Difficult Interview – Overall Negative Experience – No – Wed, 21 Feb 2018
Interviewed in Sunnyvale, CA (took 5 days)
Contact with recruiter was pleasant and polite. Phone screens with three different developers. Feedback was very positive. All were from very different divisions of Apple and that is where the problems started. That was probably a bad idea and I should have corrected them. I should have stipulated only one group and have a full set of interviews pertinent only to them. But they should have known that too. The interviewing was a full day and fairly intense. Most of the questions were relevant but some were just pointlessly obtuse. I chalk that up to experience...it is mostly new grads and junior developers who enjoy dressing people down. Senior developers have worked that out of their system and actually want to determine if they want to work with you. I dropped the ball on a couple of things and that is my fault, but that has to be expected in any interview.
I feel like I got mixed messaging. The phone screens and recruiter conversations seemed to indicate I was a slam-dunk for one of these groups. Maybe they should be more neutral in their tone until the interview process is done.
All in all not a terrible experience and I have to own my mistakes, and my take-away was that the huge tech companies can afford to be very selective. Apple, like Google, Amazon etc are not understaffed or desperate. Quite the contrary, they are probably overstaffed. So as a result you have to expect that there is little penalty to them for declining a candidate.
Interview Questions
Some interesting stuff on consensus algorithms. The usual Binary Search Tree garbage, some other stuff that bordered on trivia.
Answer Question
Other Details
The interview consisted of Phone Interview, 1:1 Interview, Group/Panel Interview and Presentation