I had a terrible experience interviewing at Apple. The Hiring Manager was more than 10 minutes late, and when he did come to the meeting he told me point blank that I didn't need to be here within the Watch PDE team, I should look at other departments, and that I should look elsewhere that wasn't in product design engineering. This was before I had a chance to even open my mouth and introduce myself. He judged from whatever information other than looking at me that I don't belong. He then followed to not believe me when I explained my qualificiations and motivations for engineering such as having a MS, research in robotics, and working on PCBs at another tech company. He made looks at and sexist remarks. Then going into the technical portion, I bombed because the whole time he was trying to make me feel bad. I'm a black woman and I'm curious what other discriminitary and sexist hiring practices Apple employes to keep black engineers out of their offices. I thought about suing, but I heard from my current colleagues about terrible experiences working there too so this kind of personality is normal. If you are not apart of the majority ( this man wasn't a white man btw) be really careful and double check who you are interviewing with. So I think I dodged a bullet, no wonder the position was open under that manager.

The interview went well overall. The interviewer opened with a discussion about a project I'm proud of, then a beam scenario question that covered structural and load analysis, stress and deflection, and material selection — testing my ability to connect first-principles thinking across the full problem space.