Apple IS&T Interview Experience

Sup everyone, I figured I’d share my experience so others can search for this before their next interview at apple is&t or if you want to laugh I applied online for a software engineering role and was contacted for a software qa role. I did a phone interview with 2 members on the team. Both of them were super nice. They went over my resume and asked me questions specific to the job description. A few days later, I got an email saying they enjoyed talking with me and invited me onsite. When I arrived to the building for my onsites, I noticed there wasn’t a lobby. I had to wait outside until my first interviewer came outside and asked my name. The outside of the building looked like trash and after walking inside, I realized that the building clearly wasn’t renovated recently. Super tall cubicles, no fancy furniture and trash coffee machines. My first interviewer was pretty cocky and literally said “what would you do when shit goes down?” I figured this guy had an ego problem and could tell he wasn’t really in the mood to be interviewing. My second, third and fourth interviewers were all nice and didn’t have any ego problems. They asked me questions related to my resume, security and software qa. The final interview was with the hiring manager. I realized she sent an older resume they had on file to the recruiter, and she said that was her fault because Apple’s internal job tool was confusing. So, I explained to her and all my other interviewers that they had a resume that was over a year old and that I sent my current resume to one of my interviewers during the interview. I realized HM didn’t really know much about software and she basically just told me that her husband worked at apple and she worked at qualcomm previously and she didn’t like it, so her husband got her into apple. When I asked specific questions about how the company’s perks, she didn’t know and tried to play it off by laughing. She also ranted about how she installed microsoft office because she doesn’t like apple’s equivalent software (lol). I couldn’t take her seriously and tried my best not to laugh when she was ranting about that. She also mentioned that most of the people in is&t aren’t super passionate about the work they do. I wasn’t expecting to get the job and wanted to use these interviews as practice for my next onsites at other companies. The whole process took about 3 weeks from the initial email to onsite results. I work in Cisco’s equivalent IT department and realized even with the “apple” name, the office and team wasn’t really anything special. Apple is&t buildings are way worse than any building at cisco in terms of look, inside and amenities. All in all, the onsite interviews were good for practice. —— I did a few other phone screens with different teams at apple. I think some of the managers don’t care about their NDAs and are open about their jobs. One hiring manager told me the facetime bug was supposed to be fixed in one day, but due to other bugs that the devs found in their services, they took longer than expected to fix the facetime bug. The same manager also mentioned that their secrecy slows down his and other teams and created a lot of duplicated work. TC 150k