Hi Folks,
Applied for Java,Spring Boot, Microservices role.
PS: This is my first FAANG experience. :)

YOE: 5.9
College: Tier-3
Currently SSE @ Walmart

OA Experience: Link

After 2 weeks, recruiter scheduled 2 elimination rounds back to back. Both the rounds were virtual.

Round #1:
Taken by a ICT3 (4 YOE)
DSA: Trapping rain water problem. (30 min)
Java/Spring Boot (Theoretical): (30 min)

1. Multiple questions on Spring Cloud components and use cases.
2. Default method in interface
3. Spring MVC vs Spring Boot
4. Comparator vs Comparable
5. CAP theorem
6. Lambda expressions
7. Microservices resiliency aspects. (ratelimiting, circuit breaking)
8. explain Factory design pattern with example

Round #2:
Taken by a SSE (12+ YOE, Guy was from Wipro, later converted his contract)
System Design: BookMyShow (end to end) (40 min)
Focused on various aspects:
Booking Flow, Onboarding of shows, Search of nearby cinema halls, analytics.
$Advice:$ Go through the codekarle videos.
Java/Spring Boot (Theoretical) : (20 min)

1. Spring Cache related questions
2. BeanFactory vs ApplicationContext
3. Concurrent collections : I explained ConcurrentHashMap.
4. whats a Future?

Feedback is positive and 3 further rounds were scheduled next week on consecutive days.

Round #3: (Loop #1)
Taken by a EM (15+ YOE, Again a Wiproite) (60 min)
15 min intro.
All sorts of behavioral related questions were asked.
Tell me a time when you innovated.
Tell me a time when you had a disagreement with peer.
Tell me a time when you delivered in short time and reprioritized work.
Tell me a time when you used some new technology in the project.
Tell me a time when...
All answers given in STAR format.

This guy was sitting in US timezone (8am PST) and slept through the entire interview. I could literally see his eyes closing down. IS&T org is truly filled with mediocrity.

Round #4: (Loop #2)
Taken by a SWE (15+ YOE, A wiproite, not surprised) (60 min)
5 min intro.

1. Create an immutable class. Full working code is expected.
2. TinyURL design discussion. Explained 2 approaches: Base62 and MD5 Hash, and its pros and cons.
3. Given an array with repeating elements, return K most frequent elements.

Round #5: (Loop #3) (after 1 week, got rescheduled)

1. implement LRU Cache. Full working code is expected along with test cases. (Used HashMap and Doubly LinkedList)
2. Make the above code thread safe. (Used ReentrantReadWriteLock and used ConcurrentHashMap instead of HashMap)
3. Complexity of above code.
4. What is string intern?
5. Why do we override equals and hashcode method?

I felt that the interviewer was not paying attention to what I was saying. He kept arguing that LRU cache could be implemented with just map and DLL was not required. I explained my thought process twice but he was not ready to accept. I dont think this old guy (40+) had adequate knowledge.

Its been a week, no update. Got ghosted i guess.
Overall my take is that Apple doesnt have a clear interview process, as you can see HM was 3rd round instead of last for me. And even recruiter also doesnt know the order of the rounds. So, you need to be prepared well for anything.

#apple #faang