Thread by @treblewoe

Since Silicon Valley hiring has everyone’s attention, here’s the experience of someone who was a hiring manager for over a decade during Apple’s meteoric rise 20 years ago. No dirt, big reveals, or criminal conspiracies; just thousands of tech bro resumes later. /1

I managed the team in Software Eng. that kept 3rd party apps working when we shipped new OSes. We worked with QA, but we weren’t QA. I hired mostly new college grads who were engineers, but not to do engineering. We were debugging other people’s code, but without their code. /2

It was a tough hiring profile, finding people who knew computers well enough to be able to intuit & birddog whatever crazy thing an app or the OS was doing that broke it, & then convincing them to join a team where they wouldn’t be writing their own software (except tools). /3

It was an entry-level position in SWE that offered contact with & visibility of every other group. The expectation was that most new hires would move on elsewhere within SWE within a couple years. In the meantime, they’d have no end of challening & mundane problems to solve. /4

During my ~11 years as a hiring manager, I personally hired maybe 20 fulltime & intern employees. Filling empty reqs was a huge source of pressure, both due to workload being down a man and the risk of corporate operational changes yanking an empty req (which did happen). /5

HR handled 100% of sourcing resumes for me, performing a first pass to exclude obvious mismatches. HR turnover was worse than mine, so I quickly told them to just send me everything remotely relevant and I’d filter them myself. “Everything” turned out to be quite a lot. /6

I never saved any firm stats, but on average I probably looked at 500-2000 resumes for every person hired. When I was inexperienced, this took several minutes per resume, carefully pondering & weighing each detail, and extrapolating to some hypothetical future on my new team. /7

After a few years of experience, I would discard a resume within ten seconds. After a while, you’ve simply seen the same exact sort of person hundreds & hundreds of times. Once you know what’s not the right fit, there’s zero point in hemming & hawing. /8

I would speak to maybe 2-4% of the candidates I reviewed. Probably 90%+ were filtered out after the first call. Someone credible would talk to another guy on my team, and on or two more if things went well. Someone promising came in for a day with the whole org, two at a time. /9

And this was just my own team. I also far more regularly interviewed on behalf of other teams in my org, & even other orgs, as other managers grew to appreciate my feedback & opinion. All told, I talked to probably over a thousand candidates from tens of thousands of resumes. /10

Lessons learned: it’s all about which schools’ programs produce the right minds for which specific tasks. Plenty of bright, capable candidates went to schools that simply taught them nothing relevant for an OS platform vendor. We’re not talking databases & web dev for this. /11

Over the years, HR evolved its own prospecting strategies to prioritize schools that produced a high hit rate, plus serving executive bias. Tim went to Duke so after a while all of finance went to Duke. Virtually nobody in SWE came from Duke; different domain entirely. /12

Over ~2004-2014, the volume of resumes from Indian schools skyrocketed, virtually all the "superstar" IITs. I was always unbiased about the protected categories. Looking back, my all-male team was quite “diverse” although everyone was probably INTJ, now that I think about it. /13

I talked at many dozens of Indians, and quickly learned a few things that are invariant: they are helpfully accommodating to the point of obsequiousness, and this holds regardless of whether they have any clue what they’re talking about. This is crucial to understand. /14

When you are speaking with an Indian, you are not communicating. You are engaging in a choreographed dance where they are exclusively tasked with mirroring your moves, and leaving you to walk away thinking that your needs will be satisfied. And that is all that has happened. /15

If you don’t know which follow-up questions to ask, you’ll have no idea that you’ve just been handled by an entity that understands how to “close,” but not how to deliver anything promised. The idea of the latter is never even part of the equation. Utterly alien minds to us. /16

One of Britain’s greatest crimes was teaching them to speak with that hackneyed, goobledygook accent, because it simply fries the brains of most Americans. It is scamouflage for the fact that they will lie, lie, lie as easily as you or I draw breath. It’s indescribable. /17

Thankfully, I became good enough at technical interviewing that a couple simple questions would break their lies wide open, & I could simply nope out in good conscience. After a while, a glance at such resumes told me how the conversations would go, optimizing away the rest. /18

During this time, in other parts of SWE & IS&T, I watched as a couple Indian hires within 18 months turned into an almost wholesale replacement of any other race in the blighted departments. The degree of their apparently illegal hiring practices cannot be overstated. /19

But of course, who is going to complain, and to whom? One of my last cross-functional meetings at the company, myself & one or two other guys from our org met with one of the terraformed orgs. There were 25 of them packed into a room for a meeting that required 5 people tops. /20

Regardless of context, every American needs to understand that they will lie under any circumstances for any reason or no apparent reason whatsoever. It is “cultural,” so get over your Christendom-centric notions of morality; those exist nowhere else on Earth. /21

And they will always & everywhere be India- & Indian-first. This week’s “discourse” laid bare their bottomless seething envy & contempt for our race & our prosperity. The only way we can protect our businesses, our communites, & our Nation is to protect our *own* under law. /22

If you’d like to hear more random vignettes from my time at Apple, please enjoy one of my guest appearances on @myth20c. And feel free to ask questions here. myth20c.wordpress.com/2024/05/20/deu…

Guess I shouldn't have used jargon. "Hiring manager" at Apple isn't HR. Basically every engineering manager like me is a hiring manager, since we are the directly responsible individual for filling our own reqs. The rest of the thread should've made that obvious.

The alt-text for the image discloses I grabbed the image of the award from Reddit. Would've blocked my name out anyway, and they all look alike.

Here's an email forward of a typical bad week in the job, for anyone feeling skeptical.

Follow-up thread:

https://x.com/treblewoe/status/1873749608251441294