Something similar happened to me at my first(!) tech interview, with Apple's [REDACTED] team.
There was ~3 minutes left in the interview, and they asked me a difficult l33t code concurrency question that was trivially answerable if you knew a specific, but lesser known, function in Apple's concurrency library. [1]
I said as much, TL;DR: "hmm I could do full leetcode that requires X, Y, and Z, and I might not have enough time to finish it, but there is a one-liner via a new API y'all got that I could do quick"
They said go ahead and write it, I did, then they insisted I was making up the function -- slapping the table and getting loud the second time they said it. Paired interviewer put a hand on their arm.
Looking back, that was not only a stark warning about the arbitrariness of interviews, but also that going from dropout waiter => founder => sold, then to Google, wasn't going to be all sunshine and moonbeams just because people were smart and worked in tech too. People are people, everywhere. (fwiw, Apple rejected w/"not a college grad, no bigco experience, come back in 3 years if you can hack it somewhere else". Took Google, stayed 7 years)
There was ~3 minutes left in the interview, and they asked me a difficult l33t code concurrency question that was trivially answerable if you knew a specific, but lesser known, function in Apple's concurrency library. [1]
I said as much, TL;DR: "hmm I could do full leetcode that requires X, Y, and Z, and I might not have enough time to finish it, but there is a one-liner via a new API y'all got that I could do quick"
They said go ahead and write it, I did, then they insisted I was making up the function -- slapping the table and getting loud the second time they said it. Paired interviewer put a hand on their arm.
Looking back, that was not only a stark warning about the arbitrariness of interviews, but also that going from dropout waiter => founder => sold, then to Google, wasn't going to be all sunshine and moonbeams just because people were smart and worked in tech too. People are people, everywhere. (fwiw, Apple rejected w/"not a college grad, no bigco experience, come back in 3 years if you can hack it somewhere else". Took Google, stayed 7 years)
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/dispatch/3191903-d...