Proton, privacy by default Ios Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The whole experience was a letdown. It started with a recruiter chat, then a typical STAR interview with a manager, followed by a take-home assignment and a live coding/review session. The take-home was pretty demanding. They suggested about 6 hours, but honestly, to do it well, you’d need closer to 10-12 hours. The worst part was the live coding. They told me my take-home was great, which was cool. Then they hit me with a quick 10-15 minute iOS Q&A, which was actually fun, and the interviewers asked good stuff. But immediately after, we dove into a LeetCode-style, but easier, string manipulation problem. The interviewers were nice, but I didn't finish it, although I was close. The feedback was basically, 'You did well, but didn't finish.' I get it, but it stings, especially with my strong take-home and iOS answers. Seems like they really focus on the algorithms. I was hoping they'd see the bigger picture and my other strengths. Thought Proton was supposed to be different.

The interview had two parts. First, I had a phone call with the hiring manager. After that, I was given a test task. The task was to refactor an existing app for 3 hours. Unfortunately, I mixed up the time zones and started late, so I only had half the time. I emailed them about this and submitted two versions: an intermediate one after 1.5 hours and the final one after the full 3 hours. A few days later, I got an email saying they weren't moving forward with my application. It's frustrating because I didn't get any feedback, which I think is unprofessional.

This was a very strange, disorganized, and irrelevant interview process that took about a month overall. There were 4 stages: first, HR screened CVs. Second, there was a logic test that felt very random and not at all related to an iOS developer role, asking things like 'count the number of triangles.' Third, I spent several days writing a Swift mobile app based on requirements and sample UI provided by HR. The requirements were mostly clear but some seemed pointless. Finally, the most bizarre part was solving 6 algorithmic contest problems, likely from LeetCode, which felt out of place for a mobile developer role at this stage. Questions like these should be earlier filters or focus more on iOS-specific skills like Swift, UIKit, design patterns, networking, and threading.