Jeremy Foo writes about his 4 year pursuit of a development job at Apple.

It was such a thrill to be approached and tremendously flattered my ego to be thought of as worthy enough to work at the fruit company. I had just shipped my first iOS App.

I did the the phone interview and was good enough to be granted the chance for the technical test; a wee bit of “homework” in the form of writing something similar to what Apple has now in the form of UICollectionView. It was definitely much tougher than what I have ever previously done but I did it anyway and learnt a bunch from it.

The code review was brutal. The author of UITableView eviscerated every decision I made in the design of that piece of work. It was pretty obvious that at that moment, everything was a bust. What I also did realise was also how high the bar was and that I had a lot of work to do.

Terrific story, well told.

UPDATE: Looks like the author deleted the original story.