This interview took place at the end of 2001. I had interviewed with Apple for several other positions before this one. Apple did keep my resume on file and called me for two openings I didn't get before landing this job.

Apple's recruiters are excellent. They were easy to get on the phone, highly responsive, knew their department's needs, and knew enough about their department's business to speak about prospects for promotion and career development in their group. Apple's recruiters specialize in particular areas of the business.

After a phone interview with the hiring manager, I came in for face-to-face interviews with all of my prospective peers on my team, my boss's VP, one of my boss's peers in the same department, and the senior director of an engineering group with whom I would frequently need to collaborate.

In each interview, the person I spoke with was able to decide I was technically qualified very early on. We mostly spoke about how to deal with various situations that might occur with customers or colleagues and how I would go about handling them. The process was mostly about deciding whether our personalities would mesh.

I would advise anyone applying at Apple to be completely forthright and never bluff. If you don't know an answer, say so and describe how you might go about finding it out.

After I joined the company, I had occasion to interview candidates for jobs both within and outside my group from time to time. Everyone I saw was already well qualified technically. Again, Apple's recruiters are top-notch, and the only applicants I ever interviewed were highly qualified. It wasn't a matter of finding someone who could do the job; it was always a matter of choosing the best of several good candidates.

I was given a few examples of technical problems having to do with porting existing code to Mac OS X, and asked to describe how I would go about implementing them on OS X. It wasn't really difficult per se, but I am an expert in my field.