We had some high-level discussion on NLP developments and simple programming knowledge questions. Overall nice and well-rounded people in a good atmosphere. They wanted to move very fast very suddenly which was not covenient to me. They also tried to 'test' natural language skills without explicitly saying so.
The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Apple (Cupertino, CA)
Interview
My overall experience was incredibly bad.
I was a contractor and applied for an employee position. The whole process took around 3 months. I spent most of this time just trying to get answers... The HR person told me that I would be contacted for an on-site interview in one week. No news for 2 weeks, so I wrote an e-mail. They didn't apologize, just told me it would take another week. Ok. Finally, I went to the on-site interviews.
The interviewers were not professional at all, they obviously lacked experience and/or interview training. On top of that, half of the questions and exercises were irrelevant to the role I was applying to. Most of the time, I was wondering why they were wasting their time on irrelevant questions and when will the real questions come. The real questions never came.
At the end of the on-site interviews, I was very disappointed. I thought that they hadn't done their job correctly, I half wanted to go back and tell them how to do it properly next time. As a result, they didn't really know what competences I had or lacked for the role.
I hadn't failed the interviews per se, but I wasn't confident on the results either. So I waited for the answer. Needless to say that they made me wait again. They told me I would have an answer in a week but didn't contact me (yes, again). I sent them a friendly reminder 2 weeks later, they ignored it. I sent another one one week later. They finally answered. An HR person told me that they didn't select me. So I accepted an offer in another comapny. Then, 2 weeks later, they contacted me to say that they might have made a mistake and wanted to offer me a position later the same year. I mean, seriously...
The lack of respect, the lack of professionalism, the lack of organization, everything was so low-quality.
Of all the interviews I have done (Amazon, IBM, Google, and smaller companies), this was, by far, the worst experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Regular SDE questions on data structures, big O notation, algorithms, coding exercise. CLI commands questions. No or very few behavioral questions.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Apple in Dec 2016
Interview
A few years ago I applied for a similar position at Apple, which was a pretty bad experience, so I wasn't very hopeful for this one. In the previous interview, one guy was avowedly yawning while I was explaining the content of my Master thesis. Pretty disrespectful. Also, I got a few pretty challenging coding assignments and computer sciency interview questions like 'Explain how a sorting algorithm works', which seemed highly irrelevant in relation to the job.
Now, a few years later, I got another Skype interview, and now the talk was really good. The man was really respectful and kind, and I got the job. Now I have been here for a year, and everyone is really content with my work. Gots to show how arbitrary and poor interviews can often be at predicting someone suitability for a position.