I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Apple (Cupertino, CA) in Aug 2015
Interview
I applied online through the Apple jobs website. I was contacted the following day by a recruiter and set up an initial call for that week. After the initial phone screen with the recruiter about my background and interests, I moved to the technical phone screen portion of the interview. This interview was FANTASTIC compared to most tech companies. I felt like the interview was more of a technical discussion about real software engineering problems than a straight "code this" kind of interview. Towards the end, I was asked to describe how I would solve two different problems but it was just conceptual, no coding.
I found out the next day that I made it to on-site interviews. Onsite I had 4 one hour interviews, with 2 interviewers in each one. Meeting a total of 8 people was a lot but gave me a good feel for the team. Later that week, the recruiter contacted me and told me the team wanted to do one more technical interview over the phone. This last interview was a traditional coding interview you see at other companies. Two days after this, I was contacted and told I would be receiving an offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
On-sites consisted of two coding questions, one database design question, and one networking question.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Apple (Cupertino, CA) in Jun 2015
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter, and then was interviewed at Cupertino. The position I applied was highly related to my current job. The interview process was going well until the last round of on-site.
I was interviewed by 8 persons for a whole day, and the interviewing panel was severely in lack of diversity. Apart from the HR lady who was White, all engineer interviewers were Indian. Half of them were nice and the other half were hostile. I am not Indian and they didn't like me.
Regarding the un-friendly ones, I could feel that they just wanted to bring me down when they entered the room. I was in a technical interview for a future job. However, these interviewers treated me as a Customer support engineer sent by my current employer company to service Apple. They asked me many BS questions like "how is XXX feature implemented" and then blame me that something was poorly implemented and why it was the case. Oh man, I am not the architect for those features, blaming me couldn't help anything! Oh yes, blaming the interviewee gave the Apple interviewers a great sense of accomplishment, that Apple is greater than anyone else on this planet!
When it was my turn to ask questions to them, oh sorry, the spirit of keeping things secret is in the bone of Apple's culture, nothing could be discussed. I have to say that interviewing with Apple is BORING, because I have to answer a lot of BS questions and get blamed for nothing, while I couldn't ask any technical question about Apple at all because everything is secret.
Given that Apple's interviewers are so ignorant, so rude, and are in lack of diversity, I will not apply for any job at Apple in the future.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions about my current job, and extremely tricky C questions that you have to memorize.
I made it through two rounds, live coding and verbal questions. They were very helpful and made sure that all questions I had were answered. It was very interesting to see how such a vig company was able to make the process so personal. It really made me want to work there!