slightly better than
| you, but you're our backup'".
|
| Have I given up on some jobs that would be cool? Yep, but
| I'm not going to waste my time with a company if they use
| a shotgun interview approach that will take my time and
| essentially turn it into a lottery system for them to
| pick from.
| jseban wrote:
| Your goal is to enable your business to make more money,
| that requires hiring enough competent people that can do
| the work that needs to be done, to make that money.
|
| Sometimes that work is really not especially interesting,
| or challenging. Nobody is going to love it, or be
| passionate about it, and it really doesn't require a
| person to be more than average in terms of skill, because
| it's just not that technically difficult.
|
| And that sometimes is the majority of _all_ salaried
| work, so statistically speaking, that 's probably also
| you and your company.
|
| Why pretend to be a unicorn and only insist on hiring
| passionate self motivated people who will be a bad fit
| anyway, and be bored after two weeks.
|
| The hiring process is not for stroking the egos of middle
| managers who want to feel special.
| twawaaay wrote:
| I am not pretending to be unicorn by keeping high hiring
| standards.
|
| It is a reflection on our strategy. Our strategy is that,
| long term, is better to have smaller, tight knit
| community of highly intelligent, capable and motivated
| people than try to throw masses of lower paid employees
| at the problem.
|
| We are fighting complexity and having large team of
| constantly rotating people that never seem to bear
| responsibility for their decisions is one of the worst
| things you can do.
|
| I prefer to spend more time on hiring, find people I am
| satisfied with and then pay them well so that they are
| not looking to change their job in two years as most IT
| seems to be doing nowadays. Retention is a hugely
| underestimated success factor.
| jseban wrote:
| Highly intelligent, (technically) capable and motivated
| people are probably not in any way correlated with the
| amount of complexity you are needing to fight with. And
| if it is, it's most likely negative.
|
| Lack of intelligence is probably not your problem, the
| computer genius who swoops in and saves the day only
| exists in movies. You are probably in a much bigger need
| of accountable management who actually structures the
| work and aligns the team by making decisions.
|
| There are plenty of reliable, mature, productive people
| with great team work and communication skills, who will
| get rejected because they say that they are actually
| passionate about playing guitar, not programming, and
| because they can't solve esoteric programming problems on
| whiteboards.
|
| Your hiring process is not optimised to further business
| goals, it's optimised for acting out the big bang theory
| in the workplace.
| twawaaay wrote:
| > You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable
| management
|
| > Your hiring process is not optimised to further
| business goals,
|
| That's a lot of things you were able to figure out based
| on my comments.
| jseban wrote:
| Yeah, I'm speaking in general terms of the software
| industry, and common hiring processes, which according to
| your comments you seem to fit into pretty well.
|
| I don't mean to criticise you but rather suggest that the
| hiring process should focus less on intelligence and
| coding skills, and try to hire people that have
| intellect. That can pair judgement with intelligence.
| That can relate decisions to goals beyond their own
| personal preferences.
|
| I have too many bad experiences with highly intelligent,
| but myopic and immature software developers who are left
| to "self organise" and just end up being lose cannons of
| raw intelligence, that does much more harm than good.
|
| Software development, is more an organisational problem
| than a technical one.
|
| The organisation itself is already so vastly complex that
| no human being can comprehend it, and that's why you have
| a hierarchy of information and specialisation of roles.
| Even if your system by some miracle has zero accidental
| complexity, it's still going to overwhelm even the most
| intelligent person, just by the amount of essential
| complexity. So you will need an organisation of hierarchy
| and/or specialisation to manage this. And the biggest
| determining factor for how successful you are, is this
| organisation and how it works as a whole, rather than any
| individuals superior capacity.
|
| I just think it's a really bad idea to try to hire "extra
| smart" people to try to solve these issues, because it
| won't work.
| twawaaay wrote:
| I think you have some good understanding of parts of the
| problem but the ease with which you generalise is
| dangerous.
|
| Getting from "I have too many bad experiences with highly
| intelligent, but myopic and immature software developers"
| to "I just think it's a really bad idea to try to hire
| 'extra smart' people (..) because it won't work" is
| pretty poor logic.
|
| I think much better and productive statement would be
| "Hiring intelligent people is not enough to solve the
| problem."
|
| It is much more productive because from there you can go
| to actually discussing what else is needed to make good
| use of highly intelligent people.
| jseban wrote:
| What I'm trying to say is: it's a bad idea to hire extra
| smart individual contributors as a solution to managing
| complexity, because nobody is smart enough. The cult of
| genius makes the workplace dysfunctional and inefficient.
|
| That extra intelligence is mostly irrelevant, and
| sometimes negative.
|
| Managing complexity is done with hierarchy,
| specialisation and careful organisation of work from
| accountable managers. You want this organisation to work
| well, and then you want to hire people who can do an
| acceptable job and function well within that
| organisation. And if you are still finding yourself in a
| chaos of unmanageable complexity, the organisation of the
| team is to blame.
|
| The hierarchy, specialisation and organisation of the
| work is not done well enough, and must be fixed. You
| don't need more horsepower when the steering of your car
| has broken, that's just going to get you in the ditch
| faster.
| sarchertech wrote:
| > I don't care about people bitching and moaning that the
| process is too arduous. Actually, I am happy about it
| because I can efficiently swipe left on them.
|
| And that's how you know there isn't really a shortage of
| developers.
|
| My wife works in a field with a real shortage. When she
| gets interviewed, they fly her out and spend 2 days
| showing her around, taking her out, and trying to
| convince her to work for them.
| twawaaay wrote:
| There is a shortage of actual developers. But there is no
| shortage of people who don't care about what they are
| doing or whether they can do it at all.
|
| When you are looking through piles of thousands of
| people, you are looking for ways to pare it down so that
| you are left at every step with higher concentration of
| the first group. Because spending same amount of effort
| on everybody is not a viable strategy.
| sarchertech wrote:
| > There is a shortage of actual developers. But there is
| no shortage of people who don't care about what they are
| doing or whether they can do it at all.
|
| In nearly 20 years of doing this I've have never had one
| of these dreaded fake developers make it through the
| resume screen, initial phone call, and a conversation
| with an engineer.
|
| And if I did, we'd just fire them as soon as it was clear
| they lied about their ability.
|
| I have had plenty of the other extreme, very technically
| proficient developers who turned out to be terrible
| employees for other reasons.
|
| My initial point is that if you can afford to make your
| screening process arduous enough that you're turning away
| otherwise qualified people because they don't want to
| work for you bad enough to jump through your hoops, then
| there's not a shortage.
|
| If there was really a shortage, you'd do what every other
| industry does. Hire based on resume, and fire the fakers.
| jacobyoder wrote:
| > In nearly 20 years of doing this I've have never had
| one of these dreaded fake developers make it through the
| resume screen, initial phone call, and a conversation
| with an engineer....And if I did, we'd just fire them as
| soon as it was clear they lied about their ability.
|
| I've spent most of the last 25 years working
| independently. A large number of the 'fakers' (or just...
| currently-low-skilled) don't apply to large companies
| with screening processes. They build custom one-off
| software/websites/etc for small businesses. Those small
| business people have no ability to judge skills or
| quality. Some of the tech folks doing that may, at some
| point, try to apply 'up' in to larger companies, moving
| away from independent/freelance, and some of those may
| get weeded out.
| dhsysusbsjsi wrote:
| Does your wife belong to some kind of professional guild?
|
| You'll find most other high qualification professions
| require a body to certify them, conduct examinations,
| disqualify them for poor outcomes, organise ongoing
| training and so on. And most importantly (for guild
| members), limit numbers and ensure the government makes
| it illegal to conduct activities unless you are a guild
| member.
|
| Developing has none of this - it's the unwashed masses.
| You get the full bell curve from useless CS graduate to
| genius high school dropout all applying for the same job,
| and everything in-between.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > When she gets interviewed, they fly her out and spend 2
| days showing her around, taking her out, and trying to
| convince her to work for them.
|
| This exact scenario has happened around a half dozen
| times for me as a software engineer over the past twenty
| years. Basically any time I'm considering a company based
| in another US state, they fly me out for interviews, at
| least take me to dinner (if not some larger group
| outing), and then have someone show me around the city
| the next day trying to convince me to move there.
| sgerenser wrote:
| I've flown out or drove long distance for many software
| developer interviews and I've never had anyone "show me
| around" the city. Although they're usually fine providing
| an extra hotel night so I have time to do so myself.
| Sadly it feels like post pandemic the on-site interview
| (at least for software engineers) may be a thing of the
| past.
| sarchertech wrote:
| The rest of the professional class certainly doesn't
| interview the way we do. Neither do people in the trades.
|
| People in performance careers like orchestra musicians and
| actors are the only other professions that really come
| close for all but new grads.
| corrral wrote:
| But programming is _special_! The same approaches to
| hiring used for accountants or electricians couldn 't
| _possibly_ work! Don 't you know programming is like
| painting? That's why we make people regurgitate
| algorithms they memorized in a high-pressure situation,
| while pretending they didn't memorize them. It's just
| like painting. _eyeroll_
| [deleted]
| ricksunny wrote:
| Not an SWE here - I wonder if the process itself is seen as
| value-creating by either side, even if a job offer isn't
| placed? For example, discussing code design may keep the
| hiring party at the cutting edge / state of the art without
| having to undertake refresher training cost. The candidate
| also gets to understand where they stack in terms of hiring
| companies' expectations, and may opt to retrain as necessary.
|
| (I'm reminded of the stories when FB was looking to make a
| smartphone pre-Oculus - it sounded like they were
| interviewing candidates but effectively getting design
| strategy consults out of them gratis, but that's probably
| more extreme than this).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 2143 wrote:
| > Bad news is that most people are not good developers and
| they don't even know about it
|
| How do I know if I'm good? Like, before applying, so that I
| don't have to waste anybody's time.
| pfarrell wrote:
| Keep a personal resume doc going. List out the projects
| you've done, how you contributed, who benefitted, and
| quantify the benefit if you can.
|
| Keeping a running list like this is how you can build
| confidence and see a bigger picture to your career. I did
| this recently at my current job as I was approaching
| burnout. It helped me reset that tailspin.
| vsareto wrote:
| There's no good test. Otherwise, that would be the
| interview process.
|
| Usually, it is just others' opinions of you. You might try
| a bunch of different jobs, be bad at them, but eventually
| find a great fit where everyone respects your work. Those
| prior opinions don't really matter now, do they?
|
| One of the other key problems why it's difficult to answer
| is that the standards of development change very rapidly.
| You'd likely find the same questions in the spirit of "what
| makes a good punch card developer?" when those systems were
| around. There were probably a lot of interviewers with a
| lot of heuristics to hire the best, but those specifics
| don't matter any more either.
|
| And sometimes, it comes down to simply marketing yourself
| well or having good salesmanship or playing office
| politics.
| twawaaay wrote:
| It is an excellent question. Having an answer to it would
| be very valuable and I spent a lot of time thinking about
| it but found no conclusive answer. Sadly.
|
| First of all, I do not condemn people trying to do their
| best to legally provide for themselves even if it means
| trying to get the job that they are not qualified for (as
| long as it is legal). Just look at our politicians. I might
| take an issue if you are straight lying about facts and
| your abilities.
|
| But at the same time I think I am fully justified to
| politely refuse to be the sucker that hires them.
|
| One reason you may want to know if you are qualified for
| the job is if you want to stay there for longer. Sometimes
| for some people stability over long term pays more than
| constantly getting jobs that are just above your level.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| If you're asking that question, you're way above average
| already.
| jseban wrote:
| > Bad news is that most people are not good developers and
| they don't even know about it because really good developers
| are so few and concentrated in relatively few places. In
| effect, most developers will never have a chance to work with
| one.
|
| Yeah and having an outstanding skill or performance is not
| important in an average company/organisation, and will most
| likely give you only trouble. Larger organisations are risk
| averse, optimised for stability and longevity. Not short term
| performance. It's not a sports team.
| zerr wrote:
| The content is the key difference - doesn't require months of
| leetcode grinding.
| deepGem wrote:
| My first interview out of college in 1999-2000 was something
| like this. A full day interview about designing the components
| of a TCP-IP stack interspersed with some personality/behaviour
| interviews. End of the day, you either knew you had an offer or
| you didn't. I had an offer. I would kill for such an interview
| experience now.
|
| The last interview I attended stretched across a month or may
| be more. Glad I got the job but boy what a nightmare.
|
| If someone told me today that I would finish all rounds of
| interviews in one day and this became a standard, even figuring
| out for hedging I would take a week off, schedule 5 interviews
| and be done.
|
| Even fundraising for a startup doesn't take 2 months these
| days, whereas an interview will. That should tell you how
| broken the process is.
| de6u99er wrote:
| Thank you so much for sharing.
| kblev wrote:
| Funny how I'm reading this on an app called Glider
| mpetrovich wrote:
| Anyone else remember playing Glider? As a young kid, I gladly
| lost countless hours trying to navigate a paper airplane through
| a Rube Goldberg mess of obstacles. What a fun, imaginative game.
|
| Would be cool if there was an emulated version somewhere. Or we
| could borrow the author's book and transcribe it to a modern
| language, ha.
| fizfaz wrote:
| you can play several versions at archive.org:
| https://archive.org/details/software?query=glider&and[]=subj...
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I think I played Glider on an educational CD-ROM perhaps, even
| one about air and science? Or maybe it was just a shareware
| disc.
| mproud wrote:
| Hell yes! It showed up on at least a few Shareware diskette
| bundles back in the day.
| tappdarden wrote:
| You are in luck. author open-sourced it.
|
| https://github.com/softdorothy/GliderPRO
|
| also glider 4.0 is there also. Along with some of his other
| games.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| This was a great read. Some commenters discussed the nature of
| the interview, and compared it to today. But personally I get
| this feeling that this was still in a time when software was
| developed mostly in bubbles. Knowing how to code was far less
| obvious back then than it is today, and knowing the right stack
| meant you could get hired on the spot. Also, I don't know of it's
| nostalgia, the way it's written or something else, but it feels
| like a lot of engineering stories from that period have a certain
| sense of pioneering or discovery, while it's definitely far
| reduced today.
| asah wrote:
| can confirm all this, and more.
|
| It wasn't until the late 2000s when programming became easy
| enough for the mainstream and you started to see "coding
| camps," upwork and the like.
|
| In the mid-90s, you had crazy demand for development but needed
| to be a brain surgeon to get hello world to work, let alone a
| website to be remotely reliable.
|
| There was no automated testing, let alone CI.
|
| Source control was sometimes used, sometimes not. There were
| LANs but there was no "web" let alone SaaS apps - there were
| maybe 1,000 websites and Yahoo! listed them all in a list. It
| was like Product Hunt, but even smaller.
|
| You almost have to wonder how anyone learned to code? and you'd
| be right for asking: it mostly happened in top-20 colleges and
| a handful of companies. I remember showing PhDs about PKZIP and
| having them not believe it was possible to compress data
| without losing information - I had to literally show them the
| (rough) algorithm.
|
| Truly, it was a time of magick.
|
| (I don't miss it: the pay sucked, people treated "programmers"
| like crap, it was often impossible to reproduce issues, and of
| course you could only work in an office with dedicated
| hardware. Compared with today, it felt like the stone age of
| software development.)
| simonh wrote:
| I did a CS degree in the UK in the late 80s. The introductory
| language was Pascal running on a Prime Mini Computer. ANSI C
| had just come out, but none of us had computers. You had to
| book time in a lab. The Aztec C compiler we used was on a
| floppy disc and horrendously buggy. All the coding we did was
| minimal exercises.
|
| I didn't even hear of object oriented programming until the
| 90s, and actually learned how to write useful programmes in
| Perl and C on the Sun machines at my first job. I learned
| Unix from scratch from the man pages. It was a different era.
| dopeboy wrote:
| If the demand was high, why was the pay so low?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| The work wasn't critical... yet. It was mostly exploratory,
| a way to soak up an R&D budget, or get R&D tax credits.
|
| It was harder to find the opportunities and therefore
| leverage multiple job offers.
| corrral wrote:
| Jobs were a lot more local, too. People didn't move
| around as much. In general, not just in software. You
| also couldn't just spend a couple minutes and get a
| ballpark for what employers were paying in another city,
| let alone get a decent sense of what a _bunch_ of markets
| looked like--it 'd take some real effort. Reduced
| mobility and information being much harder to come by
| kept salaries lower, I expect.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I remember showing PhDs about PKZIP and having them not
| believe it was possible to compress data without losing
| information - I had to literally show them the (rough)
| algorithm.
|
| They were right; that is a well-known and trivial-to-prove
| theorem about lossless compression.
|
| Lossless compression works because you only apply it to very
| particular types of data. It doesn't and cannot work on
| general data; that's why we have specialized compression
| algorithms for every different kind of data.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I took graduate compression in the mid-90s.. JPEG was
| already invented and we studied that.. there was some
| handwaving but it was not as primitive as some comments
| make it out to be today
| rockostrich wrote:
| There's a recent novel by Tamara Shopsin called "LaserWriter
| II" [1] that gives off that "sense of pioneering or discovery"
| feel for all ~200 of its pages. I highly recommend it if you're
| looking for a quickish read.
|
| [1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii
| pierrefermat1 wrote:
| I think this is just an artifact of the pioneers/total body of
| engineers: having the numerator stay relatively unchanged but
| with the denominator exploding.
| honkler wrote:
| I read it as - Engineer Sneed Art dot com
|
| I'm too far down the rabbithole
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