I applied for an internship at Apple after winning their prize at a hackathon. The first interview was directly after the hackathon and I was a sleep-walking zombie. Despite running on 2 hours of sleep for the last 3 days, that interview went really well! The lady I was interviewed by talked with me about what I was interested in and thought I would be a good fit for her team (I believe it was building something around Xcode tooling).
I left that interview feeling pretty good and with an action item of having a phone interview "soon™". Suffice to say, soon quickly turned into 3 months later in the next semester. I turned down a few internship offers at this point waiting for this phone interview. I'd also emailed a few times and gotten either basic responses or nothing. I should have taken that as a sign that this was not meant to be, but I was a college student and it was Apple.
The phone interview finally came and this ridiculousness continued. At the time, I was pretty new to Javascript, but I had Node listed on my resume (as you do when trying to compete for internships). The interview called me and we started talking. This was the "technical" interview, so he asked me about my experience in Node. I told him I listed it because I had done a bit of work with it a bit (part of the hackathon project we won with included Node), but that I wasn't especially confident in the inner workings of Node itself. He then proceeded to asking only questions related to the inner workings of Node itself.
I had no idea what to answer on a lot of the questions and he got more and more frustrated with the interview. It ended and I never heard back from anyone.
The good news is I learned a whole lot about how to interview. A few takeaways, in the hope that we can all learn more about internship interviewing:
Don't interview directly after a hackathon or late night coding challenge. The love of hackathons has died off a bit (sleep schedules everywhere sigh in relief), but it is still a way many places hire. They can be fun and a great way to find interns, but people are not on top of their game when they haven't slept in 3 days.
Have an interviewing team. Make sure they are all on the same page, ask every candidate the same general questions, and are there for all parts of the interview. Jumping around between people is nerve-wracking for interviewees and inefficient for interviewers - often times questions are asked multiple times, interviewers have different understanding of skill sets, and interviewees don't know what information each interviewer has on them.
Don't wait forever to make a decision or get contact. A smarter me from that time would have used the Apple internship interview to leverage other internship interviews and realized that the lack of communication was a bad sign. I ended up at a great internship with a great company, but I shouldn't have gotten drug around like that.
If someone tells you they don't know something, don't ask them questions about that thing. This is just common sense.
There are lots of other insights I have gained on hiring developers/interns, but those are the important ones from this experience.
I applied for an internship at Apple after winning their prize at a hackathon. The first interview was directly after the hackathon and I was a sleep-walking zombie. Despite running on 2 hours of sleep for the last 3 days, that interview went really well! The lady I was interviewed by talked with me about what I was interested in and thought I would be a good fit for her team (I believe it was building something around Xcode tooling).
I left that interview feeling pretty good and with an action item of having a phone interview "soon™". Suffice to say, soon quickly turned into 3 months later in the next semester. I turned down a few internship offers at this point waiting for this phone interview. I'd also emailed a few times and gotten either basic responses or nothing. I should have taken that as a sign that this was not meant to be, but I was a college student and it was Apple.
The phone interview finally came and this ridiculousness continued. At the time, I was pretty new to Javascript, but I had Node listed on my resume (as you do when trying to compete for internships). The interview called me and we started talking. This was the "technical" interview, so he asked me about my experience in Node. I told him I listed it because I had done a bit of work with it a bit (part of the hackathon project we won with included Node), but that I wasn't especially confident in the inner workings of Node itself. He then proceeded to asking only questions related to the inner workings of Node itself.
I had no idea what to answer on a lot of the questions and he got more and more frustrated with the interview. It ended and I never heard back from anyone.
The good news is I learned a whole lot about how to interview. A few takeaways, in the hope that we can all learn more about internship interviewing:
Don't interview directly after a hackathon or late night coding challenge. The love of hackathons has died off a bit (sleep schedules everywhere sigh in relief), but it is still a way many places hire. They can be fun and a great way to find interns, but people are not on top of their game when they haven't slept in 3 days.
Have an interviewing team. Make sure they are all on the same page, ask every candidate the same general questions, and are there for all parts of the interview. Jumping around between people is nerve-wracking for interviewees and inefficient for interviewers - often times questions are asked multiple times, interviewers have different understanding of skill sets, and interviewees don't know what information each interviewer has on them.
Don't wait forever to make a decision or get contact. A smarter me from that time would have used the Apple internship interview to leverage other internship interviews and realized that the lack of communication was a bad sign. I ended up at a great internship with a great company, but I shouldn't have gotten drug around like that.
If someone tells you they don't know something, don't ask them questions about that thing. This is just common sense.
There are lots of other insights I have gained on hiring developers/interns, but those are the important ones from this experience.
Nice, we learn with every experience and nothing is how we expected.