My experience of interviewing for a job at Apple

We live in an age of inversion. Many things are the opposite of what makes sense.

- You have to interview, and prove you're worthy, to become a slave

- You have to pay to look at ads (ever been to a movie theater, or sat in a plane with screens in front of you?)

- You have to pay to get cancer (ever buy a cigarette?)

It's interesting, because the other way makes way more sense. If you're going to be a slave, you should get to pick where. You should be paid to look at ads. You should get paid to get cancer.

For what it's worth, I recently left a position at Apple and I am the complete opposite of the "culture." Two key differences emerged in my reading of the author's process and my own, which I think boil down to differences between DevPub and where I worked, in what they call Internet Services in Cue's org. That's a pretty wide org, so there's vast gulfs even within, just based on the way the org was put together.

My culture screen was in-person, while I was being interviewed technically. Part of their process was getting to know me. I'm relaxed in interviews, joke around, and have a good time because at the end of the day, we need to like what we do. I find that this confidence has opened a lot of doors for me, but I do have to work very hard to project it given my internal strife. I often find that interviewers are more nervous than me, frankly, because as an industry we tend to toss people in a room who are themselves suffering from imposter syndrome and ask them to gauge someone they've never met with very little interview training. I was interviewing for one company on my third day.

I am the polar opposite of what I would consider to be someone who "fits Apple culture," in general, but it's worth remembering that there are vastly different cultures in different areas. I'm fat, I don't dress well, I'm largely unkempt if left to my own devices, I'm not a social butterfly -- put a soldering iron in my hand and I'll have a good time. I enjoy theoreticals about encryption and side channel attacks. I identify more with Woz than Jobs. Universally, across the board, every time I told someone I'm an engineer at Apple I got the look up and down and "you are?" in reply. I think people have an image of Apple that's formed from the typical customer and perhaps the retail folks; while that's true to an extent (what's served at Caffe Macs is an often great example, but you can find a kick-ass burger if you know which one to go to), I didn't find that Apple struck me as especially hipster or faux-cool or however you want to think of it. Again, maybe my area, but typical Web startup people generally break that way, so I would have expected Apple to reflect it, but no. That's neither here nor there and represents a very compartmentalized view. (I didn't work on Infinite Loop, and when I made journeys over there I got a different feeling, so that might be related.)

Just based on my own experience, I think team fit goes way over culture fit, and I don't think OP's experience sounds like a culture screen.

The other difference is that my process was practically a mirrored copy of Google's, with recruiter courting, technical screen by the recruiter, deeper screen by the #2 on the team, in person interviews. I interviewed for two different teams at Apple (one no-hired me, which was fun because then I was responsible for some of their stuff), and the process was nearly identical, except the no-hire team put a pair of people in the room and my accepting team put only one for each interview. At no point was FaceTime ever used. In fact, I wasn't aware that was a norm anywhere, but I admit that my purview was limited to my area.

While I would love to work at Apple, I honestly don't think I want to work somewhere that isn't happy to see a picture of me holding a beer.

If they don't want my whole personality, they can't have my intelligence.

I refuse to turn myself into a "corporate robot" for the sake of a paycheck.

I agree that most companies get it wrong, but what is right? It seems like interviewing and recruiting is a field dominated by "sounds right, common sense" styles of thinking (like most HR) where there is no post-mortem of how well a candidate did in the next 6-24 months.

Even if you look at most MBA programs, the stuff on recruiting and interviewing aren't as research and evidence based as you would expect, and instead you just get spoon fed a bunch of best practices seemingly out of thin air.

I think programmers and technology companies in particular are very trend-following. For example, Microsoft decided to do some out-of-the-box questioning about circle manhole covers and suddenly tons of other companies had to have their own version. Google did CS algorithm questions, so everyone else had to have them also (even for jobs which use high level libraries like Java, C#, PHP, etc).

What were the bad things about working at Apple? Why did you leave?