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Apple’s tech interview scope for junior position

105 points by krzyzanowskim 6y ago

krzyzanowskim 6y ago
The full story is https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestionsEU/comments/laz3hv/more_than_1000_applications_57_interviews_one/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestionsEU/comments/laz3hv...
- tumetab1 6y ago
  With that it makes much more sense. I think the interviews at apple had such big scope because the applicant had it on its CV, they had other good applicants so they have to really choose the best ones and/or they were trying to figure out what to offer him/her according to his/her skills.
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  Thanks. In particular, "junior" (which is very vague anyway) doesn't appear anywhere in the post. Confusingly, the Reddit post talks about an "internship" at Intel while the person's website identifies them as "Software Engineer @Intel". A ragetweet saying "what the hell did I just read" without linking to the source turned out to be about as useful as expected.
  - stevegalla 6y ago
    The OP answers in the comments, “It's a 2+ years experience role.” The post also says “ I wasn’t too excited until 7th January 2021 when my recruiter called me again and said “Welcome to Apple!”.” In terms of working at Intel, the post said internship ending December 2020, and their LinkedIn profile says, “Incoming Software Engineer @Apple”. I agree the tweet wasn’t great, but there is info in the Reddit thread to fill in the gaps from the source.
spoonjim 6y ago
Well that’s what it takes to compete at that level. If you want to work at Apple, learn a fuck ton of programming. If you want to work in the National Football League, learn to throw a football at 50 miles an hour with 3 inch accuracy while both you and the target are being chased by big strong men. Competition at the top is supposed to be tough.
- movedx 6y ago
  Is it the "top", though? If you get a job at Apple are you a "made man" at that point? Is your career at its peak? I don't think so. I would decline a position at Apple, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. There are plenty of other companies offering problems at a similar scale that are equally as hard.
  - asutekku 6y ago
    If you get a job at FAANG, you are pretty much guaranteed to be employed for the rest of your life due to the weight the names of FAANG carry. Sure, other companies might offer similar challenges but if you've only worked at a random company X, it doesn't give you an advantage in future job interviews. Name recognition is more important than some realize.
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      Yeah, pretty much this. I can't stress enough the difference living in a hot area for tech, having a famous school or some big names in your resume makes in attracting recruiters from top companies vs working for some random mom and pop shops in a unknown city.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - p_l 6y ago
      It used to be like that, but these days I often encounter the opposite, with ex-FAANG people having stigma attached to them, though arguably mostly google. FB is I think second in that.
      - mav3rick 6y ago
        500k per year, what a tough "stigma"
FDSGSG 6y ago
It's a bit broad, but nothing here seems unreasonable. I do wonder how Apple comp is in Europe?
trinovantes 6y ago
At the risk of sounding like Stockholm Syndrome, why is this hilarious? If you want to work at a top tech company, the bar is much higher. First round questions cover standard CS undergrad curriculum and second round covers the depth of his background. I'd say he's lucky his second round is tailored towards his (presumably Python) background instead of his interviewer's background. Other than the question about HTTP2/1.1, nothing seem too absurd.
- akmarinov 6y ago
  With this kind of knowledge why be a junior at Apple when you can be a senior somewhere else and presumably be better compensated?
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    Because most companies view seniority as a function of your domain experience, not your broad knowledge of generic CS, so you won't be considered for Senior positions without the right amount of experience.
  - kiallmacinnes 6y ago
    Most likely because they[1] wouldn't get a senior job elsewhere. "Senior" has only a little to do with technical experience, and a lot to do with what could generally be bucketed into "work experience". [1]: I'm talking in general, not about this specific person :)
    - throw14082020 6y ago
      I've also found salary is not tied to interview difficulty. I've got really high job offers easily (3 hour on-site), and struggled to get the low paid ones because they're technical interview process is difficult/ boring (8 hour project work). Having said that, I think its more common to find higher salary paying jobs to be more selective/ difficult.
  - tester34 6y ago
    I don't think this is a "senior level knowledge" Seniority comes mostly from experience 5/10 years Of course some companies give senior titles for people with 2-3 years of xp, but I think we can all agree that this is big "XD"
chx 6y ago
If you are a startup (which is not unreasonable to presume given this space) then do look at https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-the-enterprise-of-hiring/ https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-the-enterprise... for a better way of doing this.
- notretarded 6y ago
  No
  - chx 6y ago
    Care to elaborate? That's the best hiring process I've ever seen.
    - matsemann 6y ago
      It's a troll account with most posts being removed, just ignore it
      - notretarded 6y ago
        How dare you
    - notretarded 6y ago
      I didn't want to
LandR 6y ago
Maybe it's because I'm old but I'm not doing 4hrs of interviews for anyone.
- 74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
  You probably will if your choices are limited and one of them is being unemployed or underpaid.
  - true_religion 6y ago
    I don't know how limited someone's choices can be if they consider working for Apple to be a real possibility.
- chmod775 6y ago
  If I'm going to spend the next few years working with that individual you bet I'll give it four hours, then some, and a few days to reflect.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I just don’t feel I get anything out of 4 hours that I wouldn’t get out of 1 hour. Someone either solidly sinks their chances in that time, or they’re adequate. Maybe I’ve never been in a position where I had to pick between two great candidates, but then, either one would have been fine.
- bradlys 6y ago
  > Maybe it's because I'm old but I'm not doing 4hrs of interviews for anyone. Really? That's your complaint? As far as interviews go, I can't see anyone but yourself complaining about the length of interviews these days. It's usually the ridiculous breadth of knowledge required (on the tip of your tongue ready) that people get upset about. If anything, I'm usually wishing interviews with companies were longer so that I could assess the culture better. It's very hard to get a feeling if a place is the right place to work when you spend 85%+ of the time in interviews talking about yourself and then answering some leetcode/design/tell-me-about questions.
albertzeyer 6y ago
Why is this scope of the interview a problem though? The intention is to get a good impression of the abilities. It doesn't mean you need really to do a perfect 100% on all questions and know every single detail. And then, after interviewing a couple of candidates, they can choose what they do, or where to set the actual bar. And probably they also have certain priorities. And I assume there actually are junior people who have experience in all the listed technologies. Maybe not so many, but there are. It's not so uncommon that you play with technology already during school.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  >The intention is to get a good impression of the abilities. It doesn't mean you need really to do a perfect 100% on all questions and know every single detail. Hopefully that is being conveyed to the candidate as well because if you're in an interview for hours, being barraged by a lot of technical questions and not having any proper answers to them, it's pretty much soulcrushing.
  - bartread 6y ago
    It hasn't happened for a long time but I remember, many years ago, being repeatedly frustrated by attending job interviews where I was questioned about languages/skills that clearly weren't listed on my CV and/or where I'd been clear with the recruiter up front that I had no knowledge or experience in these areas. E.g., even now I have next to no knowledge of Python because I've never used it in detail. Nor do I claim to have done on my CV. An interview where I get asked "Lots of Python" questions (see the second round section on OP) isn't going to go well, and even as a veteran engineer with a fairly thick skin I'm not going to be terribly happy about enduring it. This kind of problem is exacerbated if your interviewers haven't done sufficient prep so, instead of realising that you don't know anything about a particular technology, they take your poor performance in that area as an indication that you overall suck. I understand why companies ask these standardised batches of questions: we all know that IT is full of jokers who claim proficiency in technologies where in reality they have very limited exposure and skill. But if somebody's actually told you they don't know something then you're simply wasting your time and theirs, and creating an unnecessarily negative experience, by going through the motions. The thing with Google is that, because so many people want to work there, there will likely be somebody in that mass of candidates that has reasonable knowledge in all those areas, and they can afford to be that picky. Most companies can't which, overall, I think is a good thing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tester34 6y ago
wow big props to Apple for security related questions we need more security related questions than algos bad algo can always be rewritten meanwhile leak cannot be reverted (it may be insanely difficult)
krtkush 6y ago
OP on reddit says that two of his offers got revoked! It must be so frustrating to give hours of interview successfully but still not getting that job.
akmarinov 6y ago
Compare this to DuckDuckGo’s interview process. You get 2 assignments and get paid for both. First one - write a feature implementation proposal Second one - they pick a feature or an issue from their open source code on Github and you have to implement it You get paid for the whole process, the work is remote, pay is equal across locations.
- nojito 6y ago
  Apple gets far more applicants per job position than ddg
  - 74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
    They are also bigger and make more money.
    - nojito 6y ago
      It's much more efficient to pre-filter candidates before they get in front of an FTE.
  - gregoriol 6y ago
    So they make more people loose 4 hours of their lives?
    - fingerlocks 6y ago
      Four hours is on the low end, even for regular companies. Online assessments, phone screen, on site, various calls with hiring managers and internal recruiters, post-interview follow-ups, all combined can easily push up to 8 hours or more over a few weeks.
    - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
      4 hours is a bog standard interview process. I would seriously question the standards of a company that spent significantly less than that.
intsunny 6y ago
There are many commenters who are going to write something along the lines of: "If you want to work at top tech company"... However given the recent quality/stability issues of MacOS and IOS I suspect more technical brain power is not what Apple needs. The "stability" of Catalina, and the roll out of Big Sur left a lot to be desired.
- b3kart 6y ago
  No company is perfect, but it doesn't mean they should stop trying to hire competent people.
  - slumpt_ 6y ago
    He’s suggesting their approach to hiring competent people is flawed.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    It means they should start trying to hire competent people. What I’m seeing in this list is more like: Did this person study CS and actually remember everything, and did they happen to look through a bunch of normally irrelevant stuff for shits and giggles.
- glintik 6y ago
  To tell the truth, there are no questions about quality or stability in Apple's interview :). I think, they need introduce a new 3rd round about this.
- 0x008 6y ago
  I would not attribute this to Apple's hiring process. It is very easy to have excitingly talented people being dragged down into oblivion by enterprise management decisions.
- Traster 6y ago
  Quality is always an organisational issue not a matter of individual talents.
gsnedders 6y ago
Much of this seems to be asking questions about things the candidate has experience in? We don't know what either job they applied for was nor what was on their CV.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  Yeah strongly agree with this. I suspect there is missing context in the tweet. It might have been that the position was something like “engineer on some language runtime/compilers team,” or that the candidates cv had a bunch of stuff about low level python/c++ implementation details. Another reasonable hypothesis is that the candidate was just very strong and kept getting asked more questions. Eg maybe they are asked some question about c++ semantics or stl and this develops into discussing details of vtables and suchlike. Or maybe they are asked a general question about python performance and this develops in the expected direction towards discussion of the GIL, and then further into discussion of other runtime details. It feels totally random that there’s some discussion of tail recursion next to knapsack problem. That feels to me like eg the candidate or interviewer makes some reference to it and there’s some discussion, rather than the interview being about tail recursion. Similarly, maybe the interview was maybe about 0/1 knapsack but the candidate solved it faster than expected and discussion moved on to fractional knapsack and then random time fillers. Also note that there’s a few points where there isn’t much discussion. Maybe a different candidate could have had a lot more interesting things to say about the system design question about ratelimiters. Maybe I’m wrong and this is illustrative of Apple’s minimum standards, but I would guess that it’s some very strong candidate who’s doing a lot of technical interviews and writing down experiences.
- 0x008 6y ago
  Came here to say this. Despite everyone being like "oh my god it is so much skill needed for a junior position", we should be asking ourselves if that was maybe because the application had an exceptional CV? From the twitter post it seems like most of what they asked during the 4hours was something the application had proficient experience in. Seems like a rather comfortable experience?
  - stu2b50 6y ago
londons_explore 6y ago
Doesn't seem unreasonable to me... I think I'd be able to take a good crack at demonstrating understanding of all those things to the level of detail you can get to in a few hours of interviewing. I doubt I'm the only one.
glintik 6y ago
Apple's interview: lots of security questions. Reality: Macos security issue with blank root password. Knowledge != smart.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  You can have sucky products made by good people. Once you enter a big corp, all that CS knowledge they ask you gets flushed quickly and replaced with learning various internal tools, processes and corporate idiosyncrasies which are unique to each team/project/company.
may4m 6y ago
Is their success rate zero? I don't think so. People want to work at FAANG so much they can afford to raise the hiring bar to hire someone with intermediate/senior knowledge on junior level.
nonameiguess 6y ago
I think people miss that you don't need to ace these interviews to get hired. It's just more data points that allow them to probe the exact depth and breadth of your knowledge, as well as your general thought processes and how you go about investigating problems you don't already know the answer to. You're not necessarily expected to answer 100% of the questions 100% correctly. I'm not at Apple, but still a fairly desirable position at a good SV company where I was grilled on some extremely arcane details of things I claimed to have experience with on my resume. Some of them I knew instantly, some I didn't but had a reasonable wrong guess and the interviewer(s) explained the right answer and we moved on. That was fine. They explained beforehand why they were asking what they were asking and were very clear that I wasn't expected to be a walking encyclopedia, though I definitely had to show that I knew how to find and use the right part of the right encyclopedia.
- stu2b50 6y ago
  Additionally, looking at the list I'm pretty sure the interview were resume based, too. They asked such a breadth of questions because OP had such a breadth of supposed experience and expertise on his resume. I am fairly certain every apple interview does not involve questioning the candidate about their PyCon experiences. I see nothing wrong going down a resume and asking about each point. It certainly sounds better than the leetcode infested mess the rest of the industry uses.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > some I didn't but had a reasonable wrong guess and the interviewer(s) explained the right answer and we moved on. That was fine. You would be surprised at the number of candidates who would start arguing with the interviewer. Being able to learn new things on the spot during a pretty stressful event, admit one is wrong with no shame and move on is a great trait to select for.
the_only_law 6y ago
I once considered looking into some more niche FAANG positions, including some at Apple. Probably won’t make it. I just don’t have the time / capability to learn this stuff vs the domain knowledge for the positions I looked at. If I knew ahead of time what questions would he asked for why position maybe, but given again that the stuff I was looking at at the time was domain specific, not like Glassdoor will really help.
MarkSweep 6y ago
Compared to Google, Facebook, and smaller companies I interviewed at, Apple was an outlier in terms of quantity of interviews. I was interviewing for a build engineer role, which is sort of DevOpsy as I understood it. More ops than dev. It was located in Tokyo. Boston: 30 minute technical interview at career fair 2 back-to-back technical screen over phone Tokyo: on-site with ~4 one hour technical interviews Cupertino: on-site with ~4 one hour behavioral interviews 1 or 2 more phone calls with higher level managers (would have been in person, but COVID happened at this point) I ultimately did not get the job, either because I was kind of a stretch in several ways or because of COVID.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Guess you didn’t get paid for your time?
burntoutfire 6y ago
Out of curiosity, I've looked at Apple's jobs page and it is... something different. There's plenty of self-aggrandizing BS that you'd expect from them, but the most basic info is just missing - e.g. they don't even provide a list of locations where they have job openings... This page is the most "design over substance" that I've seen from them.

105 points by krzyzanowskim 6y ago

The full story is https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestionsEU/comments/laz3hv/more_than_1000_applications_57_interviews_one/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestionsEU/comments/laz3hv...

tumetab1 6y ago
With that it makes much more sense. I think the interviews at apple had such big scope because the applicant had it on its CV, they had other good applicants so they have to really choose the best ones and/or they were trying to figure out what to offer him/her according to his/her skills.
tom_mellior 6y ago
Thanks. In particular, "junior" (which is very vague anyway) doesn't appear anywhere in the post. Confusingly, the Reddit post talks about an "internship" at Intel while the person's website identifies them as "Software Engineer @Intel". A ragetweet saying "what the hell did I just read" without linking to the source turned out to be about as useful as expected.
- stevegalla 6y ago
  The OP answers in the comments, “It's a 2+ years experience role.” The post also says “ I wasn’t too excited until 7th January 2021 when my recruiter called me again and said “Welcome to Apple!”.” In terms of working at Intel, the post said internship ending December 2020, and their LinkedIn profile says, “Incoming Software Engineer @Apple”. I agree the tweet wasn’t great, but there is info in the Reddit thread to fill in the gaps from the source.

spoonjim 6y ago

Well that’s what it takes to compete at that level. If you want to work at Apple, learn a fuck ton of programming. If you want to work in the National Football League, learn to throw a football at 50 miles an hour with 3 inch accuracy while both you and the target are being chased by big strong men. Competition at the top is supposed to be tough.

movedx 6y ago
Is it the "top", though? If you get a job at Apple are you a "made man" at that point? Is your career at its peak? I don't think so. I would decline a position at Apple, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. There are plenty of other companies offering problems at a similar scale that are equally as hard.
- asutekku 6y ago
  If you get a job at FAANG, you are pretty much guaranteed to be employed for the rest of your life due to the weight the names of FAANG carry. Sure, other companies might offer similar challenges but if you've only worked at a random company X, it doesn't give you an advantage in future job interviews. Name recognition is more important than some realize.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    Yeah, pretty much this. I can't stress enough the difference living in a hot area for tech, having a famous school or some big names in your resume makes in attracting recruiters from top companies vs working for some random mom and pop shops in a unknown city.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - p_l 6y ago
    It used to be like that, but these days I often encounter the opposite, with ex-FAANG people having stigma attached to them, though arguably mostly google. FB is I think second in that.
    - mav3rick 6y ago
      500k per year, what a tough "stigma"

FDSGSG 6y ago

It's a bit broad, but nothing here seems unreasonable. I do wonder how Apple comp is in Europe?

trinovantes 6y ago

At the risk of sounding like Stockholm Syndrome, why is this hilarious? If you want to work at a top tech company, the bar is much higher. First round questions cover standard CS undergrad curriculum and second round covers the depth of his background. I'd say he's lucky his second round is tailored towards his (presumably Python) background instead of his interviewer's background. Other than the question about HTTP2/1.1, nothing seem too absurd.

akmarinov 6y ago
With this kind of knowledge why be a junior at Apple when you can be a senior somewhere else and presumably be better compensated?
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  Because most companies view seniority as a function of your domain experience, not your broad knowledge of generic CS, so you won't be considered for Senior positions without the right amount of experience.
- kiallmacinnes 6y ago
  Most likely because they[1] wouldn't get a senior job elsewhere. "Senior" has only a little to do with technical experience, and a lot to do with what could generally be bucketed into "work experience". [1]: I'm talking in general, not about this specific person :)
  - throw14082020 6y ago
    I've also found salary is not tied to interview difficulty. I've got really high job offers easily (3 hour on-site), and struggled to get the low paid ones because they're technical interview process is difficult/ boring (8 hour project work). Having said that, I think its more common to find higher salary paying jobs to be more selective/ difficult.
- tester34 6y ago
  I don't think this is a "senior level knowledge" Seniority comes mostly from experience 5/10 years Of course some companies give senior titles for people with 2-3 years of xp, but I think we can all agree that this is big "XD"

chx 6y ago

If you are a startup (which is not unreasonable to presume given this space) then do look at https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-the-enterprise-of-hiring/ https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-the-enterprise... for a better way of doing this.

notretarded 6y ago
No
- chx 6y ago
  Care to elaborate? That's the best hiring process I've ever seen.
  - matsemann 6y ago
    It's a troll account with most posts being removed, just ignore it
    - notretarded 6y ago
      How dare you
  - notretarded 6y ago
    I didn't want to

LandR 6y ago

Maybe it's because I'm old but I'm not doing 4hrs of interviews for anyone.

74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
You probably will if your choices are limited and one of them is being unemployed or underpaid.
- true_religion 6y ago
  I don't know how limited someone's choices can be if they consider working for Apple to be a real possibility.
chmod775 6y ago
If I'm going to spend the next few years working with that individual you bet I'll give it four hours, then some, and a few days to reflect.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I just don’t feel I get anything out of 4 hours that I wouldn’t get out of 1 hour. Someone either solidly sinks their chances in that time, or they’re adequate. Maybe I’ve never been in a position where I had to pick between two great candidates, but then, either one would have been fine.
bradlys 6y ago
> Maybe it's because I'm old but I'm not doing 4hrs of interviews for anyone. Really? That's your complaint? As far as interviews go, I can't see anyone but yourself complaining about the length of interviews these days. It's usually the ridiculous breadth of knowledge required (on the tip of your tongue ready) that people get upset about. If anything, I'm usually wishing interviews with companies were longer so that I could assess the culture better. It's very hard to get a feeling if a place is the right place to work when you spend 85%+ of the time in interviews talking about yourself and then answering some leetcode/design/tell-me-about questions.

albertzeyer 6y ago

Why is this scope of the interview a problem though? The intention is to get a good impression of the abilities. It doesn't mean you need really to do a perfect 100% on all questions and know every single detail. And then, after interviewing a couple of candidates, they can choose what they do, or where to set the actual bar. And probably they also have certain priorities. And I assume there actually are junior people who have experience in all the listed technologies. Maybe not so many, but there are. It's not so uncommon that you play with technology already during school.

Hamuko 6y ago
>The intention is to get a good impression of the abilities. It doesn't mean you need really to do a perfect 100% on all questions and know every single detail. Hopefully that is being conveyed to the candidate as well because if you're in an interview for hours, being barraged by a lot of technical questions and not having any proper answers to them, it's pretty much soulcrushing.
- bartread 6y ago
  It hasn't happened for a long time but I remember, many years ago, being repeatedly frustrated by attending job interviews where I was questioned about languages/skills that clearly weren't listed on my CV and/or where I'd been clear with the recruiter up front that I had no knowledge or experience in these areas. E.g., even now I have next to no knowledge of Python because I've never used it in detail. Nor do I claim to have done on my CV. An interview where I get asked "Lots of Python" questions (see the second round section on OP) isn't going to go well, and even as a veteran engineer with a fairly thick skin I'm not going to be terribly happy about enduring it. This kind of problem is exacerbated if your interviewers haven't done sufficient prep so, instead of realising that you don't know anything about a particular technology, they take your poor performance in that area as an indication that you overall suck. I understand why companies ask these standardised batches of questions: we all know that IT is full of jokers who claim proficiency in technologies where in reality they have very limited exposure and skill. But if somebody's actually told you they don't know something then you're simply wasting your time and theirs, and creating an unnecessarily negative experience, by going through the motions. The thing with Google is that, because so many people want to work there, there will likely be somebody in that mass of candidates that has reasonable knowledge in all those areas, and they can afford to be that picky. Most companies can't which, overall, I think is a good thing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tester34 6y ago

wow big props to Apple for security related questions we need more security related questions than algos bad algo can always be rewritten meanwhile leak cannot be reverted (it may be insanely difficult)

krtkush 6y ago

OP on reddit says that two of his offers got revoked! It must be so frustrating to give hours of interview successfully but still not getting that job.

akmarinov 6y ago

Compare this to DuckDuckGo’s interview process. You get 2 assignments and get paid for both. First one - write a feature implementation proposal Second one - they pick a feature or an issue from their open source code on Github and you have to implement it You get paid for the whole process, the work is remote, pay is equal across locations.

nojito 6y ago
Apple gets far more applicants per job position than ddg
- 74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
  They are also bigger and make more money.
  - nojito 6y ago
    It's much more efficient to pre-filter candidates before they get in front of an FTE.
- gregoriol 6y ago
  So they make more people loose 4 hours of their lives?
  - fingerlocks 6y ago
    Four hours is on the low end, even for regular companies. Online assessments, phone screen, on site, various calls with hiring managers and internal recruiters, post-interview follow-ups, all combined can easily push up to 8 hours or more over a few weeks.
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    4 hours is a bog standard interview process. I would seriously question the standards of a company that spent significantly less than that.

intsunny 6y ago

There are many commenters who are going to write something along the lines of: "If you want to work at top tech company"... However given the recent quality/stability issues of MacOS and IOS I suspect more technical brain power is not what Apple needs. The "stability" of Catalina, and the roll out of Big Sur left a lot to be desired.

b3kart 6y ago
No company is perfect, but it doesn't mean they should stop trying to hire competent people.
- slumpt_ 6y ago
  He’s suggesting their approach to hiring competent people is flawed.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  It means they should start trying to hire competent people. What I’m seeing in this list is more like: Did this person study CS and actually remember everything, and did they happen to look through a bunch of normally irrelevant stuff for shits and giggles.
glintik 6y ago
To tell the truth, there are no questions about quality or stability in Apple's interview :). I think, they need introduce a new 3rd round about this.
0x008 6y ago
I would not attribute this to Apple's hiring process. It is very easy to have excitingly talented people being dragged down into oblivion by enterprise management decisions.
Traster 6y ago
Quality is always an organisational issue not a matter of individual talents.

gsnedders 6y ago

Much of this seems to be asking questions about things the candidate has experience in? We don't know what either job they applied for was nor what was on their CV.

dan-robertson 6y ago
Yeah strongly agree with this. I suspect there is missing context in the tweet. It might have been that the position was something like “engineer on some language runtime/compilers team,” or that the candidates cv had a bunch of stuff about low level python/c++ implementation details. Another reasonable hypothesis is that the candidate was just very strong and kept getting asked more questions. Eg maybe they are asked some question about c++ semantics or stl and this develops into discussing details of vtables and suchlike. Or maybe they are asked a general question about python performance and this develops in the expected direction towards discussion of the GIL, and then further into discussion of other runtime details. It feels totally random that there’s some discussion of tail recursion next to knapsack problem. That feels to me like eg the candidate or interviewer makes some reference to it and there’s some discussion, rather than the interview being about tail recursion. Similarly, maybe the interview was maybe about 0/1 knapsack but the candidate solved it faster than expected and discussion moved on to fractional knapsack and then random time fillers. Also note that there’s a few points where there isn’t much discussion. Maybe a different candidate could have had a lot more interesting things to say about the system design question about ratelimiters. Maybe I’m wrong and this is illustrative of Apple’s minimum standards, but I would guess that it’s some very strong candidate who’s doing a lot of technical interviews and writing down experiences.
0x008 6y ago
Came here to say this. Despite everyone being like "oh my god it is so much skill needed for a junior position", we should be asking ourselves if that was maybe because the application had an exceptional CV? From the twitter post it seems like most of what they asked during the 4hours was something the application had proficient experience in. Seems like a rather comfortable experience?
- stu2b50 6y ago

londons_explore 6y ago

Doesn't seem unreasonable to me... I think I'd be able to take a good crack at demonstrating understanding of all those things to the level of detail you can get to in a few hours of interviewing. I doubt I'm the only one.

glintik 6y ago

Apple's interview: lots of security questions. Reality: Macos security issue with blank root password. Knowledge != smart.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
You can have sucky products made by good people. Once you enter a big corp, all that CS knowledge they ask you gets flushed quickly and replaced with learning various internal tools, processes and corporate idiosyncrasies which are unique to each team/project/company.

may4m 6y ago

Is their success rate zero? I don't think so. People want to work at FAANG so much they can afford to raise the hiring bar to hire someone with intermediate/senior knowledge on junior level.

nonameiguess 6y ago

I think people miss that you don't need to ace these interviews to get hired. It's just more data points that allow them to probe the exact depth and breadth of your knowledge, as well as your general thought processes and how you go about investigating problems you don't already know the answer to. You're not necessarily expected to answer 100% of the questions 100% correctly. I'm not at Apple, but still a fairly desirable position at a good SV company where I was grilled on some extremely arcane details of things I claimed to have experience with on my resume. Some of them I knew instantly, some I didn't but had a reasonable wrong guess and the interviewer(s) explained the right answer and we moved on. That was fine. They explained beforehand why they were asking what they were asking and were very clear that I wasn't expected to be a walking encyclopedia, though I definitely had to show that I knew how to find and use the right part of the right encyclopedia.

stu2b50 6y ago
Additionally, looking at the list I'm pretty sure the interview were resume based, too. They asked such a breadth of questions because OP had such a breadth of supposed experience and expertise on his resume. I am fairly certain every apple interview does not involve questioning the candidate about their PyCon experiences. I see nothing wrong going down a resume and asking about each point. It certainly sounds better than the leetcode infested mess the rest of the industry uses.
908B64B197 6y ago
> some I didn't but had a reasonable wrong guess and the interviewer(s) explained the right answer and we moved on. That was fine. You would be surprised at the number of candidates who would start arguing with the interviewer. Being able to learn new things on the spot during a pretty stressful event, admit one is wrong with no shame and move on is a great trait to select for.

the_only_law 6y ago

I once considered looking into some more niche FAANG positions, including some at Apple. Probably won’t make it. I just don’t have the time / capability to learn this stuff vs the domain knowledge for the positions I looked at. If I knew ahead of time what questions would he asked for why position maybe, but given again that the stuff I was looking at at the time was domain specific, not like Glassdoor will really help.

MarkSweep 6y ago

Compared to Google, Facebook, and smaller companies I interviewed at, Apple was an outlier in terms of quantity of interviews. I was interviewing for a build engineer role, which is sort of DevOpsy as I understood it. More ops than dev. It was located in Tokyo. Boston: 30 minute technical interview at career fair 2 back-to-back technical screen over phone Tokyo: on-site with ~4 one hour technical interviews Cupertino: on-site with ~4 one hour behavioral interviews 1 or 2 more phone calls with higher level managers (would have been in person, but COVID happened at this point) I ultimately did not get the job, either because I was kind of a stretch in several ways or because of COVID.

Aeolun 6y ago
Guess you didn’t get paid for your time?

burntoutfire 6y ago

Out of curiosity, I've looked at Apple's jobs page and it is... something different. There's plenty of self-aggrandizing BS that you'd expect from them, but the most basic info is just missing - e.g. they don't even provide a list of locations where they have job openings... This page is the most "design over substance" that I've seen from them.