I interviewed with the IS&T division, which has a pretty poor reputation.

I found the interviews, both phone and in person, to be reasonable and fair, although not the high-caliber type of technical questioning I was expecting from reading other reviews of Apple interviews.

IS&T is mostly shoved into some ugly, noisy, and crowded buildings in Sunnyvale and is a thoroughly unpleasant place to interview. I've been on other campuses, and this is about as far from Apple as you can imagine. The smell of sweat, harsh lights, and bare concrete floors permeated every hall, corner, breakout room, and lunch area, all filled with very tired-looking Indian contractors.

But despite the IS&T conditions, I found the whole process extremely frustrating and ultimately declined because of Apple HR. In my mind, any company with such a dysfunctional HR department shows how they truly feel about their resources and is not one I want to work at.

I had applied for several positions through Apple's recruitment portal, but this was actually the third time that Apple HR reached out to me about a position I had NOT applied for. Each time, the hiring manager for the position seemed baffled that I had been given to them for consideration, making for some awkward conversations. The third time they reached out to me, I was extremely reluctant to proceed and had two offers in hand, so I was very clear that I was under time constraints. They said, "No problem, we can do this very quickly."

Every step of the process was met with mysterious delays. They set up an initial phone screen then delayed it without explanation. Then they set up an on-site – knowing I was running out of time – for a week later, and then delayed it also without explanation. A week later, they let me know that they were interested and would like to make an offer, but did not actually make an offer, just a verbal one so that I would turn down the other offers. Over the next week, I sent emails and left voicemails asking for any kind of updates, with absolutely no response.

At this point, I had had enough and took a really terrific offer in the South Bay.

Five weeks later (!), Apple HR sent me a written offer, and I was more than a little pleased to turn them down.

The technical questions were really mediocre, and they got two of them wrong.

Management questions were the typical "how would you handle this..." type. I got the impression they weren't really listening to the answers.