> Overall, I’m pretty happy my work caught someone’s attention and that I had the opportunity to meet all these people.
This is a really cool way to sum up the article.
My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple
21–30 of 295 posts
Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple
#22Note: after 25 minutes answering questions for a job you really want it’s kinda hard to shift to a question-asking mode. When I was looking for a job I found that it helped enormously to write down a set of questions ahead of time. Some I liked: What does a typical day look like for you? What projects do you work on? How long have you been at $company? How has your role changed since then? If I were hired for this ro…
I agree. Having a few questions in mind is always a good idea, though I tend to prefer discussion starters rather than a simple, straightforward question. It gives you the opportunity of a follow-up, which let's you talk about a topic of _your_ choosing. My usual rule of thumb for end-of-interview discussions is that it should last until the interviewer suddenly realizes time's up. Then you know that they really enjoyed the conversation.
In general though, I'd avoid HR-related questions. They are almost always likely to generate a generic response, almost every candidate will ask similar questions, and they can easily be answered by your HR department contact.
Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple
#23EVERYONE does a horrible job recruiting. I think a very low number of companies are doing this correctly.
The thing about the process is one bad moment spoils the entire process for the candidate. Shallow/No responses, or horrible questions, or something unprofessional being said during the interview.
It's not just $AAPL it is everyone, but if you are an interviewer or a recruiter, please fight for the candidates to get good responses and good questions, especially if you fly someone across the globe to awkwardly sit in a room for 6 hours.
Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple
#24Idk. Flaunting how much the process cost and how much income it lost was sort of put off for me. It's great to see insight into interviews, in general, but that just left a weird bitter note to the article.
Same here. I always cringe a little bit when I see people breakdown their time to an imaginary monetary loss. This way of looking at things comes with a pretty heavy dose of narcissism if you ask me. It says "People would be paying me money for what I'm doing for free right now; look how much I'm sacrificing." While there might be quite a few people out there who could get away with billing their time at any given ho…
Yeah I wouldn't quantify how much money I personally lost, but it's absolutely fair to specify how many hours of time were lost. I value my free time. That's time I could be learning a new skill, working on a product, or just having fun. Either way, it's time I gave up for nothing.
I understand wanting to really vet someone first; but it really does seem kind of excessive how long these interview processes are becoming. It's not as if the author were applying for a Japanese salaryman (read: lifetime) employment position. Why not do a normal interview, bring them on as a contractor, see how it goes, and then make your final decision? It'd be a bit of a risk for the candidate if relocation were involved and remote work wasn't possible, but that would be on them.
Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple
#25Isn't this why they are a top-tier company? I mean, their selectivity is what makes their company great as a whole.
Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple
#26About two years ago I was fast-tracked to interviews at Apple via recommendation. About 9 interviews later over 4 spread-out days, I was told I had done quite well during the interview process. Eventually I was not given the position because I was holding a beer in my LinkedIn picture. They ended up paying my current employer (their vendor at the time) astronomical amounts of money to do the very same service, done b…
"Think different. But not too different."
Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple
#27Idk. Flaunting how much the process cost and how much income it lost was sort of put off for me. It's great to see insight into interviews, in general, but that just left a weird bitter note to the article.
Same here. I always cringe a little bit when I see people breakdown their time to an imaginary monetary loss. This way of looking at things comes with a pretty heavy dose of narcissism if you ask me. It says "People would be paying me money for what I'm doing for free right now; look how much I'm sacrificing." While there might be quite a few people out there who could get away with billing their time at any given ho…
> Same here. I always cringe a little bit when I see people breakdown their time to an imaginary monetary loss.
If you're freelancing, then it's not that imaginary. You're giving up billable time.
Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple
#28"Talent Shortage"
I feel like that's a big misunderstood thing in our community. There is a talent shortage - in the sense that companies are always ready to hire someone in the top ~10%. That's what talent means in this context. Google and Facebook will always be more than willing to hire the people who build frameworks in their spare time or contribute to the Linux kernel. There is however no shortage of one trick pony PHP developer…
"Wanted: Someone with the time-management skills to get to the top 10% of developers. Must be willing to show up for 8 rounds of on-site interviews and be prepared for deep philosophical discussions on the merits of mergesort."
Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple
#29"Talent Shortage"
I feel like that's a big misunderstood thing in our community. There is a talent shortage - in the sense that companies are always ready to hire someone in the top ~10%. That's what talent means in this context. Google and Facebook will always be more than willing to hire the people who build frameworks in their spare time or contribute to the Linux kernel. There is however no shortage of one trick pony PHP developer…
Well, there have been a few instances in the past where I've been desperate to hire and I've brought people in against my better judgement. I can tell you it sucks having to look someone in the eye and let them go because they couldn't keep up with the rest of the team. Once you've had to do it a few times as a manager, you become more conservative with your hiring.
Sure, pushing pixels around is easy, but when you're up against a deadline and the app is crashing in a subtle way, you need engineers who have solid debugging chops. Not everybody does.
Re: My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple
#30About two years ago I was fast-tracked to interviews at Apple via recommendation. About 9 interviews later over 4 spread-out days, I was told I had done quite well during the interview process. Eventually I was not given the position because I was holding a beer in my LinkedIn picture. They ended up paying my current employer (their vendor at the time) astronomical amounts of money to do the very same service, done b…
Wouldn't they have seen that before they brought you on-site? Isn't that how they found you? I'm a little surprised this was the reason; we had beer bashes all the time at Apple.