This is an experience that needs to be public.

I applied online for the position of "Detection and Response Engineer". I arranged the interview for 8:00 AM local time (the same time zone as the position location) because one of the two interviewers was in a different time zone and needed to be within business hours. This was fine, even though I had to make quite a few rearrangements in my schedule.

I received various questions from the two interviewers, with the time split equally between them. The questions are in the respective section.

Here is where things got interesting. I was asked to "describe" how I would solve the following programmatic problem: "Keep only the unique elements in a list". I responded quickly, saying more or less that I would need a set to check if I had already seen the element currently being examined. This is a fairly straightforward question, and given that I was actually describing, not writing or coding, the solution, I thought the interviewer would understand. A small parenthesis: as far as I am concerned, this is one of, if not the, optimal ways to solve this problem.

Anyway, I had to further explain my solution, specific operations, and so on, which is very hard to explain when you are simply imagining the code. Next, I was asked about the complexity of the problem. I said O(n) as my answer, since it was the overall complexity of my algorithm. Again, the interviewer wanted me to be more specific, so I did a proper complexity analysis and said O(n) for the iteration over the given list and O(1) if we use a hash set/set for the lookups of "seen".

THE INTERVIEWER LAUGHED IN MY FACE at that moment. It was not a moment of cracking a joke, nor was it part of small talk. The interviewer seemed to be holding back laughter for a while, and it was my (correct) answer that triggered it. I did not pay attention because I wanted to continue with the questions. In the end, I thought that perhaps the interviewer believed my overall answer was O(1), which would have been incorrect. However, this certainly does not justify their response in any case.

Moving forward and slightly thinking that what the interviewer did was at least disrespectful, I was asked about "inner" vs "left" join. I tried to come up with an example, but since this was done verbally once again, I messed that up, and my answers were mostly wrong. At that moment, the interviewer ONCE AGAIN LAUGHED in my face.

Another indicator of disrespect and misbehavior was also the fact that while I was explaining my answers, I was constantly interrupted. Was it because I was saying something right? Was it because I was saying something wrong? I have no idea. I was just kept being interrupted, but again, I thought it was better to keep going.

I have to say that I was also quite surprised to see zero reaction to that behavior from the other interviewer. They could have said something, they could have sent a private message to prevent that from occurring a second time, but none of those things took place.

Regarding the questions, I also need to point out that I was asked to give the regular expression for IPv4 in the WebEx chat(!), and I was also asked about iOS (Apple iOS) because I had listed "Cisco IOS (Internetwork Operating System)" on my CV. Just saying...

I simply tried to finish the process, maybe because it was too early in the morning to think about what was actually going on. I had a terrible rest of the day, mainly thinking why I did not react to their behavior. One day later, with a clearer mind, I sent an email to all the people involved in the interview process on Apple's side (HR and the recruitment team) stating that I was withdrawing from the process due to the aforementioned reasons, while also explaining the situation.

To Apple's defense, I need to say that the email was appreciated, followed by a call from one of the members, apologizing multiple times on behalf of Apple and thanking me for bringing this to their attention. I also mentioned that: "On one hand, I would not like the interviewer to be in a difficult position because of that, on the other hand, I would not like anyone else to have a similarly terrible day as I did."

I appreciate Apple as a company, and their reaction was prompt for this incident. However, as I mentioned in the beginning, this is a story that needs to be told, especially when there are others like me out there.

• Programmatic question: Keep only the unique elements in a list.

• Regex for IPv4.

• "Inner" vs "Left" join.

• Usage of map/filter/reduce.

• Spark: You have a DataFrame of "timestamp, message". How would you find the delta between each message and the previous one, then append it to the end of the line?

• Different types of DDoS attacks.

• DNS DDoS attack.

• GET vs POST request methods.

• DELETE vs PATCH request methods.

• DNSSEC.

• SQL Injection in logs: How would you track or find it?