The contact with the recruiter was pleasant and polite. I had phone screens with three different developers. The feedback was very positive. All three developers were from very different divisions of Apple, and that is where the problems started. That was probably a bad idea, and I should have corrected them. I should have stipulated only one group and had a full set of interviews pertinent only to that group. However, they should have known that too. The interviewing process was a full day and fairly intense. Most of the questions were relevant, but some were just pointlessly obtuse. I chalk that up to experience; it is mostly new grads and junior developers who enjoy dressing people down. Senior developers have worked that out of their system and actually want to determine if they want to work with you. I dropped the ball on a couple of things, and that is my fault, but that has to be expected in any interview.

I felt like I received mixed messaging. The phone screens and recruiter conversations seemed to indicate I was a slam-dunk for one of these groups. Perhaps they should be more neutral in their tone until the interview process is completed.

All in all, it was not a terrible experience, and I have to own my mistakes. My take-away was that the huge tech companies can afford to be very selective. Apple, like Google, Amazon, etc., are not understaffed or desperate. Quite the contrary, they are probably overstaffed. As a result, you have to expect that there is little penalty to them for declining a candidate.

Some interesting stuff on consensus algorithms. The usual Binary Search Tree garbage, and some other stuff that bordered on trivia.