It is difficult to get an offer from Apple and other companies that are at the top of their industry. Such companies naturally attract tons of candidates and their success is indicative of a hiring process that selects the most valuable — talented and with pertinent skills — candidates. Getting an on-site interview is hard enough and no guarantee of success. I know people who interviewed with different groups for more than a year before being hired.

I’m often asked what a person can do to increase their chances of being hired. More often than not, these questions come from college student friends of family/friends.

The key, in all of this, is two fold:

1. Maximize your visibility.

2. Maintain professionalism.

So, some random points on the subject. None of this is particularly unique to Apple.

Maximizing your visibility has never been easier than it is today.

Every employer with a remotely competent hiring process will research candidates through both formal — provided references — and casual channels. Casual searches are as easy as doing a google search, checking myspace, linkedin, facebook, and twitter.

Thus:

• Get involved in the communities related to the profession you are pursuing
  • Join mailing lists; post intelligent questions, respond with intelligent answers. Don’t fake understanding stuff and don’t try to paraphrase that which is well documented.
  • Build small sample bits of code to answer questions with sharing in mind. Could someone else read your code as an effective answer to the same question?
• File bugs. Most companies have bug reporting or feedback systems. File useful bugs & feedback. It may seem like a black hole, but if you ever have to interact with the company through other means — say, a job interview — your name will be remembered if you file lots of good bugs.
• Get involved in some open source project. Start with well written bugs, move up to patches, and — if so motivated — commit rights are a great way to demonstrate that you can work well with a team.
• Write in mostly complete, coherent, sentences. Seriously. People reading your words can’t hear the inner voice you used to write it. They can’t hear the sarcastic tone, nor know the context of authorship. Informal is fine, but incomprehensible is not. And, seriously, is it really too hard to type “are” or “our” instead of “r”?
• Never hesitate to contact someone directly, if they have made their email address available. Just make sure you have good reason and don’t be offended if you hear nothing back. Keep your intro short and to the point.

All of the above will both increase your visibility to potential companies and individuals of interest. It is really all about reputation. Every interaction you have with the professional community surrounding the career of your choice contributes or degrades your reputation.

So what does this have to do with internships?

The hardest part about getting a job with a competitive company is getting your foot in the door. You need to have a history of success, a portfolio of work product, and the ability to market yourself through effective, often extremely brief, communications.

Without a depth of experience, going in through the front door, so to speak, isn’t even an option as your CV just isn’t going to stand out from the competition’s.

Internships are the most effective tool I know of for not just getting a foot in the door, but for obtaining an offer that is pretty much tailor made just for you.

Most companies have internship programs and, of those that do, internships are only available to currently enrolled college students. Most companies do not simply treat interns as a cheap labor force. Most companies recognize that interns are a brilliant, low risk, way of seeing if a potential candidate would work out as an employee. An internship can end without an offer of another internship or a job and still be considered quite successful.

The bar for being hired as an intern is much different — not necessarily lower — than an employee. Since internships are, by definition, temporary and less expensive than a full time employee, a company can and will take a greater risk. If there is a spark of potential, that is often enough.

In other words, think of an internship as being paid to have a multi-month job interview. Companies know this and will generally structure the internship program specifically to allow the candidate to demonstrate their potential, often with some kind of end-of-summer presentations to management of the candidate’s work.

Let me reiterate: If you are a college student, spend a summer or two — especially in the final years of your education — as an intern. It is, by far, the best way I know to start your career and it is something only available to you as a student.

And don’t be afraid to use your connections when trying to grab an internship (or job). A simple, brief, email indicating interest can lead to an internship or, at the least, can yield tips on when and how it is best to contact the company.

Personally, I started my career as an intern. First at NeXT, and then at a series of small companies. It was the best job training imaginable and gave me a significant advantage over the folks that pursued the “traditional” graduate-then-job path.

(And, yes, if you made it this far, I do know folks that are looking for interns. Feel free to ping me. Figuring out how — which isn’t hard — is a first test of your motivation.)

It was an unsolicited “application for job of software engineer” email. Sent to my .mac account. Without a To: field or any other uniquely targeting information in the message.

Likely, a fairly wide dispersal and normally something that’d I would delete without a second thought. But this one stood out for a couple of reasons.

Kindly consider my resume for the post of Software Engineer available in your esteemed organization. I am a competent professional seeking excellence. Your company is renowned and provides excellent opportunities for professionals to groom in their respective fields and I would like the honor of being part of such a pronounced institution.

Which organization was that, exactly? What fields? At least this mystery organization is very conspicuous.

Hint: When writing a cover letter, try to indicate that you know the name of the person to whom you are writing (or, at least, something a bit more specific than “The Human Resource Manager”). At the least, demonstrate even a smidgen of domain specific knowledge about the company, technology, or job that you are interested. Even a clue would help.

(Already had 2 phone screens with GOOGLE).

Well, good for you! Yay! Phone screens with GOOGLE! WHEE!

If they went so terribly well, why are you spamming the world for a job?

The included CV — a Word document that I was willing to open in that the AppKit does not emulate Word’s susceptibility to Macro viruses — opens with the traditional career objectives:

My career objective is to be one of the top technical leaders (research and development) in enterprise software architecture, development, and design. (Already had 2 phone screens with GOOGLE).

If having 2 phone screens with GOOGLE was a career objective, then it has been met and shouldn’t be listed in the objectives, should it?

Outside of that, the CV wasn’t bad.

However, the real gem was in the second document attached to the email. It is called gaming.txt. Cool! Maybe “Dude or Dudette” [D-or-D] has some experience writing games or testing them or something and has attached a short document — only 0.8KB — indicating projects D-or-D has worked on.

Uh, no…

A brief excerpt from gaming.txt:

Games ended by Dude or Dudette:
———————————–
Alone in the dark The New Nightmare (PC)
Dino Crisis (PC)
Dino Crisis 2 (PC)
…22 more lines completed…
2006 Fifa World Cup (PC)
Need for Speed Carbon (PC)

Yup. That’s right. D-or-D appears to believe that a list of games successfully completed is a competitive advantage in the job market.

No, I’m not kidding. Had me laughing out loud for a few minutes on that one.

I’m tempted to write back to see if I can get some 1337 phints for NfS.

(No — didn’t appear to be a Phishing kind of thing. D-or-D was found via Google and seems ot have a legitimate ‘net fingerprint. I’m not going to out the individual, but I am not surprised that someone did. D-or-D will do well with a little bit of repackaging and better presentation.)

So far, it has been a blast. And I’m betting that there is zero risk of getting bored anytime soon.

Now, it appears that Life is about to mimic Art.

Personally, I don’t think most of the population has any idea how reliant the United States is upon immigrant labor. Looking at the food chain, everything from New York’s top restaurants to the behemoth meat packing plants to many of the fresh veggies at the farmer’s market or in the grocery store all rely upon immigrant, often latino and often paid well below minimum wage, labor.

Monday has the potential to be a very interesting day.

The list with very brief descriptions. Click through for more information.

2373705: Senior Embedded Systems Engineer Help to improve support for iPod development within the Xcode tool-chain.

2374115: Performance Analysis Tools Engineer Improve the integration and capabilities of the performance analysis tools included with Xcode.

2374098: Embedded Systems Performance Engineer Embedded systems (iPod) focused improvements to the performance analysis tools included with Xcode.

2375392: Distributed Build Engineer Help to improve the distributed build feature within Xcode.

2374092: Build Systems Engineer Focused on improving the build system within Xcode. This is not about building Xcode itself, but about refining the code that is run when a developer hits the Build button while running Xcode.

2371488: Xcode Engineer — Xcode UI The Xcode team is seeking an experienced engineer with excellent end user application human interface design skills to conceive, design and develop future enhancements to Xcode and its supporting tools.

The following isn’t with the Xcode team, but may be of interest to folks interest in contributing to development tools.

2371718: Interface Builder Engineer Help to improve and extend Interface Builder.

The position is with my team.

Join the team responsible for Interface Builder–Apple’s industry-leading GUI Builder. We are looking for a motivated and experienced software engineer to continue improving Interface Builder pushing it in new and exciting directions. The chosen candidate needs to be capable of working on a large existing code base, and of helping to design and implement new functionality. Responsibilities will include supporting both the Cocoa and Carbon frameworks in Interface Builder.

If I wasn’t already working at Apple, I would jump on that one…