Interviewing at Six Silicon Valley Giants in Six Days: Day 3 @ Apple

A contemporaneous account of my 2018 interview gauntlet

The Morning Of

I think I’m largely out of nerves to worry about. I still feel a little bit of nervousness because I’m going to spend 4–5 hours with engineers trying to find out where my ability ends, and it’s never fun to reach the point where you realize you’re out of knowledge if other people are trying to hear it. It’s motivating to hit that point when you’re building out your own project, but it’s a different situation with someone grilling you.

I wasn’t provided an itinerary today and I’m not going to divulge any details about my interviews today. I’ll still update about how I’m feeling and if I finally hit my “bombed” interview. From a compensation standpoint, I’d love to get as many offers as possible, obviously. However, both of the places I’ve interviewed so far I’ve really enjoyed (although I enjoyed each in entirely different ways), so I’d be thrilled to work at either place. Each additional company is icing. That being said, I could totally end up working at Apple, Amazon, Facebook, or Google. As I said when I first started this chronicle, I’d be thrilled at any of these tech giants.

I’m at a bagel shop and I just wrapped up breakfast. My interview is in about three hours, so I guess I’ll go explore a bit around the area. I’ve resolved that I’m done studying/preparing on this trip until I hit a road bump. Once I have an interview that shows “hey, you really don’t know $topic as well as you thought”, I can brush up on that. However, until I hit that point, I’m confident I can come up with things on the spot. I’ve already encountered multiple questions that I’ve never seen before and I’ve figured them out on the spot. Building that confidence actually ends up helping my performance. It’s like self-reinforcing good stuff!

Anyway, I’m closing my laptop now. I probably won’t write anything ore until after my interview, which ends around 5:00pm, the latest end time of any of my interviews.

The Interviews (and Closing Thoughts)

It’s now 8:28pm. Today went well. It went worse than the two previous days, but five minutes before I went in to check-in at reception for today’s interview, LinkedIn called me to say they were very impressed by my interviews and they were excited to move forward with an offer. No numbers from yet.

I’ll keep this one short because I’m spooked by Apple. I had five interviews in total today. I think I did exceptionally well on two of them (algorithmic stuff and culture fit stuff), I did decently on two of them (language-y stuff), and I did just ok on one of them (design stuff). My voice is seriously starting to fade and I’m only halfway done. On the other hand — I’m halfway done!

I’m cautiously optimistic that I’m 3/3 thus far when it comes to offers. Each company had some extremely cool facets to their organization and no company has given me any reason to bump them off of my “super excited to work there” list.

Although I have to switch hotels again tonight, I’m super happy that I’m over halfway done with the week. While I have an interview on Monday, I get an entire weekend to hang out with a friend and just chill, so I should be pretty fresh at that point. Apple says they’ll get back to me this Friday (it’s Wednesday now) at the earliest and most likely Monday. I think Yelp will extend an offer tomorrow. Exciting times!