Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Apple with 3.7 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 67% positive. To compare, the company-average is 66% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 42 days to get hired, when considering 3 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Apple overall takes an average of 37 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Apple as a Software Engineer according to 3 Glassdoor interviews include:
One on one interview: 100%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Apple
Interview
Step 1: phone screen, non-technical for most part
Step 2: coding problem to work on
Step 3: Full day onsite of white boarding. This is highly technical. I was asked a mixture use; software/ algorithm questions, a puzzle, and design question.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Unexpected:
Puzzle question. If you have 2 eggs, and you want to figure out what's the highest floor from which you can drop the egg without breaking it, how would you do it? What's the optimal solution?
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Apple in Dec 2014
Interview
Hiring process seemed ok but not sure what they were really looking. Random questions in every subject, not into a specific candidate strengths. Another thing was when asked about job or role definition, interview didnt really explained it well so that candidate can get more from the discussion. Overall it was ok type, not too bad and not too good.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Apple in Oct 2014
Interview
- I submitted my resume to the Grace Hopper Celebration database, and it was forwarded to multiple Apple recruiters who were looking for New Grad candidates.
- Each team at Apple has its own designated recruiter, and because my resume was distributed to many teams, I ended up doing a number of phone screens. The phone screens usually were not difficult because they were only 30 minutes long. They mostly tested knowledge based trivia questions along with asking about your past work experiences and projects. It was pretty overwhelming because multiple recruiters were trying to contact me, all from Apple, but it felt ridiculous having to do so many phone screens that all essentially looked for the same skill sets. They even had a recruiter that just started her job, who contacted me by the wrong name and wrote down the wrong information about me, which I felt was fairly unprofessional and disorganized.
- Because there were many teams in contact with me, they hired a single POC recruiter to manage my onsite, which really helped. Scheduling an onsite during the fall is a bit difficult because Apple gives their employees the entire Thanksgiving week off, and many people go on vacation during December. Anyways, I ended up scheduling it and was told I would have 4 2-on-1 interviews. It turned out to be 8 45-min interviews for 4 different teams and I didn't find out until I had a "break" when a hiring manager came to talk to me. Thinking back, it was probably the most mentally stressful day of my life. Note that I probably could have split it up into two days, but because I had other obligations, I asked for a single day interview.
- In terms of question style, most teams liked to focus on problem solving and algorithmic questions, covering data structures, trees, graph search, etc. one of the teams asked me to find bugs in a piece of code. Another team really focused on class design and asked me to describe the architecture one of my past projects.
- Although I was offered breaks in between the interviews, I felt pressured not to take them to keep everyone on schedule. It was also really tough doing so much talking throughout the day (literally met with 16 people that day). My performance was likely diminishing as the day went on, and I knew I didn't do too well on some of the interviews.
- The overall feel of the Cupertino office: the building I was placed in was beautiful. The cafes serve extraordinary food and the people I talked to were very smart and sounded like they were doing exciting work. As often noted, Apple is pretty secretive even internally. Some teams I talked to say they do code review through email, which I found pretty strange.
- In the end I did not move on to the next round (which would be another onsite for whichever teams were still interested). Overall, I wish that Apple had a more generalized interviewing process for New Grads. The disorganization really displays how segregated Apple is as a company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe the architecture and class structure of a component in one of your side projects.