I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Apple (Cupertino, CA) in Feb 2020
Interview
Open position in Search team.
Had two telephonic coding rounds before being called for onsite interview.
1st telephonic round coding question like Tree Serialize and deserialize, follow up question can the serialize string output be further compressed (which I didn’t have much time) . Then got an email from recruiter saying they want to have one more telephonic online coding round. In the second round coding problem asked was 3 sum problem with target equal to 0 and follow up was to find all possible combinations of subsets which equals target sum. Later next day got email from recruiter saying team wants to move forward with onsite interview.
All the communication with regards to scheduling or any updates is done via email recruiter didn’t call to inform or have even the initial introductory call.
Onsite interview email didn’t have any details apart from location and from and to time and hr contact name. Onsite interview every person who interview will give a coding question
1st round - with Engineer question like How will you identify performance problem in java application and one coding question
2nd round- with Engineer coding question like given k sorted lists get top n elements based on search score (like merge k sorted lists and select top n elements)
3rd round - with head of the team asked some general questions and then asked couple of questions like dfs coding and how to generate synonyms for search query (this question is very vague basically idea is to look at the log or user interactions in given user session time like say 10 sec and use that info to generate synonyms)
4th round lunch round with entire team , felt like they were trying to access if the potential candidate fits in the team dynamic
5th round with hiring manager general info about company and team praising about the company and informing that the potential candidate that it’s not 9-5 job and later asked coding question like sort 3 unique numbers (hint 2 pointers)
6th round with Engineer asked about coding problem like k dimensional tree or point problem not able to recollect
7th round with Engineer started to explain about employee org chat problem what data structure and if employee view manager (direct or in direct like skip level) then the profile should be colored red, if manager views direct or indirect reportee then profile color should be green else for other case blue color. Need to code data preprocessing and other logic
Next couple of day later got email from recruiter informing about team passing.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Tree serialization and deserialization follow up compress serialize string output
I applied through other source. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Apple (Hyderabad) in Jan 2020
Interview
I have attended 2 telephonic rounds before attending the interview in Hyderabad office. Both are Skype calls from US only.
1st round - This round targets to understand overall experience.
2nd round- 3 interviewers joined the skype call and asked on core java, spring..etc. No coding test.
3rd round - In this round they have given php code and asked me to find what are the ways to optimize. This test is conducted as they have php project migration to java. Also asked design patterns.
4th round - This round is taken by Indian and he asked me what is the most challenging thing I faced in my career. This one is the worst assessment made by our Indian bro. But overall interview process is ok
I applied online. I interviewed at Apple (San Francisco, CA) in Sep 2019
Interview
Highly competitive process that requires expert knowledge of subject. Helps to have 10+ years and have lots of questions to ask. Interview is not too long and is used as a gauge to see if the company wants to move along with the process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What improvement do you see making to the company?