Hi all!
My profile summary:
Years of experience: 8+ overall, 6+ as SDE
University: far from top ones
LeetCode problems solved: 1192 - 299/672/221 Easy/Medium/Hard, contest rating: 2199
Interviewing:
Location: Apple London
Position: Software engineer
Telephonic rounds
1st round (mid-end December 2021, 30 mins)
So I’ve joined the 30 minutes chat expecting for it to be a standard recruiter call about my experience/motivation/etc. Suddenly, a guy started asking me technical Java questions. Only at that moment did I realise that this round was already going to be technical. I didn’t prepare at all, as in, completely. Luckily, the questions were not really difficult and mostly open. We spoke about lots of things - starting from Java, continuing to algorithms and touching system design and just programming languages concepts. Later I also realised that he was a manager / team-lead of the team I was applying to.
The only feedback I got from the recruiter was that they are ready to proceed to the next round.
2nd round (beginning of January 2022, 1hr)
The 2nd round was with the same person, but for 1 hour. This time the question was more specific and closely related to whatever the team was doing at the moment. Basically, I had to suggest and implement an algorithm for solving quite a widely scoped problem. I asked lots of clarifying questions to understand if my assumptions were valid, and basically added several constraints to be able to narrow the problem down to a heap question. Overall, I think I spent about 30 minutes figuring out the exact algorithm to write, 10 minutes on implementation and the rest of the time - to test and discuss the alternative approaches.
Virtual onsites (mid-January 2022) [part 1]
The onsites consisted of 3 rounds. I didn’t know in advance if there was going to be system design, or only algos, or maybe some Java-related stuff, and when I tried to clarify this with my recruiter, he said that they are not too restrictive on this since the interviewers go with the flow. So basically I was mentally preparing myself for everything.
Another fun thing to mention here is that all but one of the onsites were in the evenings. There was no option to reschedule them to be in the morning, since most of the team is sitting in Cupertino. I know my brain doesn’t really work that well in the afternoon, so the whole interview process I was not expecting much from myself. Maybe that helped?
3rd round (morning, 1hr)
This round was again with the team-lead and with another person from the team who was the main interviewer. The problem was an algo one, it is there on LeetCode and it is a BFS one with medium difficulty. Implementing it was pretty easy, even though I hadn’t been practicing graphs - just because it was a typical BFS. There were some follow-ups where the interviewer wanted to hear about bi-directional BFS, but I didn’t need to implement it. I liked the interviewer, it was a pleasure to communicate with him, and I also saw he really wanted for me to feel comfortable.
4th round (same day, evening, 1hr)
This round was in the evening, there were 2 interviewers. It also turned out to be a plain algo round. I was asked 2 questions, 1 required topological sorting and another one was more of an “Other” section, but also quite common on LeetCode. It was interesting to implement both and answer the questions. One of the interviewers told me he was impressed with my solution to the second problem, which was very nice to hear. Overall, I again got a good impression from communicating with both of the interviewers.
5th round (next day, evening, 1hr)
This round was postponed to the next day, since I didn’t want to take more than 1 interview in a row in the evening. It was a system design problem. When I was preparing for a system design interview at Apple, I had the information that they don’t usually ask “classic” questions like design Twitter, web crawler, etc. What they do ask is either a question based on your experience from the resume, or a real question that the team works on and has experience with. And indeed, it was not a classic problem, but rather one that required more thinking. I quite struggled on this one, trying to utilise all the things I’ve been preparing, and improvising at the same time. Overall, I got the impression that I nearly bombed this one, but maybe there were a couple of good things I said that made the interviewers take the positive decision.