Phone prescreen and then in-person interview. Was asked to come in and went through to a small office with a whiteboard. A manager came in and handed me a test after asking what I felt most strongly in. I took the Swift/Objective-C one. After looking at the questions for a bit it became obvious that they couldn’t be answered without asking further questions, which I did after the interviewer returned. We went over the questions and started putting check marks and Xs like he was a teacher. Most of the questions were completely irrelevant or pointless in determining my skill level of the job applied for. We eventually moved onto writing code on a whiteboard for trivial things that I assume were to try to assess my code writing ability. Typical questions like reverse a string were asked. I did not prepare for this so I basically said I’ll brute force it and did. I did get stuck on some simpler requests since I wasn’t prepared for this kind of interview. I eventually got frustrated and said this isn’t really a good way to determine how good a candidate is. It’s not realistic to write code like this without a compiler and especially without reference material. I’d you want to quiz a junior then fine but for a senior position let’s talk about architecture, trade-offs in implementation and just other ideas not CS BS. The entire time he had an air of superiority, laughing at silly things after making his point and quite argumentative. He eventually brought in another guy that I could barely understand and they went over my experience in more detail. Once I got to this point I was more comfortable because I could go into detail of my past achievements. By this point it was pointless though. They said the process is to bring me in a couple more times to write more code. I was already lost to them at this point. Considering the hot, smelly, dirty office and the pretentious engineering staff, this is a place you should steer we’ll clear of.

Waste of time. It started out promising. I've been a map nerd since I was 9 years old, navigating solo in dense forrest and organizing my own orienteering courses. Their office is also a very small commute for me. I was excited! They didn't really have a strong product vision though. There were no grand plans to use machine learning, or unify mapping UX, etc. Or at least none that wasn't confidential. So I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until a more in-depth onsite interview. Moving onto tech questions... It didn't help that there was snickering and overtalking when trying to explain answers, so nervousness was compounded and core concepts such as async and serialization probably came off as the "wrong" answers. At least in the wording they were looking for. I got the sense that they were after only a narrow scope of wording with textbook phrasing. But you can only provide a textbook answer if you A) get lucky, or B) use a concept every single day... and you shouldn't ever test for A. Oh, and there was also quite a lot of digression on how I'd need to become an "expert on C++" ...I don't know to what extent that C++ is baked into their native apps, but if it's an amount large enough that an iOS developer needs to become a C++ expert just to get by, that seems like there's going to be a crazy amount of C++ in there. I'd be willing to learn, but the sheer amount seemed like a red flag! There was nothing on Swift, no persistent storage or networking integration questions, nothing about how to build complex architecture, nothing much on design patterns, and nothing on how to optimize the UI and data fetching. Even algorithms and data structures have more relevance than 60-80% of their questions. Even the 20-40% of questions that may have been remotely relevant, were offset by the style of the interview. In that each question was asked in a "gotcha" sense, instead of in a collaborative sense or any other way that you'd openly discuss ambiguity prominent in the real software world. When this became obvious, I explained to the interviewer that I didn't think that they'd be able to find good mobile developers who know how to build complex systems, by asking these types of gotcha questions solely designed to make the interviewer feel smarter. The interviewer claimed that these were concepts they use every day. It was at that point that I had to withhold snickering of my own, politely thanked him for his time, and said that I wouldn't be moving forward.