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 langua

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.