I think it's only fair to start from the beginning and tell you the strange circumstance around my hiring. I never applied to Apple as I never thought they would reach out, however I moved to San Francisco for Mind The Bridge Startup School (3 months) and while here I interviewed for Facebook - this was back in 2013 when Facebook was cool okay!

The Facebook Rejection 

I made it to the onsite interview and honestly thought I got the job - I was impressed with myself during the interview, like, I didn't even know how something triggered in my mind and was able to solve some tough problems. Anyway, got the call a week later with a rejection and thought the world was ending; had to go back to Italy and didn't think I was gonna be able to move to the US and work for some cool tech giant ever again.

Destiny and Karma 

As soon as I got back to Italy, Apple (ironically) reached out to a friend of mine that I helped moved to the US and since he enjoyed the work he was doing at his company he recommended they reached out to me instead. #spoileralert few years later I made an internal referral for that same friend who now works at Apple

The Interview

The Apple Interview went good, split in 3 days over FaceTime at 11PM my time. I will be talking more about the actual interview in a future post.

After asking for my salary expectation (I told them $100K), the next email I received from the recruiter was about how they thought there could be a better role that fit me better and I thought "I passed this freaking interview and after I told them how much I wanted they think I am not longer good for the role??, wtf is going on".

I stood my ground insisting with the recruiter the role I interviewed for was a great fit for me and in the end they were okay with that. Little did I know, I found this out years after I joined, what happened was that my future director who interviewed me thought that I could get a better position and I didn't even have to interview for that one...the recruiter decided to leave that part out.

Conclusion

1. You never know how your life is gonna go. One day you feel terrible because a rejection from Facebook seems like the end of the world. A month later you get hired by Apple

2. Help people that help you, damn help people in general. Karma is good and sometime is a b****.

See you next week with new content! Here is a snapshot of my Apple Park door tag, which became memorabilia when I left as well as my Apple badges throughout the years.