How to Get a SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Job at APPLE: Q&A w/ Apple Software Engineer

Hey Muhammad, how are you doing? I'm doing good. How are you Saja? Doing great. Doing great. So obviously you're a software engineer at Apple, which is a really nice company that a lot of people try to get into. I just have a few questions out here for you to kind of spread the knowledge, spread the love with my YouTube family. Are you up for that? Yeah, that sounds good. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, how about we just start out with you introducing yourself as well as your background? Yeah, sure. Uh, so my name is Muhammad Maj. I moved to the US in 2016 to pursue a bachelor's in engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Initially, I was interested in mechanical engineering. So, I worked with the Solaka team on campus. We went to Australia, got second place at the world championship. However, I was concerned that I was not as attracted to mechanics as computer science. So, then I switched my major in sophomore year. Moved on to work at Bosch for a semester as a co-op in China building software solutions so that they can better analyze and reallocate power more efficiently. moved on and then worked at Ford as an intern on their autonomous vehicles team helping them build internal tools for the engineers who are working on the actual vehicles. Graduated in 2020, so the past year in May with an offer from Uber that was rescended because of the pandemic. So the summer I was recruiting again and then got connected to my team at Apple and that's how I ended up here. I really like how you turned a bad situation with a rescended offer to a really excellent one at Apple right there. Could you kind of transition into talking a little bit about your experience at Apple thus far? I know it's only been a short while, but still. What's like a typical day in the life of an Apple software engineer? I work on the cellular protocol stack or the CPS team. We help build smartphone modems for the iPhones and the iPads. So that's where I'm at. Our team is unique in the sense that we have engineers across three continents. So we have to work all of them at the same time. Other engineers have a regular 9 to5 job. We have a very different routine where we wake up at 8:00, have a meeting, daily stand up with the teams in Europe, gather insight from them, work for a while until the afternoon, take a break for a couple of hours, get back to work until 8:00 p.m. at night, and then we have a stand up with team in India, share what we have developed so far, sign off, go back to sleep, and repeat. At Apple on the CPS team, I was hired to build internal tools as well to build whatever the engineers across the three continents need to better maintain, manage, and test their code. depending on their needs. I have to do multiple jobs at the same time. I'm currently a full stack developer, a cloud architect, and a DevOps engineer at the same time. Depending on which team needs me to pursue a different role, it's been a great experience so far. Big benefit of being on this team is that I do not know what comes next. Cool. Cool. Um, and honestly, really speaking of benefits, what are the coolest perks of being an Apple employee? There are different layers to the perks you get working at Apple. Being a part of a big tech company means that you get the usual competitive pay, healthcare, and insurance that are important benefits that you're looking for. Just working at Apple lets you get in touch with their vast array of products and services at a much more discounted price. That is very helpful. Also, just working at Apple means you get commuter benefits with their free shuttles, discounted food on campus, which unfortunately is not accessible at the moment. My team in specific provides a couple of more benefits. I get to wear multiple hats at the same time allowing me to increase the breadth of my knowledge and experience. At the same time, Apple has so many engineers working on different products that you are able to access and learn from without any barriers to entry. That allows me to explore, branch out, learn from them. I think that's a big benefit of working at a big company like Apple. Honestly, sucks that you're missing out on all that food benefits and all the experiences of being there in person. Could you talk a little bit about how best to apply to Apple? Whether that's through like career fairs, referrals, and just kind of like the whole process really. In terms of available outlets to entry, the most common one is their career page where you get to look into different opportunities and positions available. Most of the people apply there. So, the chances of getting picked is dependent on your luck. I guess to improve those chances, definitely get a referral. Now, at Apple, because it's such a big company, there are so many teams working on it. It's always better to have a referral from anyone at Apple, but it would be best to get a referral from a team that is looking for an engineer or an intern. If you're aware of someone who has an position on their team, getting a referral from them with a word of mouth to the manager or the hiring manager would definitely go a long way in getting recruited. Apart from these general tracks, I think I was able to get in touch with my team on LinkedIn. My resume spoke about my experience in building internal tools which my team was looking for at the time. So I think having an updated LinkedIn and resume that speaks to your strengths might help a lot in allowing recruiters to connect with you if you are a perfect fit. University of Michigan has a great pathway when it comes to working with Apple. We have an Apple day every semester where multiple teams and their engineers most of them who were at the University of Michigan would come and talk about their experience collect resumes especially if they have any openings available. If your university provides you that option definitely go for it. Moving forward after you apply comes obviously the interview and the interview process. Could you talk a little bit about the interview structure? Especially as software engineers, we need to know data structures and algorithms. So really different things to prep for interviews at Apple. Yeah, sure. I can talk about uh my interview in particular and as well as what I understand as a general guidance to how you can prepare for these. Like most software engineers, I started at lead code, hackrank and other outlets online where you get an opportunity to solve some software engineering questions, tried some algorithms as a practice. What I did after I had a couple of uh questions answered on those portals was I collected 50 to 100 questions, curated them for myself based on which questions I had more difficulty dealing with. Anytime before I have an interview, I just go through the list, spot a few questions that I want to practice before the interview and I'm ready for the interview. Uh in terms of the interviews specifically that I attended at Apple, there are two components obviously one is behavioral and one is technical. In terms of technical questions, they ask simple algorithm questions. Usually you're expected to solve between 30 minutes. I would say each interview is 45. So 20 to 30 minutes go in on getting a question, solving it and solving a follow-up to that question. The rest of the 15 minutes are usually behavioral. It's best if you can concisely speak about your experience in 5 to 10 minutes. That would allow the interviewer to know who you are leaving time for you to solve the technical aspect of the interview. At Apple, I had five on-site and one phone interview followed by a call with the director which was purely behavioral material to prepare for. Apart from the general questions you found on online portals like lead code that data structures and algorithms that are more frequently expected in these interviews data structures I would recommend maps and heaps stacks and link list. I think those are more frequent ones that I was able to see at Apple. I focus more on algorithms though graphing algorithms like DFS or backtrack algorithms like finding permutation of a string or recursion. I think these are three big patterns that I go through before an interview that personally helps me be prepared for them. A really valuable advice you had right there. So, just wrapping things up a little bit here. Do you have any general tips or tricks for anyone who's trying to establish their career on the right path? Whether that's specific to Apple or just like in general, things to help people stand out in the software engineering industry. One thing that really helped me stand out, I think, were my projects and research experiences. The reason I was recruited at Apple was because of previous experience doing something that wanted me to do on the job, which was building internal tools. Having some previous project experience or research experience on campus or outside would definitely add some value to the resume where you can showcase that you are a professional at the same time gather some skills that are very useful in the commercial space. I think what would help is having a very updated resume and LinkedIn where people can approach you based on your skill set. That's what helped me as well especially in a pandemic where I was not sure how to move forward where very few people were hiring. I think what helped me really was approaching people online, having an updated profile that people can visit to if they need an engineer for a position. So, I think having a good social presence and personal projects on your belt definitely helped me stand out in addition to being good at the interview part. Gotcha. Gotcha. Um, well, thank you so much for being here today and answering all these questions that I had. Um, I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks a lot for inviting me. I'm really happy to be here and I hope this information helps other people join Apple as