The role was for the Siri Search team. The first round was with the manager. We had some discussion on search and information retrieval techniques, and then he asked me to write code in an editor. I completed that; the round was smooth, and the interviewer seemed experienced.

The next round was with a junior team member (I realized this after the interview). He said the interview would be 45 minutes and spent the first 15 minutes introducing himself and talking about his work. He then took 5 minutes to send an email with a link to the editor where he would write the problem. He then took another 5 minutes to explain the problem. Apparently, I had to finish the problem in only 20 minutes. In those 20 minutes, he started arguing with me over the time complexity of the solution. The question involved an infinitely long array, and I had to find a number. I explained that I would use a starting and end index and keep doubling the end index (my initial indexes were 0 and 200). He was adamant that this was a linear time solution and wasted a further 5 minutes. At the end, I did not have any time left.

I checked on GeeksforGeeks later, and their solution uses a start index of 0 and an end index of 1, then they keep doubling. Other solutions do the same more or less. I'm not sure how that is considered linear. I suspect he was inexperienced in coding and was only looking for the specific solution he had prepared for the interview. Later, I found out he was from a data analytics background and was inexperienced. The irony was that the position was for search, and no discussion happened about information retrieval algorithms and techniques like vector space. It seems the individual was inexperienced and was trying to impress by asking trending questions from GeeksforGeeks. At least, they should put up some experienced developers to interview experienced developers. I have over 10 years of experience, and I was interviewed by someone with barely 3 years of programming experience. Even though his profile said data analytics, I'm not sure. Even if he was a programmer, I thought Apple had awesome software engineers. It was a bad experience overall; I won't go for Apple interviews again.

Find the first occurring duplicate string.

Find if a value exists in an infinite length array.