Perhaps, but perhaps the role just wasn't fit for you. A lot of 'senior dev' roles are much more about programming language trivia and much less about leadership.
I am curious - where do you work?
Asking so that I can potentially avoid that company, as this is the most inane and borderline backwards thing I've ever seen written about senior engineering.
That being said I agree I wouldn't want to work somewhere like what was described above. It's certainly not a style of interview I would approve of or conduct myself.
If the anecdote is related to your experiences working on FB then, please, specify it, blanket statements aren't what I expect from HN comments.
In some startups, everyone above 25 is senior developers. Everyone else is junior, there is no middle role. So it is not like companies had much choice how to label people.
Imo, most of what people write about "senior engineering" is what they personally admire in this or that senior, what they aspire to be or want others to be. It is not what actually role labeled "senior developer" is.
At my employer, the best senior developers are the ones who know they can google the answer to trivia so they don't need to remember it.
I've +20 years developing professionally. I remember the stuff I use day to day, and know how to navigate the docs of the technologies I use frequently for the less used tidbits. Being a good Senior isnt about knowing the answers to everything, but knowing how to find the answers quickly. Also, how to ask the right questions.
I don't know is always an acceptable answer, but should be followed up with "I'll get back to you in an hour or two.", or something to that effect (obviously for some problems, may need to experiment/prototype).
Fully agreed, but I don't think it is like that across Apple at all. It was like that just for that specific team OP was interviewing with, and it makes sense in the context of that whole team being Wipro converts. This is definitely unusual to have a team like that in the first place, so OP just simply got unlucky.
Given a company of Apple size, no matter how pleasant and competent an average team is, there will always be a few outlier teams that are just whack and awful to work with.
I can confidently say the same about my workplace. I like my team and org a ton (in terms of competency, how the responsibilities are assigned, etc.), and I believe that an average team in the company is very competent and high quality. However, I would be lying if I said that I haven't encountered at least a couple of teams in other orgs at the company that I would never want to work on due to similar issues.