The posting was for a skilled Objective-C engineer with experience developing SDKs and frameworks.

Had a few phone interviews with the in-house recruiter and the hiring manager; these went well.

I was scheduled to have a follow-up phone interview with one of the lead engineers; however, an emergency conflict came up, and he needed to reschedule. I was coincidentally scheduled to travel to Apple for an on-site interview with another group in a few days, so we co-opted the trip, splitting the interviews with the two groups over two days.

This interview review is related to the first day/group only. I will post a separate review for the second day/group later.

The engineers, the manager, and the recruiter were all very friendly and easy to converse with. The knowledge-based programming questions were difficult but manageable. Several pertained to nonatomic/atomic properties, retain cycles, some bitwise operations, and delegates vs. blocks vs. notifications.

The coding questions primarily related to data structures and optimization, with a little UI coding towards the end.

By the end of the day, I was exhausted and more than a little demoralized. I should have performed better. I had a few shining moments, but these were overshadowed by some glaring gaps in my memory on some of the early basics of data structures and algorithms. I left them with the impression that I was really more of a framework consumer than a competent framework author, and that I wasn't really ready for the challenges that this posting entails.

Nevertheless, the engineers and the manager were stellar. They were friendly, not dismissive, and helpful, particularly when I was flailing. I would have been honored to work with all of them.

Given a histogram data representation, how would you find the adjacent bars/columns that collectively yield a rectangle with the largest coverage area.

Given a string of words and a maxWidth, write a method that inserts new lines where appropriate to perform a word-wrap. (Wrap on word boundaries, assume " " is fine).

Now, how does your implementation handle strings with multiple spaces between words? Are those extra spaces lost or preserved?

"What is the one question you wish I would've asked? What question are you sure to nail if I ask it right now?"