This was for a machine learning related research scientist role. I had a number of separate individual screening interviews discussing prior work before being assigned a lengthy take-home assignment and finally the on-site. The on-site consisted of presenting the take home, presenting prior work, and back-to-back meetings. Prior to the onsite, the recruiter made a point to tell me that 'person X' tends to "guard the team". I am not sure exactly what this meant, but it was concerning that a toxic interviewer was going to come into play during the on-site. If this is something that is known, rather than warning candidates, perhaps this person should be taken off of interview duty. Throughout the process, the HM appeared strangely effusive, telling me how great my prior work was, how great my talk was, and so forth. The on-site interviews consisted of behavioral questions, straightforward hypotheticals incorporating research into products, and surprisingly basic machine learning questions that might elsewhere appear in an entry level data science role rather than a research scientist role (e.g. tell me about a time you used regularization). The interviewer that the recruiter warmed me about was fine, as were all of the others except one. This guy asked a series of 'Tell me about a time when...' questions as mentioned above. I would start telling him about a project, and he would have no follow-up questions to actually understand or engage with the work I described in any way. After the second of these and through the subsequent series of questions, he started to ask 'If I was the one doing the work' and even 'How could it be that I was doing this work?' rather than asking questions about the actual work itself. Well, apparently as I made my way through numerous institutions and wrote a large body of publications, he figured I was an extremely charming sociopath that made a lot of people in completely different organizations do my work and write my papers for me. I am not sure if this guy is what killed my candidacy or something else happened, but after this laborious process I was ghosted by both the recruiter and HM (whose direct contact I had). The take-home and the rest of this occurred during the holiday season right before their shutdown, which is a busy time for all as people try to wrap up the year's work before going on break. A two sentence email saying 'we went in a different direction' would have been nice, just to pretend Apple treats candidates like humans and not a commodity.