Thank you for your insight.

Apple is one of the few FAANG companies with a decent number of open vacancies in the UK at the moment.

Can you tell me what you mean by shipped code? I've shipped plenty of code in my current job (none of it is that exciting, though). I probably don't emphasise it enough on my current CV, now I think about it.

Ideally you have a product you worked on on the App Store or equivalent. Excellent if you have some of the code with you (to the degree you are allowed to).

Both of these things lead to natural points of conversations with your interviewer.

"Have any problems with concurrency with you approach?"

"Any user feedback that caused you to make changes to the app?"

etc....

A portfolio of shipped code might work for Apple but most other FAANGs probably gravitate towards standard programming puzzles.

So any SWE with >0 YOE?

you’d be surprised. I was just talking with a former coworker said that their team has essentially shipped nothing for 9 months due to changing priorities. Code was written, and merge requests were merged, but feature flags meant that no one ever saw the effects of the changes.