I recently had a two-hour interview that included over 100 standardized questions focused on iOS software development theory, spanning from 2010 to the present. While I appreciate the structured approach, the interview primarily consisted of AI-generated theoretical questions, with no opportunity to discuss my practical experience or showcase my recent SwiftUI project, despite my request for a few minutes to do so. Additionally, I found that some of the questions covered outdated or broadly shared concepts between iOS and Android, which may not have been the most relevant given my expertise in commercial package development rather than academic research or platform-specific technologies. Communication was also somewhat challenging, as the interviewer didn’t appear to be very proficient in English.

The interviewer was late, and when he finally arrived (after around 10 minutes), I told shorty about myself and without any additional questions related to my experience he almost immediately gave me an app to code for one hour. The task was to set up the app architecture, configure an HTTP API, add unit tests, and put together an okay-looking UI - all in just one hour (!!). When I asked what exactly he expected - to finish the test app or to set up a clean architecture - I didn’t get a clear answer. I’m not sure if this is the process for all positions or just for iOS, but it felt strange. In the end, I managed to set up the API, build two screens, implement a basic MVVM+C architecture, configure dependency injection, and create a usable UI - but I didn’t have time for unit tests, unfortunately. The feedback was even stranger. Of course I “didn’t think about unit tests” and I received a comment saying I had good experience with a technology I never mentioned anywhere (: Overall, it was the last time I applied for a DataArt job