Just remembered that time in my Google job interview when they asked me what my favorite forensics tool is and I said it was grep.
Protip: You don't have to leetcode or invent a new kind of physics to land a senior engineer job, just knowing how stuff really works is great.
@tdierks Remember how the Mac boot progress bar used to crawl along to about 50% and then it was done?
In Mac OS 8.1, I had to change the Startup Manager to keep loading extensions in MacRoman order even though the contents of the directory listings on HFS Plus volumes were in Unicode order (some extensions depended on load order and were named to make them load in MacRoman order). I'd also added a callback before and after each extension was executed so startup management programs, like Conflict Catcher, would continue to work.
Another engineer used those new Startup Manager callbacks to make the progress bar progress more consistently. When those changes went into a build, people testing that build started asking “What changed to make booting my Mac so much faster?!?” It wasn't any faster -- it was just a perception.
We thought about making the progress bar longer based on the display width so that people with bigger displays would get even faster boots 🤣 We didn't do that.
Matt Linton 
Jim Luther