The iOS Interview

5 min readJan 23, 2022

Worlds First iOS Developer | CEO of iOSBFree

The iOS Interview

We all get nervous when the prospect of an interview enters our lives. It can be daunting and even a bit scary to appear in front of a new team and receive a technical grilling. No one wants to be on display facing a series of very technical questions designed to trip them up and reveal their engineering weaknesses. This is why we must come prepared and be ready for this moment — we must train!

Who Conducts The Interview?

From the moment a pile of CVs arrive into the office they become a chore for the managers, HR department and department heads to organise. They simply don’t want to deal with them. The responsibility then lies with the developer entrusted and also lumbered with the task of filtering them.

And so, it’s the developers who we must convince of our talents and not the managers. Perhaps this is not what we expected and yet it is always the case in any company. The higher-level managers will always rely on the technical opinion of their developers. This shifts the responsibility to someone else (which is a very 21st-century thing to do) whilst also reducing workload. In reality, the developers are placed in charge of the hiring process and no one else.

The Positives

This leaves us with a few positives and also some negatives too. The positives are that we’re placed within our usual environment of technical gurus who understand (or should understand) the development process of iOS. These are our colleagues and friends and this should provide a decent amount of comfort to help us relax a little.

The Negatives

The negatives are that these developers are not qualified to conduct any interviewing process and usually (in my opinion & from a lot of experience) have no idea what questions to ask or strategy to use in order to reveal a candidate's strengths or weaknesses. These developers have accepted more responsibility than they asked for by agreeing to evaluate each candidate. Responsibility is not something that is welcomed by everyone and in fact, I would argue that most try to remove themselves from such a burden at every opportunity. And so, we end up with a small problem — these developers may care more about impressing their boss and looking intelligent themselves than the actual hiring itself! 😬

The Questions

Over the years I have found that almost every developer conducting the interview has absolutely no idea what questions to ask or how to evaluate a candidate's level of skill. Instead, they simply search for ‘iOS Interview Questions’ on Google and follow the search results blindly. You wouldn’t believe how many times I have been asked questions relating to TDD (Test Driven Development) when neither the company nor the team implemented or used TDD!? Why would they ask this if they didn’t use it themselves? Well, I guess it’s because they didn’t know what to do and simply relied on others to do the hard work for them.

The Interviewers Secret Agenda

You may not want to hear it, but the role of the interviewer won’t just be to find a suitable candidate and expand the team, but it becomes an opportunity to impress managers and people watching the performance of the team. They may become more concerned with their appearance of intelligence than getting you the role.

As successful candidates, we must acknowledge this rather honest observation and act accordingly. We must be prepared to:

Answer overly corporate questions that may be irrelevant to the position. This could be re-phrased as ‘ticking boxes’.
Take more ownership of the conversation leading the discussion into areas of real-world examples where we can show off our true talents, revealing our knowledge and experience.
Go the extra mile and create talking points. Perhaps we could even write a small app as an example of our work replicating one screen of the company’s mobile app. We could then add an additional design feature (something flashy and cool) such as slick animations that could improve their UX (User Experience). I have tried this and it has quite a high rate of success!

The Extra Mile

I personally don’t always go the extra mile for corporate positions as they are by definition very corporate. They stick to their prepared speeches and internet-searched questions searching for keywords and technical terms. But when I interview at a small company for a role I’ll spend a few days creating a sample app to replicate one screen of their live app and improve it somehow. During the interview, I will then discuss a ‘little project’ I did one evening just for fun. I find it to be a great display of motivation, skill set and of course investment into the company.

Business owners want to know that the candidate will be invested in their company just as much as they’re invested in receiving their paycheque.

Why not go the extra mile and create a talking point in your next interview?

Some Interview Questions:
(Don’t forget to Google ‘iOS Interview Questions’)

What is TDD?
How does Combine work?
How does GCD work?
What’s meant by thread-safe and how do you handle this in iOS?
What are MVC, MVVM and Viper?
What’s a delegate?
Have you used SwiftUI?
Discuss design patterns
What’s a retain cycle? How do you prevent them?
What’s the difference between the frame and bounds of a UIView?

Technical Questions

Gone are the days of having our CV read in front of us discussing our experience role by role. Instead, we’ll discuss technical questions early on in the interview followed by some general discussions about iOS. I think it’s always advisable to lead the conversation towards real-life examples and personal achievements of adding new features (the cooler the better) and improving the team somehow.

Conclusion

We must always be prepared to lead the conversation. Having pre-prepared topics and talking points will go a long way into securing the position we’re interviewing for! We can’t be too shy to manoeuvre the interview towards great things we’ve done in the past (Career Things) that have benefitted our team or company.

The interviewer would rather say no than yes, because it lowers the risk of looking bad in front upper management. So, let’s make their life easier by over-delivering and providing far too many reasons why they should hire us! 👍

Thank you for reading.
Much love 🧡❤️💜.
The iOSBFree team.
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