he is trying to pay his dues. its an intern position. at the very low level.
So if they went directly for big name that isn’t exactly paying their dues.
Maybe writing tests is paying your dues, because it often feels like a thankless job. Building UIs in a JS framework... Those could be "paying your dues", or more precise getting real world development experience.
But there's a lower limit to that "paying your dues", when it comes to educated professions.
It kind of reminds me when I got asked for an internship experience if I had any experience doing large Python 2 to 3 migrations. The job description didn't even use the word Python. (I later found out through Glassdoor that this company paid interns about the same rate as the entry rate for the H&M down the block.)
If so, that's awfully wrong. I still had an interview loop and all at the company I joined. All he really did was refer me to a recruiter and matched me up with a team that he knew needed an intern. I'm sure his referral meant something but it wasn't an automatic job offer at all.
Seems like an unfortunately odd leap to consider that not doing the work to get the job.
And being a junior programmer isn’t “having a big corner office” or “being at the top”. It’s literally the bottom of the software engineering ladder
No one really expects much from them.
But I personally like that blue collar work ethic.
I think it’s really easy for people to accidentally have a net negative impact on the productivity of a team. Especially early in their career, especially if they’re only there for a few months.
Having interns is probably still worth risking that - they bring some life and variety into an office and they’re only around for a few months anyway. But I would be leery about adding a junior engineer to my team if we’re using manual memory management and they don’t get it. You might have to obsessively code review all their stuff to make sure they don’t introduce memory bugs. Memory correctness in iOS programming probably usually doesn’t matter that much, but a bit of wariness is reasonable and understandable.
Overworked engineers might also not want to spend their time handholding an intern if its not in their KPIs to do so, and they don’t consider that to be part of their role. This is a cultural thing as much as anything else.
Some internship candidates would have been able to answer those questions.
I interview a dozen or so internship candidates every year, and i see a lot of variation in what they know. They're all good students from good universities, so they've got a grounding in theoretical computer science, and they've all done some coursework projects and one or two group projects. But some have done a lot more than that. One was into competitive programming. One had built a business around automated eBay sniping. One had built a few iOS apps that were making money.
My approach is to hire anyone who has any practical experience (a group project is fine) and doesn't try to bullshit me. But i could imagine some people focusing more closely on the handful of people with deeper experience. It depends on what you want your internship programme to do.
Guy proceeds to seriously ask me about low-level memory management, i.e. ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) vs. other methods (this was roughly 2013 or so).
I attempted to give an answer from what I knew just reading the docs, as I hadn't written complex-enough code for it to matter. Mentioned I didn't have first-hand experience using it, so that's my frame of reference.
He basically laughed and went off to tell the recruiter it wasn't worth having me finish my interview loop.
I understand for an experienced iOS engineer at the time, those would've been entirely valid questions and it'd be reasonable to expect enough time spent using them that a quality answer could be given.
But I was honest in saying I hadn't gone that far and this was for an internship.
Of course that was also when I realized that in the real world, there are small companies who tend to want FTE-level of productivity out of young engineers/interns for that pay level who aren't experienced enough to know it.
Edit: Coincidentally that same day I reached out over Twitter to the CEO of a company I admired, also in SF, and asked if I could just tour the office since I was in the area.
That CEO spent his lunch hour with me, had a good laugh about the interview story, and worked with one of his teams and recruiters to get me in the schedule to interview. Got an internship there the right way, spent two years interning, went full time for 3.5 years, and that was the beginning of my full-time career.