I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn for Apple. They reached out for a front end role, and although I wasn’t keenly interested I decided to go through the interview. First was a 1 hr screen with a recruiter, who pitched some teams. I opted to talk to the hiring managers he suggested. I then spoke with two hiring mangers for an hour each, after which one decided to interview me. Then there was the phone screen. This is when things started to become bizarre. For the phone screen, I was told it would be technical, and they gave me example questions for things like trivia about little endian vs big endian. I thought surely that was a misnomer. But it wasn’t. I can’t explain why that’s important knowledge for a front end developer. The ‘technical’ phone screen was pure talking, just asking for domain knowledge in different areas of computer science (little emphasis on front end work). They moved me on on to the onsite round, despite never having seen me code. I went to the onsite, it had 3 rounds, with a total of 7 interviewers. 4 people face timed me for the first round. I think this was a terrible experience. I could see them getting bored when I did poorly, and losing interest and looking at other things. I felt like it was impossible to do well in that round with that much disinterest. That was a front end coding interview, and some weird question about designing a serializer and deserializer. When I asked what this hypothetically would be used for, they refused to answer beyond ‘it’s a question’. It’s hard to optimize for something when you don’t know what its purpose is. The next round was a fairly standard system design interview, and 3rd was about again bizarre. Two interviewers for that round, one asked a leetcode easy question which I rapidly completed. The other asked me to high level implement gestures on macOS. I think that is a pretty bizarre question for a front end developer. My experience with that team informed me that they don’t know what they’re looking for, nor do they know how to ask questions that are reasonable relative to the work. Two weeks later, the original recruiter followed up asking me to reinterview. I declined.