Senior mobile interview preparation

Prepare for the mobile interview you actually have.

A correct answer is the entry fee. The round is scored on what happens after it: the follow-up, the constraint that changes, the trade-off you have to defend out loud.

Example round · iOS · senior
Question
Design the image loading for a feed of 10,000 posts.
First answer
An in-memory cache in front of URLSession, keyed by URL, with a disk cache behind it.
Then
“The feed scrolls fast on a three-year-old phone and memory warnings start. What do you change first?”
What is scored
Whether you size the cache by cost not count, cancel off-screen work, decode off the main thread, and say which of those you would measure before touching.

What the interviewer writes down

Four things get scored, and none of them is “knew the answer”.

Every guide and every book here is organised around the same four signals, because they are what separates a senior answer from a correct one.

  1. 01

    Signal

    Does the first answer say something only an engineer who has shipped this would say?

  2. 02

    Structure

    Can the interviewer follow the reasoning, or do they have to reconstruct it from fragments?

  3. 03

    Depth

    What happens at the second and third question, when the textbook answer runs out?

  4. 04

    Judgment

    When the constraint changes, does the answer change, and can you say why?