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by Bahamut 3280 days ago
I start at Apple tomorrow - unfortunately I can't really say much about it except that my industry experience and experience interviewing with a myriad of companies helped prepare me for the interview process at Apple, although Apple is pretty intense as far as interviews go (I only study interview failures).

While I am self-taught and without a CS degree, I did spend 4 years at a top 15 PhD program in mathematics (UIUC), and have undergrad degrees in math & physics.

After leaving grad school, I was desperate for any career track job - after 2 years of fruitless job searching, I got fed up and started teaching self whatever skills I felt I needed. Observing lots of web developer positions open, I decided to target programming skills. Half a year after then, I got my first job as a frontend web developer. Turned out I loved the work, and invested a lot of hours outside of work investing in myself to improve my skills. I also was introduced to the world of open source, and guided to contribute. Fast forward to today, I have 4 1/2 years of web development experience, predominantly frontend but about two years working across the stack. I have architected frontends for most of my career, as well as done some major open source work.

2 comments

Congratulations! as a front-end engineer, did you also have to master Algorithms and Data Structures to be able to get into Apple?
Did you answer your interview questions in Javascript? Seeing that you are a front end dev.