I applied online. I interviewed at Apple (Cupertino, CA) in Mar 2019
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter, pre-screened etc. After a couple of weeks the recruiter called and set up a phone interview with an Apple manager for the next day. A few minutes after the scheduled time I received a call from an Apple employee, not the manager. He asked me to describe my experience. I began describing my first job since some of the skills I acquired were relevant to the job at Apple. I was interrupted after 10 Sec. He asked if I knew how to program in C. I said yes, I have been writing firmware in C for several years. Then I started describing a firmware project I developed in C. After about 10 Sec. he interrupted me again, asking if I knew C++. I answered yes and that I also knew C#, and Python. I tried to continue with the description of the work I have done that is related to this job but was interrupted again, almost as soon as I began. This time he wanted to know if I knew Matlab. Neither Matlab nor C++ were mentioned in the job description. That concluded the first part of the interview. He asked me some basic questions about RTOS and version control programs. "What is a semaphore?" "What is a mutex?". Then the interview shifted to a website I could edit. There were several tricky puzzle book type problems. These do not test a person's ability to design or debug software. If someone had to solve them he/she would just write a short program or evaluate it with a script. But none were real world problems. And I doubt the interviewer would be able to solve them without himself. After that the interview ended. The interviewer was impersonal and didn't ask if I had any questions.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Apple (Santa Clara, CA) in Apr 2018
Interview
First had an initial phone call with the team manager. Talked about general embedded concepts, semaphores, mutexes, Real-time OS experience I had. Pleasant conversation overall, he said to refresh on basic C concepts for the in person interview.
In person was overall a rushed experience. No overview for number of interviewers but first person just dove in and started asking questions. Difficult to understand many of the interviewers. The next interviewer would come in and interrupt the current question then just start the next problem. No sense of any personality fit for the group - basically felt I could have been at home and doing programming while they watched not sure why they had a face to face since they just wanted to look at code..
Interview questions [6]
Question 1
Make a bitmask that takes as input a width and position
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Apple (Cupertino, CA) in May 2016
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter and had 1 phone interview with the hiring manager followed by onsite interview with the team and leads. Each onsite interview was for 30 minutes and there were 7 interviews with the hiring team and 4 interviews with the leads.