Hypothetically, let's assume every company follows this method and around 30% of the employees who went through long probation period didn't make it through. Wouldn't that leave the employees in an even worse situation than getting rejected immediately, since they resigned their current job and now everyone in his professional circle knows that he or she didn't make it through company X's probation period? In addition to that, the employer will also accrue a lot more negative publicity from the employees who didn't make it through.

However, based on available information, I am 100% certain that I couldn't successfully complete the on-command hypothetical coding exercises with someone standing over my shoulder, along with the other mental and social gymnastics associated with applying at any of these companies. I wonder how many other well-qualified people are out there that will simply never apply because of the drawn-out, intimidating hiring process.

At the end of the day, it comes down to being able to truly connect with your interviewers and breaking out of the typical question-answer format. It sounds like you almost reached that point - I'm not sure if the lunch was a standard thing they did with all applicants, but it did seem like they were really interested in you. It could be that the process came down to a handful of equally desirable candidates, at which point luck plays a large role in deciding who gets the job. I would definitely keep in touch with everyone you met, and apply again at the next opportunity.

I feel you have to look at job interviews like a hand of poker or the like. There are things you can do to increase your odds, but even with perfect play not every hand is winnable.

Silicon Valley as an engineer is a demanding environment to be in, and like many such environments getting in is quite a challenge. As an outsider, you are at many disadvantages: you don't know the culture, you don't know how things get done, you don't know who to talk to and who will waste your time, and so on. So to get in, not only are you fighting against all of these obstacles, but you also have to perform at the level which is expected of everyone, which might be higher than what you're used to.

This means that the odds of getting in on your first try are quite, quite low. If your goal is really to make it there, you have to treat it as a numbers game - after 5, 10, 20 tries, you'll probably get in. Or maybe if your dream is to work at Google/Facebook/etc., then the best way to do it is to first start working for a smaller, lesser known company that's having a harder time hiring. Make yourself a name there, volunteer to give some talks, post some open source projects that'll bring your name at the top of Hacker News for a day, and after a couple of years, knock again at the door of your dream company. Or maybe they'll end up knocking at your door again very soon. Recruiters know very well that the number of false negatives is quite high, and that people can change very fast.

If you want to take part, you have to put in a lot of effort and personal work, and expect things to take time- you have to stay humble, and you have to keep pushing. I think it's worth it. Some people don't believe that it is, and that's completely fine- but you have to know whether you want it or not. If you really do, then don't give up on the first obstacle.

Sure, 700 billion is an impressive market cap for a company, but that's not what it's all about for the creative people of Apple.

$6,000 of your time, meh, we all invest that much in side projects, year after year, if not more frequently than that.

5,000 miles, yeah, so you took a flight, is this supposed to be a measure of something of significance? Yes we sometimes travel for interviews. Putting mileage numbers to it almost sounds like complaining.

17 hours of WWDC videos, that's a sliver of a slice of what's available. If anything, it's an embarrassing number to admit to, for someone who claims to be an Apple UI expert.

Maybe this weird fixation on off-point numbers was a turnoff for the kind folks at Apple, I don't know.

About 9 interviews later over 4 spread-out days, I was told I had done quite well during the interview process.

Eventually I was not given the position because I was holding a beer in my LinkedIn picture.

They ended up paying my current employer (their vendor at the time) astronomical amounts of money to do the very same service, done by me, on-site.

Go figure.

Despite end of the day praise and the acknowledgement that I'd be recommended for the next phase, not to mention a genuine rapport with the devs that sporadically popped in, the four letter firm acquired a software house and froze recruitment a week later.

I spent a day revealing tricks and patterns - something I charge a substantial daily rate - for nothing. But this is ridiculously common: the more effort required to interview the less likely I am to get the job.

Nowadays I'm happy to walk out of bullshit interviews where they ask open ended questions where only their answer is correct.

You get to a certain age/experience where it becomes apparent that a good interview is an informal session where you have a meeting of the minds not an adversarial grilling.

    Note: after 25 minutes answering questions for a job you really
    want it’s kinda hard to shift to a question-asking mode.

Some I liked:

What does a typical day look like for you?

What projects do you work on?

How long have you been at $company? How has your role changed since then?

If I were hired for this role, what would my first day/week/month look like?

Is there anything about $company that some people really like, but others might dislike? (For example, having an open-plan office.)

What tools do you use on a regular basis?

The thing about the process is one bad moment spoils the entire process for the candidate. Shallow/No responses, or horrible questions, or something unprofessional being said during the interview.

It's not just $AAPL it is everyone, but if you are an interviewer or a recruiter, please fight for the candidates to get good responses and good questions, especially if you fly someone across the globe to awkwardly sit in a room for 6 hours.

It's great to see insight into interviews, in general, but that just left a weird bitter note to the article.

One of the more painful things that I came across regularly was that we often had multiple great people go through the full interview process for a role, but could only hire one. Often 2-3 candidates could have done the job brilliantly, but we could only choose one. In that case, it tends to be really subtle things that shift the decision. (And this is where Google's Unconscious Bias training is vitally important - https://www.gv.com/lib/unconscious-bias-at-work)

It sounds like that situation may very well be the case here: lots of expense (both time/effort and $) and a long series of interviews, with a "no" at the end. (And in my experience those "no's" are often blunt, no matter how awesome a candidate is, for cover-your-ass/legal reasons.)

And indeed, if you had to go through all this it means they very seriously considered you for the position. Now, the expenses they made mean little (even for a far poorer company) compared to the mistake of recruiting someone that did not fit.

There's many reasons why someone would not be selected and sometimes it's just that people didn't "click" really.

I know that most of the time, recruiters word is "if you're not sure, better not hire than to make a mistake" and sometimes people who could have been accepted and made a positive contribution to the team get refused. There's even a bit of luck in that.

Thanks for sharing, though. I've never applied for Apple - albeit I guess engineering jobs get more tech stuff in the facetime interviews ;)

If there were indeed a shortage the practice would be reversed and companies would be willing to risk hiring unqualified workers in order never to miss the one candidate who can do the job.

But so long as there is a flood of less qualified workers along side a good number of skilled ones, the practice will continue or worsen.

What you get are a bunch of new hires who's only qualification over the not-hired is that they put on a good show for the interviewers. I'd say they are the best actors, but that doesn't cover those very good actors who make the mistake of playing the wrong part. Say you are willing to work through weekends to meet deadlines ... oops sorry, you guessed wrong. In this office that attitude is too competitive. We are going with those who guessed "no, weekends are for relaxing" and don't think you would get along with them.

The message this sends to current employees is also evil: if you don't fit in perfectly we don't want you. So everyone shows up to work in costume, wearing a mask, because they fear standing apart. Bring the wrong suit or express the wrong opinion and you might not "fit" anymore. We often hear about a lack of visible diversity in IT. How can we expect to achieve visible diversity if we cannot yet tolerate emotional and cultural diversity? Employees and prospective employees should be judged on on their work product, not on their ability to emotionally camouflage themselves.

Did Office Space teach us nothing?

- Sometimes, a "No" means "we like your career trajectory; we've identified you as a candidate that we want to follow up with in ~6 months".

- Sometimes, a "No" means "we really like you; we think you'd be a fit here, we'll be constructing this team in ~6 months".

- Sometimes, a "No" means "we wont relocate; we wont fly you out here; we're only considering local (e.g. Bay Area) candidates".

- Sometimes, a "No" means that it's up to you to reflect on the situation. Take as many notes as you can during the process. Analyze what you said, wrote, acted, etc. It's up to you to determine how you could be better.

- When you get to the on-site and have the opportunity to learn a lot more, things might not be all ponies and rainbows like you'd imagine. Be open to what you didn't want to see, hear, or learn about. You might learn that you actually don't want to work here.

- You're racing against the clock. Balance is key. You hear advice about asking clarification questions, discussing trade-offs, etc. but at the end of the hour one of the most important things is the code you put up on that board. The interviewer will likely whip out their phone, take a pic, and that's that.

- Coding on a whiteboard, with a stranger, in an unfamiliar environment, after traveling many miles... is... challenging. Without much practice, you're at risk to fall flat on your face--I've face-planted my fair share, and it's always fuel to get back at it again.

- Interview as much as you possibly can. You learn about companies, people, technology, industry, challenges, etc. Practice, practice, practice.

- Sometimes, recruiters reach out to you for an initial call (you're excited), and then you learn that members of the hiring team haven't even seen your resume (orly? u think i haz de skillz dear rekrooter?). You then never hear back from the recruiter, or receive an email stating that they're not moving forward. I've only had a couple of these, but it's enough for me to strongly dislike contact before any member of the hiring team has reviewed my qualifications.

They have nothing to gain by explaining and plenty to lose if they say something stupid.

Despite the headlines, market cap, cache of the name of the company on your CV, how can't you have as many questions coming up to put at them as they have for you?

The only time I've been turned down for a job that looked like it could have "dream job" aspirations to it, I had to say that 1) I totally knew and agreed with why they were declining and 2) felt they knew exactly why I would not likely feel comfortable coming in with them in a way that fits just right.

You should be seeking out, within reason, what day 1, month 1, and year 1 are going to be like. You should be seeing how they fit into your life path as much as they are seeing how you are going to get them through the issues that made the added headcount necessary.

What OP left me with, literally, was "I'm not a dummy b/c they brought me in." It's such a dry, objective review that it makes me think they were along for the ride instead of taking the wheel. It could well be just a personality-based thing. The OP has an apparently sterile passion for design and/in documentation.

Interviewers love passion and resonance - or at least they should at some place you really want to be. Nobody should have to pry things out of you. And then, they want to be able to agree with you and your view on technical passions and interpersonal rapport. Are you hard-working, objectively talented, opinionated-but-open, and do you seem ready and able to complement or enhance them?

I imagine that companies with such processes only get candidates that are extremely compliant and lack self-esteem. Because most people I know would politely tell the employer to go f themselves after the 3rd screening call.

Are these long drawn out, humiliating application processes typically American or does this happen in other countries as well?

I always call my candidates and ask one simple question when they don't get the job and after I tell them they won't be getting the job: do you want the usual HR rejection reason as in "you don't fit the profile we are looking for" or "we have a candidate that better fits the business need," or do you want me to give you 3 suggestions on how you could have done better? If the latter (they always want feedback, don't we all?) then I go into very specific behaviors. The majority of these tend to fall in two camps: you did not prepare for the interview, or you did not demonstrate a specific skill or experience and this is how I think you can get it.

100% of the people I have given feedback have never come back to sue my company or me for rejecting them. Many have followed me and one has actually followed me, interviewed at another place I went, and got the job then.

Regarding the article, yea, seems pretty standard. Sorry you didn't get the job

In the end I didn't get an offer, with a one liner explanation.

I was grateful that they even gave me a chance and hold no hard feeling against them BUT I'm pissed about the waste, on my and their part. On the days I had the interviews, I wasn't productive at all as I spent time preparing, managing my nervousness (pacing around), and decompressing after interview. Those are a few days I won't get back. Even without putting monetary value on it, I think all can agree it is a big waste.

After all that, all I got was a stinking one liner explanation, that I wasn't a good fit. What was the tech test for?

One person on the team I talked to seemed as if he hadn't seen my resume until the interview time. He was going down my resume and asking questions and I could tell that it was his first time reading it. And I also feel that was the person that gave thumbs down.

I hope their accounting knows that 1 person cost the COMPANY nearly 6 man hours of their employees, for nothing.

EDIT: From what I've seen previous jobs, managers and team members are asked to interview the candidate, not necessarily say yes/no based on the resume alone.

Not that anyone will listen but I think it would help if HR asked managers/team-members to give up/down on each resume before calling in for interview. If enough give down, don't call in for interview. Save time for all.

This is a really cool way to sum up the article.

My culture screen was in-person, while I was being interviewed technically. Part of their process was getting to know me. I'm relaxed in interviews, joke around, and have a good time because at the end of the day, we need to like what we do. I find that this confidence has opened a lot of doors for me, but I do have to work very hard to project it given my internal strife. I often find that interviewers are more nervous than me, frankly, because as an industry we tend to toss people in a room who are themselves suffering from imposter syndrome and ask them to gauge someone they've never met with very little interview training. I was interviewing for one company on my third day.

I am the polar opposite of what I would consider to be someone who "fits Apple culture," in general, but it's worth remembering that there are vastly different cultures in different areas. I'm fat, I don't dress well, I'm largely unkempt if left to my own devices, I'm not a social butterfly -- put a soldering iron in my hand and I'll have a good time. I enjoy theoreticals about encryption and side channel attacks. I identify more with Woz than Jobs. Universally, across the board, every time I told someone I'm an engineer at Apple I got the look up and down and "you are?" in reply. I think people have an image of Apple that's formed from the typical customer and perhaps the retail folks; while that's true to an extent (what's served at Caffe Macs is an often great example, but you can find a kick-ass burger if you know which one to go to), I didn't find that Apple struck me as especially hipster or faux-cool or however you want to think of it. Again, maybe my area, but typical Web startup people generally break that way, so I would have expected Apple to reflect it, but no. That's neither here nor there and represents a very compartmentalized view. (I didn't work on Infinite Loop, and when I made journeys over there I got a different feeling, so that might be related.)

Just based on my own experience, I think team fit goes way over culture fit, and I don't think OP's experience sounds like a culture screen.

The other difference is that my process was practically a mirrored copy of Google's, with recruiter courting, technical screen by the recruiter, deeper screen by the #2 on the team, in person interviews. I interviewed for two different teams at Apple (one no-hired me, which was fun because then I was responsible for some of their stuff), and the process was nearly identical, except the no-hire team put a pair of people in the room and my accepting team put only one for each interview. At no point was FaceTime ever used. In fact, I wasn't aware that was a norm anywhere, but I admit that my purview was limited to my area.

Another factor I've heard considered in that situation; Does he/she have a lifestyle that can fit in this town? Windsurfers quickly change their minds about living in Anchorage, and next thing you know it's hiring time again.

I applied for a Developer position back in the summer (not at Apple) and after a great phone interview I never heard back.

Today, more than 7 months later I got a call out of the blue saying the position was just advertised again and they were really disappointed I didn't apply (I didn't see it) apparently my resume was great and I scored really high on the phone interview (who knew?) so they've had me submit my resume today and have already started calling my references.

I'm very curious why it all fell in a heap 7 months ago, but I suspect internal politics or the budget dried up or some-such.

And like first dates, you can do all the right things, etc. And you think things went well, but, you find out that there is no second date.

This is so true. If you remind the person interviewing of someone they don't like, your chances lessen. You have no control over that. Also be aware that non-HR people have to interview people with not a ton of guidance or experience in interviewing. When I interviewed people I was trying to figure out was 1) can this person help us, 2) what will it be like working with them.

Also remember that it can work the other way too. You are trying to see if you'd like to work there while interviewing. At my last company we had people reject us. And when looking for a job last year I politely told a couple companies I thought would be great I was not interested after interviewing.

If they don't want my whole personality, they can't have my intelligence.

I refuse to turn myself into a "corporate robot" for the sake of a paycheck.

I've seriously been asked by a candidate in an interview what our product was, and not just once. You took a day off work to come here and you couldn't even look at our website? On the other hand, I've had candidates who proactively identified some of the internal challenges we were currently dealing with "but how do you deal with X?" which is impressive.

More importantly, this decision to work at a company is going to have a bigger impact on the candidate than the hiring manager. People forget that the interview is a two way process. It's important to find out whether this company is going to be a place you will enjoy. Use questions as a way to figure out what the environment is like. Look for subtext in the answers.

In general though, I'd avoid HR-related questions. They are almost always likely to generate a generic response, almost every candidate will ask similar questions, and they can easily be answered by your HR department contact.

The author got it right when he mentioned at the end that he was "talking to the people who implemented the original OSX UI". That's the sort of thing that would make me interested in working for you. Personally, I don't care about a company's 'interview process'. That's just filler crap they use to get people talking. I don't need help to get me talking about what I do. I'll answer questions, but as soon as I can, I'll be grilling you about all kinds of stuff. I'm in question-asking mode by default.

Back to OP: I personally don't see myself working for a place that needs to talk to me for more than 1 hr before making a decision. If they take this long to decide on a hire, imagine how long and grueling are their technology decisions.

I understand wanting to really vet someone first; but it really does seem kind of excessive how long these interview processes are becoming. It's not as if the author were applying for a Japanese salaryman (read: lifetime) employment position. Why not do a normal interview, bring them on as a contractor, see how it goes, and then make your final decision? It'd be a bit of a risk for the candidate if relocation were involved and remote work wasn't possible, but that would be on them.

If you're freelancing, then it's not that imaginary. You're giving up billable time.

A lot of startups do still hire with a large company mindset, but I think they're making a big mistake.

Simply the process of getting approval for a job req and playing the required politics screws everything up. I've actually been pressured to hire someone just to hold onto the req at a large company, with the up-front, stated intention to fire the person in a month or two and keep looking.

Tell me more about the skills shortage.

Please explain. I hear this a lot but it's never substantiated other than by vague references to employees being able to sue for being fired. Yes, some employees do sue, but there generally is no ground to do so, even when the employer has misbehaved. In my experience, it's actually incredibly easy and cheap to fire someone. You might lose a couple months' salary, but generally even that won't be a total loss as you're likely to get at least some decent work even out of a bad hire.

There could be any number of reasons someone might not appear to "fit" on a given interview day, which wouldn't necessarily apply in them in the day-to-day - jet lag, the stress of the interview process, being under the weather and many more...

People and cultures adapt over time, through contact with each other; if you're denying good candidates because of their "fit" in the now, you're artificially limiting yourself for the future.

First, regarding the cultural fit: I think it's important that you share a similar mindset with the people who already work there. You'll get along better, and it is more productive. For example, if one person is much more assertive than another, and tends to get their way, we may miss out on the contributions of another. (A lot of very different examples here)

The second part: You're right, they can't give you a full personality quiz, but they're doing their best (oral communication and body language tell a lot more than having you fill in a quiz). They want to look for someone who fits in, so they bring you in and see if you do. What other way is there?

> ... best actors ...

I think if you intend to be an actor for the sake of a job, you're going to have a miserable time. Sure, I suppose this is the case if you value money more than satisfaction at you workplace. Which is where you'll make friends and spend a lot of your life, so I think you shouldn't, but that's subjective, so I concede this point.

> ... not fitting ...

This relates to the previous part in terms of priorities between just "getting the job" and "being happy with your job". As for the idea of not fitting in, I think it's too much of an exaggeration to think that people won't tolerate a few things here and there--but if you're entire view was different or fake to begin with, well maybe you didn't belong after all... you wouldn't be happy there anyway, so it's for the best.

Culture is also wether to be a perfectionist or to ship things now, even if they have bugs. To spend time sharing your knowledge with others or to document the code. To create a design or to quickly do what the customer wants. To generate comprehensive documentation, or to give personalised support. To tolerate brilliant aholes (hey, they are geniuses after all) or not.

All those things are different approaches to work, and being in places where the culture is different of your own can be a pain for both sides.

Funny thing: at country clubs, "culture fit" used to be a nice way of saying that we had better keep the Jews, Chinese, and Italians out, and that anyone darker-skinned than that will be automatically assumed to be an employee.

> It's a job, not a country club.

Yes, it's a job, but your ability to deliver on your work is not defined merely by private metrics like how fast you type, how many lines of code you can write a day, or even how knowledgeable and experienced you are about C++. Pretty much every job that you might apply to involves very large amounts of communication with your colleagues. When that communication breaks down (which it does even when you are a good culture fit), all sorts of elements come into play to help get things back on track. Also, when there is a need for rapid change (which there is on an almost daily basis in any company that's not on a straight path to the cemetery), communication and how well you gel with the rest of your team becomes the critical factor for how fast that change can happen.

"It's a job, not a computer game," I would reply. You can play your game by yourself with no interactions. Jobs require mature people who know how to communicate and behave in the target environment.

> What you get are a bunch of new hires who's only qualification over the not-hired is that they put on a good show for the interviewers. I'd say they are the best actors, but that doesn't cover those very good actors who make the mistake of playing the wrong part. Say you are willing to work through weekends to meet deadlines ... oops sorry, you guessed wrong. In this office that attitude is too competitive. We are going with those who guessed "no, weekends are for relaxing" and don't think you would get along with them.

If a company hires based on superficial answers like this, and thinks they're hiring based on culture fit, they're totally missing the point and they'll probably fail. Culture fit is at the same time far more subtle and far more concrete than this. Superficial features like whether you say that you're willing to work weekends or not are irrelevant. However, little and big details like how you walk down the street, whether you are open to someone questioning your ideas, whether you let someone else walk through the door first, whether you are a well rounded person with more to bring than just "I'm a great programmer", and, indeed, whether you recognise that you do want to work with people that you like and get along with, whether you you care about what kind of people you're going to be working with - individually those might be easy to fake, but as a whole, it's as hard to fake that general picture as it is to fake knowing about programming (to a programmer) when you're not a programmer. Even if you learn stuff by rote, details will slip.

> The message this sends to current employees is also evil: if you don't fit in perfectly we don't want you. So everyone shows up to work in costume, wearing a mask, because they fear standing apart. Bring the wrong suit or express the wrong opinion and you might not "fit" anymore. We often hear about a lack of visible diversity in IT. How can we expect to achieve visible diversity if we cannot yet tolerate emotional and cultural diversity?

That's the message, perhaps, if the company sending that message is totally stupid. Yes, culture fit matters, and yes, people can drift out of culture fit. But this is not something that happens suddenly, it happens over a long period. People don't suddenly come to work one day with a completely different outlook on how they want to behave at work. Obviously, if their definition of culture fit is based on childish, superficial details like whether you wear a suit, then yes, you'll get dumb behaviour from said companies.

My experience is that, quite unlike what you describe, organisations with culture fit enable people to stick out more. Because you know you're surrounded by relatively like-minded people, you tend to feel more comfortable being yourself. On the other hand, in an environment with a bland mix of employees with no consideration of culture fit, people tend to much more harshly punish people who stick out. Take a company like Zappos, which definitely cares about culture fit, and has as one of its explicit values "be weird", and compare the types of behaviours you see in that company to what you'd get somewhere like UBS or any typical traditional large corporate, which don't tend to care about culture fit, and you will easily see that people at Zappos tend to be much more willing to stick out - it's the ones working in the banks that have to wear masks all day.

> Employees and prospective employees should be judged on on their work product, not on their ability to emotionally camouflage themselves.

See above point - it's not about emotional camouflage, unless you're in a dumb company that doesn't understand the point of culture fit. It's about being emotionally intelligent and well matched to the people you'll be working with, so you feel comfortable being yourself around them, and don't have all this extra friction of working with people you don't really like or get along with.

> Did Office Space teach us nothing?

Yes, it taught us that the superficial understanding of culture you're describing can be implemented in horrible and somewhat comical (if you're not stuck in it) ways. It taught us that "pieces of flair" is a terrible way to measure enthusiasm, that "hawaiian shirt day" is ridiculous, that bland cultures generate zero loyalty or wellbeing, that culture, or lack thereof, can be a ruthlessly efficient demotivator.

In other words, it taught us that actual culture fit really does matter.