Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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45 stories

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AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Two Phone Screens, Failed on the Socket Message Round

Two rounds of phone interviews, done on two separate days. The first half of Apple's phone screens is always a behavioral question, which I thought was pretty distinctive. The first round was with an older engineer, kind of serious and not big on smiling, but you could tell he was a senior engineer. The question was to design a hit counter that aggregates how many hits happened in the past 5 minu…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Poker System Design, OOD Rock-Paper-Scissors, and Two Hiring Manager Rounds

Coding 1 Design a poker card system, implementing two core methods: shuffle and order. The order method needs to return a sorted list of cards by suit and rank — for example starting with 3 of Clubs, 3 of Diamonds, 3 of Hearts, 3 of Spades, and so on up through Ace. Coding 2 First a relatively simple LeetCode DFS (depth-first search) question, followed by an OOD (object-oriented design) segment w…

Onsite0
AppleSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2025

Passed Five Rounds but Lost to an Internal Hire, Plus Coupang, Databricks, and Mistral AI Along the Way

Background: 5.5 years of experience, all of it at second-tier companies doing infra. Goal: mainly looking to move into AI-related work. Target level is Google L5 equivalent or above. I'm not afraid of a heavy workload, I like healthy competition. Timeline: started grinding problems and sending out resumes from early February, and by early June had gradually started getting offers and wrapped up i…

RejectedOnsite0
AppleData Scientist
Aug 2025

Four Onsite Rounds, No Offer

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
AppleASIC Design Verification Engineer
Jan 2025

Hardcore Technical From C/C++ to SV/UVM, Almost No Behavioral Questions

Hi everyone! The job search grind is finally over, and I landed the offer I wanted. Along the way I read countless useful posts from people who came before me on this forum, and I learned a lot from them. Today I want to give back and summarize the interview experience and high-frequency topics that I and the friends around me ran into applying for ASIC Design Verification (DV) roles in North Ame…

OfferOnsite0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

Share your experience to earn XP