My process was expedited because Apple acquired the company where I was going to work. Apple flew me out for a single day of on-site interviews, during which I had three 2-on-1 sessions. There was no effort to get to know me in any of them. Each interview was an hour spent entirely on technical questions covering algorithms and system design.

The first two interviews were not great, but not terrible. I asked a lot of clarifying questions, which seemed to annoy the interviewers more than anything. It was strange.

The worst interview I've ever had was the third one, with the two team leads. One of them wrote up a problem on the whiteboard, then spent the rest of the interview looking bored out of his mind at his phone. His problem was very vague and incomplete as he first asked it. When I asked questions about it, he got frustrated and talked down to me. He would occasionally glance up at my progress (it wasn't a hard problem once the details were worked out) and make a snide remark about what I had written. He expected syntactically perfect whiteboard code and threw in some expletives for an added bonus. The other interviewer would snicker whenever the first criticized my code. At the end, they asked if I had any questions, but every question I asked was met with, "That's confidential." It was definitely the most unprofessional interview I've ever been a part of, and I almost walked out of it because it was clear it was wasting all of our time.

Unfortunately, the misery didn't quite end there. It took Apple three full months (and 13 reminder emails) to reimburse me for the costs I had to pay for cab rides and per diem expenses. I was also never reimbursed for a flight I had to cancel because of the interview timing, but at this point, I'm just tired of dealing with them. If possible, try to get Apple to pay up front for as much as possible, because the reimbursement process is a nightmare. My (senior) recruiter had no idea where to even begin with it, which I still don't quite understand.

The skyline problem

Given a set of interval tuples, find the longest overlapping interval.

Given a huge log file of a web server, find the IP addresses that had exactly 1 request.

A network is connected in a line, so that servers can talk only to the servers to their left or right. Servers know if they are the leftmost or rightmost servers. What is a protocol for every server to learn the full topology? How long does it take?