Apple’s tech interview scope for junior position

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.

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.<p>First round questions cover standard CS undergrad curriculum and second round covers the depth of his background. I&#x27;d say he&#x27;s lucky his second round is tailored towards his (presumably Python) background instead of his interviewer&#x27;s background. Other than the question about HTTP2&#x2F;1.1, nothing seem <i>too</i> absurd.

Why is this scope of the interview a problem though? The intention is to get a good impression of the abilities. It doesn&#x27;t mean you need really to do a perfect 100% on all questions and know every single detail.<p>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.<p>And I assume there actually are junior people who have experience in all the listed technologies. Maybe not so many, but there are. It&#x27;s not so uncommon that you play with technology already during school.

The full story is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;cscareerquestionsEU&#x2F;comments&#x2F;laz3hv&#x2F;more_than_1000_applications_57_interviews_one&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;cscareerquestionsEU&#x2F;comments&#x2F;laz3hv...</a>

There are many commenters who are going to write something along the lines of: &quot;If you want to work at top tech company&quot;...<p>However given the recent quality&#x2F;stability issues of MacOS and IOS I suspect more technical brain power is not what Apple needs. The &quot;stability&quot; of Catalina, and the roll out of Big Sur left a lot to be desired.

Much of this seems to be asking questions about things the candidate has experience in? We don&#x27;t know what either job they applied for was nor what was on their CV.

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.<p>Competition at the top is supposed to be tough.

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

Maybe it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m old but I&#x27;m not doing 4hrs of interviews for <i>anyone</i>.

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 &#x2F; 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.

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.

If you are a startup (which is not unreasonable to presume given this space) then do look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.honeycomb.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;observations-on-the-enterprise-of-hiring&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.honeycomb.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;observations-on-the-enterprise...</a> for a better way of doing this.

Apple&#x27;s interview: lots of security questions. Reality: Macos security issue with blank root password.<p>Knowledge != smart.

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.<p>Boston: 30 minute technical interview at career fair<p>2 back-to-back technical screen over phone<p>Tokyo: on-site with ~4 one hour technical interviews<p>Cupertino: on-site with ~4 one hour behavioral interviews<p>1 or 2 more phone calls with higher level managers (would have been in person, but COVID happened at this point)<p>I ultimately did not get the job, either because I was kind of a stretch in several ways or because of COVID.

Out of curiosity, I&#x27;ve looked at Apple&#x27;s jobs page and it is... something different. There&#x27;s plenty of self-aggrandizing BS that you&#x27;d expect from them, but the most basic info is just missing - e.g. they don&#x27;t even provide a list of locations where they have job openings... This page is the most &quot;design over substance&quot; that I&#x27;ve seen from them.

Is their success rate zero? I don&#x27;t think so. People want to work at FAANG so much they can afford to raise the hiring bar to hire someone with intermediate&#x2F;senior knowledge on junior level.

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

It&#x27;s a bit broad, but nothing here seems unreasonable.<p>I do wonder how Apple comp is in Europe?

Doesn&#x27;t seem unreasonable to me... I think I&#x27;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&#x27;m the only one.