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.
I'll discount the second interview since that seems heavily prompted from the interviewee's experience, but the first interview asks pretty in-depth questions (for a junior) in both C++ and web development. Chances are, developers aren't being hired to work on both - so why not focus on one or the other, rather than potentially kick great web developers out of the process because they don't know much C++ (or vice versa)?
FAANG-class companies do not want one-trick ponies or even few-trick ponies. At least in my experience, they explicitly want to hire not just for the current job but for the long term, which means selecting for highly-capable generalists with the ability to rapidly specialize in any area. And, having spent many years at a FAANG class company, they are right to do so. I worked on embedded systems, physics simulation engines, network services on a gigantic scale, RF related systems, etc. All that stuff one learns in college that many HNers say is useless, well, I found that I wound up using most of of it.
They're looking to build a maximally deep bench even if you don't meet a specific immediate need they have. It's sort of like the dichotomy you see in pro sports draft philosophies, where some teams focus quite specifically on finding players who fill existing holes in the current roster and some teams just try to draft the most talented person possible even if they can't figure out what to do with them right away.
Hard disagree. Out of the four bullet points, 1 and 3 are standard CS, but 2 and 4 are hands-on programming and engineering topics that you don't get from college. 5% of graduates might know about all these details, 95% won't.
Of course that's fair if you want to be selective.
"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 :)
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"
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.
Is this supposed to be a pro or a con?
This is very hard on people who are already employed. Who wants to work 2 jobs simultaneously? The pay of a short-term contract is basically nothing compared to the pay of a full-time permanent job.
Suppose I apply to 20 places, and they all want me to do this? It doesn't scale at all.
Neither does a 1 day on-site interview process. Give me the home assignment any day. At least that’s likely to be some kind of fun.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One thing I've found pretty helpful with this is a code sample demonstrating mutable default args in python. Most juniors and a surprising number of mids haven't come across this even after 2 or more years of experience with the language, so they're surprised by it. I then explain how the issue happens, and then ask them how they would fix the function.
For me, its those kind of questions where you as an interviewer are able to provide a tiny hint or nudge when the person is stuck that gives much more insight. They're not getting the answer, and are doing the work themselves but doing that in a bit of an unnatural environment like an interview makes me very, very happy for them. I had an interview with a candidate who didn't know python much, but liked it for its conciseness for interviewing, but worked in golang regularly. Candidate hadn't heard of this, and was surprised by it, and after understanding the reason behind the behavior, we ended up on a pretty enjoyable tangental discussion of how other languages had similar gotchas and the experiences thereof.
Conversely, when a person is interviewing for a role at a much higher level than they're qualified for and are missing things despite hints, suggestions and outright pointers, its a significant letdown, and I hope those candidates are able to use these questions as guideposts of where to increase their knowledge and awareness.
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.
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.
Competition at the top is supposed to be tough.
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.
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.
You can't really compare with an anonymous junior engineer position.
A ragetweet saying "what the hell did I just read" without linking to the source turned out to be about as useful as expected.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed, people are freaking out about it, but honestly going down your resume and elaborating on each piece sounds like heaven compared to fast paced white board coding challenges.
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.
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.
Knowledge != smart.
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.
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.
we need more security related questions than algos
bad algo can always be rewritten meanwhile leak cannot be reverted (it may be insanely difficult)
I do wonder how Apple comp is in Europe?
