I worked there for three and a half years, so here's my advice:
1) Don't get discouraged if you don't get the first job you apply for. The contacts you make on the first round of interviews can help you the next time around. Try to make an impression on the recruiter, it will help if they remember you when you apply the next time. I would estimate that less than half of the people at Apple were hired for the first position they applied for. Typically, the job they did end up getting was a far better fit.
2) In interviews, if you don't know something, never try to bluff. Say you don't know it, and briefly describe how you'd go about finding it out.
3) Apply for a job you actually want, not one that just looks like a good way to get in the door. If the team you apply to join doesn't think you really want to be in their group, they have many other candidates who do.
4) Apple has the best in-house recruiters I've ever dealt with, bar none. When I joined Apple in '82, it was during a hiring freeze, and my offer had to be approved by senior management to get a waiver. My recruiter did an incredible job of arranging an interview with my hiring manager, two of his peers in other groups, every engineer on the team I was joining, and our group's VP, all in time for them to get an offer to me before Apple went on their December break (a window of about three days).
I know several people who started in Retail at Apple, and are now working at Apple corporate. Among them are a very talented visual designer, a manager who leads a team that develops various apps for internal use, and a person who writes sales training materials that are used worldwide.
Besides those, I can also point out that since Apple retail is growing so quickly, that people who stay within the retail organization can move up quickly if they're willing to learn and work hard. I know three different people who went from sales, to assistant manager, to running a store within three years.
I don't know what problems you had when you worked there (assuming for the sake of argument that you're not making it up), but I know that many others have done quite well by joining Apple retail. I'm even aware of several people who didn't make the cut to get their own store at Apple, but were recruited to run stores for other companies.
Those of you who have been out in the workplace more than ten years, raise your hand if you still remember how to write quicksort without looking it up.
Actually, those kinds of questions are a great time-saver. I've been in the industry since 1982, and if an interviewer asks me how to describe quicksort, I'll tell him it's in volume 3 of Knuth. If that answer doesn't satisfy him, I'll stop the interview.
On the flip side, when I'm interviewing a candidate, I couldn't care less whether he's got the qsort algorithm memorized. What I want to know is whether he's experienced with the kinds of work we're doing, and whether he's capable of inventing a solution to a problem he hasn't seen before. Asking him to describe qsort is about as useful as asking him to recite all the state capitols.
No, it just has to have some mirror arrangement that allows it to reach the whole screen. I don't see any reason why the laser has to strike the phosphor at anything close to a perpendicular alignment.
I like the idea of a laser taking the place of the traditional electron beam, and I can see how it would be far more efficient, but I have to wonder if this is going to bring back the flicker problem that we always had with CRTs. One of the things I really like about LCDs and LEDs is the fact that the whole raster is lit all the time.
>Increased productivity just means more profit for the stock holder, not higher wages, at least in a public company.
Oh, for crying out loud...
Increased productivity means more wealth. That means that the prices of goods can fall, and that the marginal value of the labor also rises. We didn't all live in squalor before the industrial revolution just because the nobility was hoarding all the stuff, we lived in poverty because there wasn't as much stuff to go around.
Consider how Rockefeller or Carnegie got rich: they offered their goods at much lower prices than their competition, and managed to gain a great deal of market share as a result. Kerosene for lighting replaced whale oil, and its price fell drastically (better than 90%) in the time that Rockefeller dominated the petroleum market. Carnegie's steel mills dropped the cost of steel rails by a similar amount. When the cost of steel drops, so does the cost of everything built with steel, or transported over railways, and so on.
Ford actually quadrupled the salaries to make it possible
Ford liked to say that he paid his workers enough to buy one of his cars, but there was rather more to it than that. He sold his cars at a price that many people besides his own employees could afford. He paid his men more than the prevailing wage, because he was competing for their services with other manufacturers, and his production-line methods made them much more productive. The higher their productivity, the more he could afford to pay them.
There's a leftist fantasy that 19th century and early 20th century America was a story of unions wresting money out of the hands of greedy capitalists, but the truth is that it was capital investment that raised labor's productivity and made our vast middle class possible.
We are taxed to hell and back, but that damage is dwarfed by the effect of government debt and other interference in the market. There's no conspiracy against the middle class in particular; it's a conspiracy to loot anyone, rich or poor, who makes the mistake of holding US dollars.
We are taxed far more than most people realize. Besides direct theft from our wages, we pay for it in costs passed along to buyers by corporations (which are taxed at 39%), and by inflation. The Fed likes to brag about holding the CPI steady, but what we would see without the Fed in the picture is the price of goods falling over time, as productivity increases due to capital investments. If the CPI is steady, then somebody (the government and their cronies) is skimming.
Reagan managed to get the congress to give us a reduction of tax rates, but the fact is that tax revenues continued to increase. Of course, the congress made sure that no matter how much they collect, they'll always spend vastly more than that, whether it's on military pork barrel schemes, or social pork barrel schemes.
I'm an English teacher, but I make $32,000 a year. Altogether, including a really high local sales tax, about 17% of my income goes to taxes and social security.
Don't forget to double what you think you're spending on SS payments. The "employer's contribution" is a shell game: it's money paid for your services that doesn't get to your bank account.
I know NAB is seriously pissed off at Apple, but the long and short of it is, once Avid was headed down the crapper, there wasn't much point for Apple to have a show booth. They still attend, but they're not dropping millions of dollars on it anymore.
Having stayed at the Venetian the week before CES two years ago, I can say without a doubt that it is usually standard practice to hold meetings in hotel rooms.
It's the same for NAB. Last time I attended, I had at least four meetings with vendors in hotel rooms where they had demo systems set up for products they weren't ready to announce and were only showing under NDA terms.
Vendors have been showing their products in hotel hospitality suites for decades. I've never been to any trade show yet where this wasn't the case. I don't know what the hell CES management is thinking if they consider this any kind of a problem.
That's pretty much how the Anglican Church came to grips with evolution. Regrettably, many other religions are highly offended by the concept of a more competent god.
The reason why iPhone/iPod touch makes such a great controller is because of the accelerometer's high sampling rate. It tops out at 400hz
I've been saying for months that the iPhone would make a great autopilot. It's cheap, it's light, it's got hours of battery life, it has GPS + compass + acceleration sensing, and the USB on the dock connector could easily be adapted to any of the USB servo controllers that are available off the shelf.
People have already filled cars and trucks up with far more explosive power than you could put aboard a flying delivery droid.
Anyhow, since the government has armed UAVs, civilians should, too. There's a reason why our constitution prohibits the government from having a monopoly on weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, but how do I know you can do the job? We're on our tenth professional recruiter
You're new to this, right?
Hint: there's a reason why recruiters should be commissioned, not salaried.
-jcr
I worked there for three and a half years, so here's my advice:
1) Don't get discouraged if you don't get the first job you apply for. The contacts you make on the first round of interviews can help you the next time around. Try to make an impression on the recruiter, it will help if they remember you when you apply the next time. I would estimate that less than half of the people at Apple were hired for the first position they applied for. Typically, the job they did end up getting was a far better fit.
2) In interviews, if you don't know something, never try to bluff. Say you don't know it, and briefly describe how you'd go about finding it out.
3) Apply for a job you actually want, not one that just looks like a good way to get in the door. If the team you apply to join doesn't think you really want to be in their group, they have many other candidates who do.
4) Apple has the best in-house recruiters I've ever dealt with, bar none. When I joined Apple in '82, it was during a hiring freeze, and my offer had to be approved by senior management to get a waiver. My recruiter did an incredible job of arranging an interview with my hiring manager, two of his peers in other groups, every engineer on the team I was joining, and our group's VP, all in time for them to get an offer to me before Apple went on their December break (a window of about three days).
Hope this helps,
-jcr
No one on our interviewing team has found a way to distinguish those resumes from the people who are great.
I'd be happy to screen those resumes for you for $500/hour.
-jcr
I know several people who started in Retail at Apple, and are now working at Apple corporate. Among them are a very talented visual designer, a manager who leads a team that develops various apps for internal use, and a person who writes sales training materials that are used worldwide.
Besides those, I can also point out that since Apple retail is growing so quickly, that people who stay within the retail organization can move up quickly if they're willing to learn and work hard. I know three different people who went from sales, to assistant manager, to running a store within three years.
I don't know what problems you had when you worked there (assuming for the sake of argument that you're not making it up), but I know that many others have done quite well by joining Apple retail. I'm even aware of several people who didn't make the cut to get their own store at Apple, but were recruited to run stores for other companies.
-jcr
Those of you who have been out in the workplace more than ten years, raise your hand if you still remember how to write quicksort without looking it up.
Actually, those kinds of questions are a great time-saver. I've been in the industry since 1982, and if an interviewer asks me how to describe quicksort, I'll tell him it's in volume 3 of Knuth. If that answer doesn't satisfy him, I'll stop the interview.
On the flip side, when I'm interviewing a candidate, I couldn't care less whether he's got the qsort algorithm memorized. What I want to know is whether he's experienced with the kinds of work we're doing, and whether he's capable of inventing a solution to a problem he hasn't seen before. Asking him to describe qsort is about as useful as asking him to recite all the state capitols.
-jcr
I'm guessing this thing will require a couple watt laser for equal brightness.
No. A couple watts is what you use to burn things. A couple of milliwatts would suffice for this application.
-jcr
It has to be far enough back to reach all edges.
No, it just has to have some mirror arrangement that allows it to reach the whole screen. I don't see any reason why the laser has to strike the phosphor at anything close to a perpendicular alignment.
-jcr
I like the idea of a laser taking the place of the traditional electron beam, and I can see how it would be far more efficient, but I have to wonder if this is going to bring back the flicker problem that we always had with CRTs. One of the things I really like about LCDs and LEDs is the fact that the whole raster is lit all the time.
-jcr
>Increased productivity just means more profit for the stock holder, not higher wages, at least in a public company.
Oh, for crying out loud...
Increased productivity means more wealth. That means that the prices of goods can fall, and that the marginal value of the labor also rises. We didn't all live in squalor before the industrial revolution just because the nobility was hoarding all the stuff, we lived in poverty because there wasn't as much stuff to go around.
Consider how Rockefeller or Carnegie got rich: they offered their goods at much lower prices than their competition, and managed to gain a great deal of market share as a result. Kerosene for lighting replaced whale oil, and its price fell drastically (better than 90%) in the time that Rockefeller dominated the petroleum market. Carnegie's steel mills dropped the cost of steel rails by a similar amount. When the cost of steel drops, so does the cost of everything built with steel, or transported over railways, and so on.
-jcr
Does it seem stupid to anyone else to disable all of the lower-tec nav aids?
No, it seems stupid to spend millions of dollars on a service that very few people are using anymore.
I guess we can just go back to using sextants if that happens...
Anyone who sails out of sight of land without knowing how to use a sextant is a damned fool.
-jcr
Ford actually quadrupled the salaries to make it possible
Ford liked to say that he paid his workers enough to buy one of his cars, but there was rather more to it than that. He sold his cars at a price that many people besides his own employees could afford. He paid his men more than the prevailing wage, because he was competing for their services with other manufacturers, and his production-line methods made them much more productive. The higher their productivity, the more he could afford to pay them.
There's a leftist fantasy that 19th century and early 20th century America was a story of unions wresting money out of the hands of greedy capitalists, but the truth is that it was capital investment that raised labor's productivity and made our vast middle class possible.
-jcr
Wow, so wrong and so smugly patronizing..
We are taxed to hell and back, but that damage is dwarfed by the effect of government debt and other interference in the market. There's no conspiracy against the middle class in particular; it's a conspiracy to loot anyone, rich or poor, who makes the mistake of holding US dollars.
We are taxed far more than most people realize. Besides direct theft from our wages, we pay for it in costs passed along to buyers by corporations (which are taxed at 39%), and by inflation. The Fed likes to brag about holding the CPI steady, but what we would see without the Fed in the picture is the price of goods falling over time, as productivity increases due to capital investments. If the CPI is steady, then somebody (the government and their cronies) is skimming.
Reagan managed to get the congress to give us a reduction of tax rates, but the fact is that tax revenues continued to increase. Of course, the congress made sure that no matter how much they collect, they'll always spend vastly more than that, whether it's on military pork barrel schemes, or social pork barrel schemes.
-jcr
I'm an English teacher, but I make $32,000 a year. Altogether, including a really high local sales tax, about 17% of my income goes to taxes and social security.
Don't forget to double what you think you're spending on SS payments. The "employer's contribution" is a shell game: it's money paid for your services that doesn't get to your bank account.
-jcr
I know NAB is seriously pissed off at Apple, but the long and short of it is, once Avid was headed down the crapper, there wasn't much point for Apple to have a show booth. They still attend, but they're not dropping millions of dollars on it anymore.
-jcr
Having stayed at the Venetian the week before CES two years ago, I can say without a doubt that it is usually standard practice to hold meetings in hotel rooms.
It's the same for NAB. Last time I attended, I had at least four meetings with vendors in hotel rooms where they had demo systems set up for products they weren't ready to announce and were only showing under NDA terms.
-jcr
Vendors have been showing their products in hotel hospitality suites for decades. I've never been to any trade show yet where this wasn't the case. I don't know what the hell CES management is thinking if they consider this any kind of a problem.
-jcr
That's pretty much how the Anglican Church came to grips with evolution. Regrettably, many other religions are highly offended by the concept of a more competent god.
-jcr
> Microsoft long ago passed the point of having to care about what people think of them.
IBM used to believe that. So did Dell.
-jcr
Don't run Windows. "Software auditors" are just about unknown to users of any other platform.
-jcr
Getting your act together when launching a new product takes time.
-jcr
I think one of these could be flown into a restricted area more easily.
Maybe, but you could take it out with a shotgun, and you can't do that to a mortar round.
-jcr
hookers and blow don't generate any tax revenue.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
In the words of P. J. O'Rourke, giving money to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to adolescent boys.
-jcr
Anyone have the figures for the cost of conventional generating facilities that, you know... Work when the sun's not shining, too?
-jcr
The reason why iPhone/iPod touch makes such a great controller is because of the accelerometer's high sampling rate. It tops out at 400hz
I've been saying for months that the iPhone would make a great autopilot. It's cheap, it's light, it's got hours of battery life, it has GPS + compass + acceleration sensing, and the USB on the dock connector could easily be adapted to any of the USB servo controllers that are available off the shelf.
-jcr
People have already filled cars and trucks up with far more explosive power than you could put aboard a flying delivery droid.
Anyhow, since the government has armed UAVs, civilians should, too. There's a reason why our constitution prohibits the government from having a monopoly on weapons.
-jcr