I was given a campus on-site interview directly after talking to a campus recruiter from CPU group at a career fair. The very next day, I was interviewed with pure technical questions, including whiteboard exercises. These were basic questions about Verilog, synthesis, verification, multi-core processing, and cache coherency, with a five-minute segment to talk about myself.

[This round was positive.]

After three weeks, I was contacted by the CPU group in Texas, who claimed they were interested in me. This time, the recruiter was impolite and impatient. He kept grumbling that he was busy, had a meeting soon, didn't prepare, and had likely lost my resume. During this interview, I highly doubted he was listening. He asked about verification, and whatever I said, he found a way to refute rudely. He then asked about out-of-order scheduling, register renaming, three kinds of data dependency, virtual memory, the MESI protocol, and merge sort. Every topic was covered in quite some detail.

Eventually, he said I had to go and asked if I had a question that could be answered in two minutes. I asked, "Since you are from the CPU group, do you have any comment on the new A7 chip or the new 64-bit processor, as everyone is talking about them?" He replied, "I have no comment."

I felt his emotions affected our interview significantly, and I felt very bad afterward. Within a couple of hours, Apple rejected me. I guess he must have written a really bad review and given me a "negative" rating, even though I answered almost all the questions.

I asked why there is an 'E' state in the MESI protocol.

I said I didn't know, and asked if he would teach me.

He said, "NO."