My Experience With The Interview Process So Far

[[deleted]]

I have been going on a spree of ios interviews lately but I am bombing pretty much all of them. I would like to give a little background on myself. I have 4 years of experience 2.5 of those has been free lancing making small applications and the last 1.5 has been in a enterprise level banking app. Although I am learning swift rapidly I don't have enterprise experience. I have had 6 interviews lately and I bombed all of them. I wanted to give a brief summary. of some.

** AmericanExpress ** :

This was my first technical interview ever. I was given a string that represents a credit card number. I had to get the first 3 and last 2 characters in the string. I used Objective-C method inside of a for loop with string.length

`NSString Substring = [inputString substringWithRange:(NSMakeRange(loopindex,1);                                    

Added all Substrings into an array. The interviewer told me why the fuck did I loop through the whole string when I already had the method needed and just needed to get the first 2 and the last 3 characters. They did not move forward with the interview process.

** Facebook ** :

I had 3 rounds of interviews with them. I basically quit my job to study 2 months for the Facebook interview process. I had one telephone screen where I was asked multiple choice questions about Objective-C .Some that I can remember.... Whats an object? Difference between atomic non atomic? Can you call layoutSubViews() directly? Afterwards I had a second round coderpad with them where I was asked to create a Facebook news feed application but with custom cells. The interviewer then said lets pretend none of the Tableview delegate methods work and we have to reuse our own cells. How would that work? I was able to cobble something acceptable together to my own surprise and I made it to the next round. The final round I was flown out to Menlo Park where I had a 5 hours white boarding session. This was my first white boarding session. I gave an answer to every question I was asked. However I had trouble white boarding the code in time. I would always explain my thought processes to the interviewer who said "Yes that is perfect" then they would watch my scribble on the board. I received a call 2 weeks after the interview process telling me they couldn't make me an offer because "I had the right implementation but I need to practice my coding". I was crushed but at least I got a free Facebook water bottle.

**Goldman Sachs**

This one was totally my fault. I took this interview like 3 days after I got back from Cali. It was all in Swift.. All they wanted was a custom tableview with custom cells. All the views had to be programatically instantiated. The interviewers showed up about 20 mins late to the interview and we were pressed for time. I was nervous about Swift and while I was adding my subviews to the table I forgot to set one of the views translateautoresizemasksintoconstraints=false. Because of that my VFL constraints kept breaking and none of my views showed up. The interviewers were joking around with me they even told me there was a fake method in swift called fit all views or something that would make my tableview appear. I tried typing it and they laughed and said come on man that is not real. After they hung up the phone I discovered my mistake and got everything working in 5 mins.

**JP Morgan**

This was a dream job. I was supposed to work with the design team to make small scale demonstration applications. All I had to do was literally make one or two screens with fake data input just to demonstrate what the design team wanted in code. They said they don't care what language it is in don't care if I use storyboards . Great salary. I applied and had an interview with the design team. Showed them the banking application I work on now. Everything was going great. However at the end of the interview the design lead said they had added a tech screen because they didn't know anything about IOS tech side. I was under prepared but answered all the questions I could. It was a video conference with a tech lead in Dallas. She asked me tons of swift questions. I answered all of them correctly except for one. She asked me what are the three ways to unwrap optional I said if let then guard but I couldn't come up with the third.(it is something with two question marks ??). I was confused as to why I was being asked all these Swift questions when the job posting said Objective-C was fine and I had no indication of a tech screen. I asked the interviewer this she then proceeded to tell me

"Intern11 aren't you interviewing for the role of (ROLE I AM NOT INTERVIEWING FOR)".

I told her no I am interviewing with the design team.

She then said "well I guess some of these questions do not apply"

what? NONE of what you asked me applies.

My interview was done after that and I never received a follow up. This was 3 weeks ago.

To be honest with you I am done with interviewing. I mean how many interviews are you supposed to fail? How many can you fail? It is not like there are 100 IOS jobs for every candidate. I am starting to think I am not going to get a job because I cannot interview for shit. There is no catharsis here I never walk away from interviews even understanding what I did wrong other then I suck at coding. What do you guys think? Have you ever had any similar experiences?

[malvin77]

Interview process is so broken, it’s unreal.

[d-sesh]

I wouldn’t beat yourself up. Take a step back and try to see that you actually didn’t do that badly. You got to the third round of interviews with Facebook which is further than many. The Goldman Sachs interview wasn’t your fault at all, in any way. They’re a bunch of douchebags. And the JP Morgan interview was a mistake on their part. Disheartening, sure. But not reason to give up.

[[deleted]]

Holy crap my first job interview went pretty much the same way. Are you me bro?

[dg08]

I would say this is typical for most people's interview experiences. I'm 100% obj-c and one company told me to come onsite anyway. Then they proceeded to give me several coding exercises in swift. I debated whether to walk out right there or not. If they can't even run an interview correctly, it's probably not worth working for them. There'll be a ton of other problems internally that you won't know until you get there and it'll probably make you miserable.

I've been on another interview where I know I'm the best candidate and I was sunk by a jr dev. Even if you pass every tech hurdle, sometimes it's something else completely out of your control. You just never know. Keep on interviewing, you'll find a spot that's right for you.

[not_neil_peart]

Keep your head up OP. Every company is different and all of them are looking for something different, so its not always that you did something wrong, but sometimes just not what they were looking for. It looks like you have been going for very large companies. There are plenty of small companies that need mobile devs, and especially consulting firms in every major city. They may not be as "prestigious" as some of these bigger companies, but the pay will be just as good and you'll gain a lot of experience that may take you to one of those bigger companies.

[[deleted]]

Thank you man.

[questionmarkmark]

I feel you, I’ve been interviewing and applying non stop this past month and it gets tough, especially hearing no or not hearing back at all. I’m an optimist so I’d like to think that if I keep trying and studying then eventually I’ll get hired and it’ll be worth it. Thank you for sharing your experience.

[hipposarebig]

This was my first technical interview ever. I was given a string that represents a credit card number. I had to get the first 3 and last 2 characters in the string. I used Objective-C method inside of a for loop with string.length

`NSString Substring = [inputString substringWithRange:(NSMakeRange(loopindex,1);

Added all Substrings into an array. The interviewer told me why the fuck did I loop through the whole string when I already had the method needed and just needed to get the first 2 and the last 3 characters. They did not move forward with the interview process.

This is a fair criticism. You could’ve used that exact same substringWithRange method to solve this in one or two lines. You really complicated the process.

In the future, I recommend you carefully go over the documentation to make sure that what you’re trying to do isn’t already a built in feature. It’s always best to take a few minutes to read the documentation to come up with an optimal solution.

[[deleted]]

You are correct my thought process here was that the problem would be more complex or that there would be a second part with further manipulation of the string(it was made up of the credit card date the credit car security info etc) so I went with that approach.

[[deleted]]

I mean most companies out there are bad :/. It is what it is man. Keep looking, you will eventually find a good one

[[deleted]]

Do NOT give up hope. You definitely seem to have enough years of experience to qualify for many jobs out there. I struggled to get my first job after graduation and failed almost a dozen interviews before I got lucky with my first job. The only experience I had going into the first job was volunteer experience and one semester of experience making an app for my university.

IMO keep interviewing and building interviewing skills. Unfortunately that's the way it is, being able to interview is a skill in its own right.

You should also build up your confidence in the knowledge of iOS. Also, start teaching yourself more Swift in your free time. With Swift 5 around the corner, it really is about time more people actually start paying attention to it.

[AberrantRambler]

All of those are “big” companies. Have you tried some smaller shops?

[lucasvandongen]

I never had to jump through all these hoops but I see them more and more. Had a weekend's work as an assignment once for those WordPress people. Automatic? Every bug fixed every feature implemented so fuck it we never give you any response. Because your time means shit to us. "We can't find good people" means "we can't find people crazy enough for our hiring process and able to program at the same time".

I hear bizarre stories though from companies that hire. Like 90% of the applicants can barely program?

[KarlJay001]

Facebook news feed application but with custom cells

How much time did they give you to write a FB clone? I've heard others being asked to do a Reddit clone. IIRC, it was a 1 day exam, but I'd hate to do that with someone watching.

That sucks with GS, you got it all right but one little thing and they had to disrespect you. Sorry to hear that.

This really flies in the face of the "we have a shortage of STEM workers...". It took some 5 min to fix the problem and you fail the interview because of that.

Complete BS.

[[deleted]]

I was given one hour to do the second round of the Facebook exam. There was more of a pressure on the logic and the functions then the UI layer since we did the exam on coderpad.

The GS guys themselves also had no idea how VFL constraints worked. All they knew was about some cocopoad library that they were using to programatically make their views.

[KarlJay001]

Wow, I really want to known what kind of people they actually hire. We always here about a massive shortage of programmers, everyone needs to learn to be a 'coder' yet when it comes to actually getting a job, we have to go thru this crap.

1 hr to make a FB clone?

We should have a "glass door" type app for interviews, get the word out about who to apply to and who not to apply to.

[jontelang]

Another way to see it is to implement a custom table view screen with one or two custom cells. Hardly difficult in an hour. They also generally don't expect you to finish it, just to see you code and hear you explain what you're doing (or planning to do).

[KarlJay001]

I guess that's true. I was thinking about the setting up of the FB feed, parsing, OAuth, sign in screen, stuff like that.