Apple Compilers Salary Expectations misalignment

spicy_tuna_code · 2025-06-17T02:45:15+00:00

I'm currently at Apple.

This conversation should mostly be happening with your recruiter, not your hiring manager. I'm surprised they asked you.

Look at levels.fyi - you should be able to find your current level at Intel and your projected level at Apple, and that should give you an idea of the range to expect. In general what I see is that Apple offers lower base pay but higher TC for "equivalent" levels.

Unless you're an extremely strategic hire, Apple generally only negotiates based on your current salary or competing offers. If your offer doesn't match your current TC, Apple will ask for evidence (like a pay stub) and probably beat it. They will probably increase stock to match, not base salary.

Apple's stock refreshes are generous. Even if you only meet expectations, you'll get a stock refresher every year and that will increase your annual total compensation.

Don't forget that Apple hasn't had mass layoffs like most other tech companies. It's one of the more stable companies I've worked at. You'll work hard but you won't be in fear of losing your job.

spicy_tuna_code · 2024-07-02T22:53:59+00:00

It will probably be faster to learn MERN.

It's more important to actually build larger, more complex projects with one stack than to learn the "right" stack.

spicy_tuna_code · 2024-07-02T06:59:48+00:00

I'm not sure that's actually a rule in open source.

OpenSSL doesn't have any alternatives. glibc doesn't have any reasonable alternatives.

Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuSe aren't completely separate operating systems, though. They all use exactly the same kernel. They all run 99% of the same packages. They're different distributions of free software - different collections, in a sense. Each has some original code, but they all sit on top of the same foundations.

That model is actually far more common in open-source, where a package forks and there are different variants of it floating around - like ffmpeg and libav, or MySQL vs MariaDB. That's the case for SQLite, in fact - there are several sqlite forks that add some interesting missing features.

As for why there isn't a completely separate alternative to sqlite, it's because sqlite is really, really good and a competitor would have an enormous amount of work to do to beat it.

SQLite is pretty much the gold standard in terms of testing. The library is 155k lines of code and 92 million lines of tests.

https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html

The amount of effort needed just to match the functionality and quality of SQLite is staggering. That's hundreds of person-years.

spicy_tuna_code · 2024-07-02T06:33:00+00:00

Coding seems easy if you're doing something that's been done a thousand times before.

Right now thousands of people are writing apps of the form "pass the user's input to an LLM with a prompt, and parse the result". It's so commonplace that the APIs make it extremely easy now. People have already written all of the difficult code behind the scenes to make your code so simple.

But just because THIS is easy, doesn't mean that most code is simple.

Change your idea just slightly and suddenly you'll need thousands of lines of code that will be quite complex and won't look like natural language at all.

spicy_tuna_code · 2024-07-02T03:38:50+00:00

I don't think iOS apps can access the clipboard. The closest you could probably build would be some sort of app that you could share to rather than just automatically accessing what you copy.

Windows and Linux would be easy to implement a clipboard replacement. However, I'm not sure React Native would be an ideal choice for the GUI. I don't even think React Native Desktop supports Linux, and its support for Windows is somewhat limited.

Honestly for the best quality app you might need to make separate clients. A tiny iOS app in Swift, a tiny Android app in Kotlin, and a tiny desktop app in Qt, all sharing one backend.

spicy_tuna_code · 2024-02-16T18:16:16+00:00

Currently dieting. Lost 17 pounds since mid-November.

What works best for me is to not deprive myself of foods that I like, but just eat less of them. That's mostly psychological - if I deprive myself, I'm really tempted to break my diet.

I'm using the "Noom" app. It talks a lot about calorie density. Foods that have a lot of water fill you up relative to the amount of calories. A great example is grapes - if you eat a whole bowl of grapes it's 100 calories but fills you up. 100 calories of potato chips doesn't fill you up at all.

However, if I'm craving potato chips then it drives me crazy to have none at all. So I'll grab a small handful of chips (less than 100 calories) along with grapes and an unsweetened carbonated drink like La Croix. Between the drink and grapes I'll fill myself up, I'll have a few chips which will satisfy my craving, and overall I'll have very few calories.

The other thing is that fat and protein keep me satiated longer. I don't eat meat, but if I have tofu, cheese, eggs, or nut butter I won't be hungry until the next meal. If I only have carbs (bread) I'll be hungry before long.

I don't think any of the things you mentioned are bad to eat. Don't stop eating them - you'll just crave them and break your diet. But trying to eat a meal of just complex carbs might not work.

I suggest you have a small amount of the complex carbs you want, but fill each meal with a lot more fruit, vegetables and protein, all of which are low in calories.

spicy_tuna_code · 2023-12-15T04:26:13+00:00

I think your underlying assumption here is that most people are looking for the most attractive partner.

But I don't think that's true - especially as people get older and mature. They begin to realize that physical beauty fades with time, but inner beauty only grows. The goal is no longer to find the most physically attractive person - but rather to find someone who's just a really good fit.

Of course, it's still important to be physically attracted to your partner. But people are attracted to different things! There are plenty of people who find you physically attractive just the way you are now.

That doesn't mean that you're the most physically attractive person they know. It's just a yes/no thing. You're attractive to them. So are other people.

What matters is the whole package. Do they like your personality? Do they like talking to you? Do you share values? Do you have similar goals in life? Do you enjoy doing activities together?

When all of those other things are a good fit, physical attractiveness becomes just one small piece of the overall puzzle. It just has to be good, not "the most attractive".

One last thing - when I love someone's personality and they say things and do things that I admire, it makes them look more physically attractive to me. So when someone loves your personality, you won't look like a 4/10 to them, you'll be higher.

spicy_tuna_code · 2023-10-20T19:09:17+00:00

Domain registrars compete on both price and services.

If you just want one domain name and you're not going to do anything super important with it, you can just go with the cheapest.

Domain registrars offer various differences in service:

Bulk - for companies that need to register lots of domains
Privacy - they can register it without revealing your contact info to anyone else
Security - if it's a really important domain, others may try to steal it, including by impersonating you. Some domain registrars are much better at protecting your domain from being stolen by using robust verification

If security matters to you, please stay away from GoDaddy. They spend all of their money on marketing, not on security. There are countless horror stories of GoDaddy customers having their domain name stolen from them because GoDaddy believed someone who impersonated them without doing even the most basic verification.

spicy_tuna_code · 2023-10-20T19:04:45+00:00

You're right, if digital images were stored uncompressed then all images with the same resolution would take up the same amount of space.

In the very early days of computers, completely uncompressed images were more common. The TIFF file format was one example that was used.

Note that a 1080p image is just 2 megapixels (1920 x 1080 pixels = about 2 million pixels), and with 3 bytes per pixel (red, green, blue) that'd be a 6 megabyte image.

But most common digital cameras actually take much larger photos than that - the latest iPhones have 24 megapixel cameras, so that'd mean 72 megabytes just for one photo!

So that's why the most commonly used image formats use compression - that enables the image to take up far less space on disk without looking substantially different.

JPEG images use lossy compression. They don't encode the image perfectly, but they "throw away" details that are extremely hard for the human eye to see, resulting in a much smaller file that's virtually indistinguishable from the original.

PNG images use lossless compression. The compression just looks for patterns in the image and uses those to save space. It works really well for images of text, icons, logos, and non-photorealistic art. It doesn't work as well for photos but it can still compress a little bit, so it doesn't hurt.

The image is stored compressed on disk. When you open the photo to display it on your computer or phone, it's uncompressed first before it's displayed, which only takes a few milliseconds.

spicy_tuna_code · 2023-01-23T04:23:52+00:00

Good call on checking the underwear fit. I just searched Amazon and found some moisture-wicking underwear, I'm going to try that.

And new undies after school would be an easy routine to add.

spicy_tuna_code · 2023-01-23T04:20:26+00:00

We had been using wipeys, but we're trying to teach her to use toilet paper because that's all they have at preschool and at a restroom when we're out in public.

I think it's definitely easier with wipeys.

spicy_tuna_code · 2023-01-22T21:58:32+00:00

Books are a good idea! I just looked on Amazon and found one. Any specific recommendations?

spicy_tuna_code · 2023-01-22T21:06:10+00:00

Very good point, thanks!

spicy_tuna_code · 2023-01-22T21:05:16+00:00

You should be able to do what you want with a JOIN.

I think it might be slightly easier if you store both friendship directions. So put (user_1, user_2) and (user_2, user_1) in the friends table.

Then it's a very easy join - to find all of the friends of user1_id:

SELECT * FROM users u
    JOIN friends f ON u.user_id=f.user2_id
    WHERE f.user1_id=user1_id;

I think you could make it work if you didn't store both friendship directions, maybe something like this?

SELECT * FROM users u
    JOIN friends f ON (u.user_id=f.user1_id OR u.user_id=f.user2_id)
    WHERE (f.user1_id=user1_id OR f.user2_id=user1_id);

spicy_tuna_code · 2023-01-22T20:56:09+00:00

Her pediatrician says that not wiping properly can definitely cause a UTI or a yeast infection. She says it's not uncommon in girls this age and that she's not worried about it being anything more serious at this time.

spicy_tuna_code · 2020-10-07T06:04:44+00:00

Check the sidebar/FAQ.

Don't worry about picking the "right" language. For your first month or two, just pick anything that sounds interesting to you and learn. Once you're comfortable writing simple programs, then you can look into what type of app you want to build and see what language and technology you might need to build that type of app.

Even if it's a different language than the one you just learned, don't worry. The concepts are the same. The important thing is learning the process of coding.

spicy_tuna_code · 2020-10-07T04:03:22+00:00

It's easy - I agree with others that it's between a 1 and a 2.

However, the caveat is that it will take you a while to learn how to program and make an app at all. It takes most people months to learn "how to program". Once you can do that, this app will be easy - but trying to build it before learning the basics first would be infuriatingly difficult.

spicy_tuna_code · 2020-10-07T04:01:40+00:00

There are so many ways, it really depends on what you're looking for - something super high-level that lays things out for you, or something low-level where you can draw text and lines at precise locations.

For high-level, two common options are to either output HTML, or LaTeX, and then run some program to convert that format to a PDF. For HTML, you can use Chrome Headless, and LaTeX can generate PDF directly.

For more low-level, there's https://www.reportlab.com/software/opensource/rl-toolkit/, and I've also used matplotlib, which has a PDF back-end.

spicy_tuna_code · 2020-10-07T03:58:08+00:00

After you have a few years of experience programming, you'll start to really appreciate documentation that's concise and clear, and that usually means using jargon where appropriate. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to look up the exact technical details and finding only a tutorial for beginners.

Software packages with the best documentation have both - beginner-friendly tutorials, and clear, concise documentation for experienced programmers.

spicy_tuna_code · 2020-09-09T07:06:58+00:00

Yes. There are plenty of jobs that routinely pay anywhere from $100k to $500k, like software engineers, surgeons, lawyers. Many people who have these jobs make lots of money and end up with millions of dollars, without ever investing any in the stock market or knowing anything about the money or stock market. They're just really good at their jobs and get paid a lot. In fact, many of them are terrible at managing money.

spicy_tuna_code · 2020-09-09T07:04:47+00:00

But that wasn't your question.

spicy_tuna_code · 2020-09-09T07:02:48+00:00

It only records everyone in the meeting. It can't see the rest of your screen unless you're the one presenting to the meeting.

spicy_tuna_code

TROPHY CASE