In-person technical interview, a wasted effort…

I have been an electrical engineer for the longest time (since 1988) and held various positions ranging from test engineer to hardware validation engineer, to hardware development engineer, to Electrical Engineering consultant, to name a few. I was fortunate to work for some famous companies such as Philips Medical, Microsoft, and most recently Amazon, and I truly appreciated the opportunities those companies had given to me. Due to personal reason, I had to leave Amazon and shortly afterward found myself in the struggle to find a hardware engineer job in the Silicon Valley.

I hold a BsE degree from an ABET accredited institution in the Pacific Northwest region of the US. I am also in my second year of a Software Engineering program at Arizona State University due to my keen interest in the knowledge of the software side. I am confident that by now I very much know a few more practical things that I had learned beyond the academic curricular training in my BsE degree which I obtained a while back.

Yet, I was called in for an exploratory interview with Apple (I live in the Silicon Valley now) display team last week, and as silly as it may seem, I went in. There I was hosted by the hiring manager and a team leader. The hiring manager quickly sipped through my résumé and concluded that I was mostly a program manager rather than a technical contributor, from what he read on my résumé. I asked him about his impression and he said it was showing very clearly on my résumé. I was a little disappointed about that because I had my résumé written by a professional firm, but sadly, the effort had failed me. By the way, Apple Inc. is now filled with Chinese and Indian managers. They asked irrelevant questions like “your name sounds like a Vietnamese name, isn’t it?” etc… However, I decided to follow through this interview to learn how Apple conducts it. So, the hiring manager asked me to go to the white board to draw for him the system I recently designed and walked him through. I gave him a presentation in block diagram but he wanted to know a little more in detail. I told him I could not go any deeper because of conflict of interest between Amazon and Apple since they both are consumer electronic product companies. The team leader guy then got up to the white board and asked me some more detail about the technology I used in my design, which I also answered in a general manner. Going through the technical questions they tossed at me about how capacitive touch sensing technology works and what my sensor design was like for about half an hour, the hiring manager looked at his watch and asked me if I had any question for him. I knew then it was time. But I asked him if his group had any involvement with the Apple watch development (just for the sake of asking the question.) He then responded with a brief “yes” answer and then got up, opened the door to show my way out. I thanked them both for their time and consideration and finished with shaking their hands. It was quite awkward for me because they both had such soft hands during the handshake.

I finished my interview by noon that day and by 4:00PM I received a reply from the Apple technical recruiter guy about how they were positively impressed with my presentation on the white board, but they decided to pass me up because they didn’t find a fit.

So, going back to your blog post, I totally agree with you. I will change my LinkedIn profile to include the statement you suggested to avoid interview sessions like above. Besides, from this experience, you can never please the interviewers with your presentation. No matter how much detail there was on the white board, the technical lead guy always wanted to peel off more layers by digging deeper into the details of your technical work. I found this effort to be quite rude in their part, but hey, they were the interviewers, and they get to enjoy doing that because they can.

Anyhow, I like your suggestion. I will present myself in such a way that the employers come to me rather than the other way around.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

@flexbutnotbreak