Apple Emdedded SWE interview

I recently went through the interview process for an Embedded Software Engineer position at Apple Munich. Having over 1 year of experience, I applied through their careers portal and received an invitation for a hiring manager round approximately two weeks later.

Hiring Manager Round (Virtual)

This was a very pleasant and engaging 45-minute virtual interview. The manager started by explaining his team's role, the process, and the next steps. The interview was divided into technical and non-technical questions. We began with the technical segment:

• Semaphore vs. Mutex?
• Difference layers of 4G and 5G, how do they differ? What's new in 5G?
• Carrier aggregation concept and which layer does it affect?
• Explain all layers in detail.
• What is the main role of the RLC layer?
• Other general communication engineering questions.

There was no live coding in this round.

For the non-technical questions, I was asked:

• When can you start?
• Explain a bad situation with your team members and how you resolved it.
• Explain a mistake you made at work and how you fixed it.

And so on. The manager was very nice and communicative, ensuring I was comfortable throughout the entire interview. I was selected to proceed after this round.

Second Interview (The challenging part, 1 hour)

For a role in Munich, this interview was conducted by someone from the US. The interviewer seemed less friendly and immediately started with in-depth questions about semaphore vs. mutex and other OS concepts, without any introduction.

He then moved to a Coderpad session:

• Implement a linked list, insert at head, and then reverse it. I honestly didn't expect such a question for an embedded role at Apple, but I tried my best, although I didn't fully meet his expectations.
• The second question was more straightforward and expected: bit manipulation, specifically setting and getting bits.

During this Coderpad round, the interviewer was often preoccupied with other tasks and did not communicate much, which I felt could have been handled better by both sides.

Two weeks later, I received the rejection mail.