I was contacted by a recruiter and pre-screened. 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, as some of the skills I acquired were relevant to the job at Apple. I was interrupted after 10 seconds.

He asked if I knew how to program in C. I said yes, explaining that I had been writing firmware in C for several years. Then I started describing a firmware project I developed in C. After about 10 seconds, 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 some basic questions about RTOS and version control programs:

• "What is a semaphore?"
• "What is a mutex?"

Then the interview shifted to a website where 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, they would just write a short program or evaluate it with a script. However, none were real-world problems, and I doubt the interviewer would be able to solve them without assistance.

After that, the interview ended. The interviewer was impersonal and did not ask if I had any questions.

What is a mutex?