Buy a cactus, get hired

Interviewing people at Apple was something I always enjoyed. It was a way to have a small, but important part of building the company.

I had a number of interview topics I liked to deploy. One of the most important to me was learning what software projects the candidate had accomplished that were not part of a class at school or a job. It was a big red flag if a candidate has no side projects, and learning about any side projects could reveal a tremendous amount about them.

In 2001, when I was on the Mail team, I interviewed a candidate, who I will call Felix, for a QA position on Address Book (now Contacts). In addition to testing experience, we wanted someone with excellent scripting ability.

We found people that were strong scripters, but lacked testing experience. Felix was the opposite: rather weak on scripting, but solid everywhere else.

The candidate put a link to his website on the résumé. Before the interview I poked around and found a page of scripts that he had written. They we…