A recruiter reached out to me and asked me to send over my schedule for the coming weeks. I was set up with an interview date.

On the day of the interview, I was told that the interviewer was not actually in and was on vacation. No problem at all! I rescheduled for a couple of weeks ahead.

At the time of the new interview, I was logged in and ready to go about 10 minutes prior to the start time. The interviewer was 15 minutes late due to long meetings, so I was sitting in the Zoom call for almost half an hour waiting with no updates.

The interview went well, and I was told that I would hear back soon from the recruiter to schedule the next round interview, which would be a technical interview with an engineer, based on a basic coding question/scenario.

A week passed, and I received an email late at night from the original recruiter that was addressed to a different person and basically said they were not proceeding and that an entry-level position might be better (keeping in mind, based on the job listing, this was an entry-level position, though the questions I was asked didn't make it seem this way).

I replied back, clarifying the email was meant for me and mentioning that I was told I would be scheduled for a second-round technical interview. I got a reply quickly, basically saying, "Tough luck!" with no further assistance and a complete lack of empathy or explanation for the situation. The initial email also seemed like a copy/paste from the interviewer sent to the recruiter that was just haphazardly modified to send to me, and both emails were filled with grammatical errors, which seemed unprofessional to me.

Overall, I was hopeful that this would be a big break for my early career, as I am finishing up my bachelor's degree and looking to get involved with a company I admire. Unfortunately, even though the interviewer was very nice and I thought we had a lot of common ground, I was ultimately very unhappy with this experience. It is very disappointing and surprising that Apple, of all companies, has things like this happen.

I do feel like I was misled. I will always recommend people to interview at this company, but do not be surprised if something similar happens to you too.

What errors or issues might you see with a poorly optimized compiler?