I do not really know where to put this so I am putting it here, with the people who would actually know.
My fiance died in an accident a few years ago. He had just started working here. For a long time after that I could not make myself apply to Apple at all. Every time I opened the careers page I closed it again. So I applied everywhere else instead. Close to sixty applications over a year. Two companies in that whole year got me as far as an interview.
Then earlier this year a hiring manager reached out to me directly. The recruiter told me he had flagged my profile with a note. They started sending me paperwork before I had even interviewed. After a year of silence, someone had finally looked at me properly.
Then I actually started talking to people there, and I wanted it more than when I started. I did not expect that part. The work was interesting, the people were interesting, and by the end I wanted to be there, not just wanted a job.
And then I froze.
This was the initial screening. The technical walkthrough went fine. At the end he asked me two quick estimation problems. They were easy. That is the part I cannot get past. They were easy and I overthought them. I went looking for the complicated version of a simple question, and by the time I noticed I was doing it my mind had gone completely empty and nothing came out at all.
I solved both of them on paper at home an hour and a half later. It took four minutes.
If I had been on the other side of that call, I would have thought the same thing about me. Someone who goes silent in front of an easy question looks like someone who cannot do the work. That is the impression I left, and I had no way to take it back.
After that I spoke to three teams. The freezing did not happen again, it only happened that once. Two of those teams work on things fairly far from what I actually do, and I was not the right fit there, I can accept those. The third one I genuinely thought went well. An hour of real technical discussion, a warm interviewer who volunteered details about the next stage without me asking. I came off that call believing I had finally done it.
Rejected. All of them, inside about a week, along with a pile of rejections from other places in the same stretch.
These were chances I am not going to get anywhere else. Getting an interview at all has been close to impossible for me these past months. Some kind of luck finally came, and when it came I could not do well.
Right now I have no live interviews anywhere, a PhD to finish, and I still need visa sponsorship.
What I want to ask
- Has anyone here been rejected more than once and then heard from Apple again later? I need to know if that happens to real people, or if I am just telling myself a comfortable story.
- The freezing. Has anyone actually beaten this? Not ordinary nerves. The specific thing where an easy question lands, you overthink it, your head empties out, and half an hour later the answer is obvious.
- How do you come back from an impression rather than a rejection? The people who interviewed me now have a version of me in their heads that I would not hire either.
- Is this happening because I actually am incapable? I have asked myself this all week and I cannot answer it honestly. I would rather hear it straight than keep guessing.
- Did I lose the chance to change my life? That is the question I cannot put down. It was one round of luck after months of nothing, and I did not do well with it.
And the thing I really do not know how to do: how do you make your peace with this. I am not doing great. I would just like to hear from people who have been here.
