Hey everyone, I recently went through the interview process for a Software Engineer role at Apple and unfortunately did not move forward. I wanted to share my experience in case it helps future candidates prepare better than I did. I was caught off guard as I applied for Apple in May of 2025 and received the invite to interview in December of 2025. I hadn't practiced leet code or interview style questions in over 3 months and I was using a different language at work from the one I usually use for leetcode type questions. Interview structure (from my experience) Initial recruiter contact via email Hiring manager conversation, where I was only asked about my experience. Technical interview focused on fundamentals and problem-solving (CoderPad style). The interviewers were professional and respectful throughout. This post is not meant to criticize Apple, just to share lessons learned. What I underestimated The hiring manager told me they don't do leet code style questions, but focus more on system design and architecture. However the recruiter said my technical round would include a CorderPad link and I would be asked to write code as well as answer questions on error handling and concurrency. The question I was given wasn't leetcode style, instead it was more about creating a class, store and retrieve instances of this class from "storage", in this case because there was not database, so I had to mimic it using a dictionary. I started very basic with the methods I needed to store and retrieve the data, created a very basic class of what I was going to store. The interviewer asked about abstracting it out using inheritance so that I could stored different objects that inherited from the same class. Also asked about using async/await for concurrency and error handling vs Exception handling using try/catch mechanisms. I should have made my code work synchronously and then translate it into asynchronous code so I could show the interviewer the differences and also to guarantee my code ran. Instead I ended up writing code that showed I understood the fundamentals but certain areas were incomplete because the interviewer would ask me to deep dive on some topic and I would go that route and lose my train of thought. Concurrency and threading fundamentals Even if you use async/await daily, be prepared to explain: What actually happens under the hood Threading vs async execution Blocking vs non-blocking calls How resource contention is handled Conceptual clarity mattered more than framework-specific answers. Clear, structured thinking out loud The interviewers cared a lot about how I reasoned, not just the final answer. I should have slowed down, clarified assumptions, and walked through trade-offs more deliberately. Language-agnostic fundamentals Even though I code mainly in C# and TypeScript, the questions were not about syntax. They were about: Data structures Async/Await Error/Exception handling What I would do differently next time If you use different languages like I do, make sure you know the libraries you can import to do X or Y. CoderPad has auto-complete so this is very useful. Re-study core CS fundamentals, especially concurrency and memory concepts I have mostly worked in Microsoft's stacks, but recently I switched to Typescript and I was a bit rusty on C# during my interview. I asked the interviewer to many questions for validation which I believe ended up hurting me. On my day to day, I make decisions and usually evaluate what's better for our users and I feel like I could have done the same, but because I wanted to satisfy the interview I did not show clear decision making skills. Overall, I learned a lot throughout the process, I gained confidence and I'm gonna be studying hard in 2026 so I can be prepared when opportunities like this come my way. I hope this is helpful.