This was my first time interviewing for an Apple SDE role, and it was for compute infra.
Overall the experience was bad: three phone rounds, then three virtual onsite rounds.
Apple hires by team, and every team has its own interview style. My team did phone interviews one round at a time, and you only got the next round if you passed the previous one.
Round 1:
OS and networking fundamentals plus a multithreading question, which was implementing a producer-consumer queue. The interviewer was a woman, one hour, and the intensity was maxed out. At the end she fired ten fundamentals questions in a row, and it felt like she was constantly challenging me.
Round 2:
Two easy-medium problems, then it extended into designing a distributed log system where you count keywords in the logs. The interviewer was the hiring manager, very serious, and again she kept challenging me. One hour, intensity maxed out. This was the round I had the worst experience in. The manager never smiled the whole time, completely stone-faced.
Round 3:
Multithreading again, implementing a cyclic barrier, and the requirements were very low-level. The intensity was not small, but this interviewer made me feel cared for, and I am really grateful.
Actually, right after round 2 the manager said I was not a great match, because I work on distributed data platforms / databases and they work on compute infra. I don't know why they still passed me and invited me to the virtual onsite, three more rounds.
Round 4:
Multithreading yet again, with three interviewers, and the task was to implement a lock. Yes, you heard that right, implement a lock, and you can't call anything ready-made. Then more fundamentals questions. I had assumed the onsite would be system design + BQ. Some basics I had honestly forgotten, like the details of how TLS works, and I did not answer that well.
Round 5:
Three interviewers again. A LeetCode medium: implement an event system, given a time window, which is roughly a deque + lock. At the end they asked more distributed systems fundamentals.
Round 6:
The interviewer asked topological sort, which went smoothly, and we got to the chat portion ten minutes early.
Overall the experience with this Apple team was not great. The recruiter won't tell you the interview topics, and even for the onsite the topics the recruiter gave me were wrong. Personally I think I did not answer some parts of round 2 and round 4 well, so the rejection was expected. I got the rejection email that evening. The market bar is very high right now, and there is almost no tolerance for mistakes. The only warm moment in all six rounds was the round 3 interviewer, who I think gave me a very high evaluation, which is why I made it to the onsite.
What made it bad is that the interviewers all seemed to keep challenging me, it was not very friendly, and every round was very intense. They barely tested system design and BQ, and focused mostly on multithreading and fundamentals, which is very different from a traditional interview. Also the manager clearly had little interest in me but still let me continue to the onsite. Making me go through six rounds was somewhat unkind. After this many rounds and preparing this long, of course I am a bit sad. With this market, it makes me wonder how much preparation and how good a performance it takes to get an offer when switching jobs. Keep going, though.
Sharing my experience, and I hope everyone's interviews go smoothly.
Discussion
Loading comments…