I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Block in Oct 2016
Interview
A recruiter reached out to me. I had a technical phone screen/1st round interview, then a second round interview with pair programming, then a final round interview with pair programming. All were about the same difficulty. It was a positive experience. Pair programming takes a lot of the stress off. The use an IDE that lets you run code, and you are allowed to google syntax things if necessary. I didn't google anything, but I would play around with the interpreter side of the online editor to test things out.
Hi,
Thank you for taking the time to tell us about your experience with Square! We are happy to hear that you had a good experience with the Software Engineer Interview. At Square, we are always striving to provide the best candidate experience possible and we value your positive feedback. Hopefully your post will help others prepare for their interviews at Square. Thank you for sharing!
Best,
The Square Talent Team
Application
I applied online. I interviewed at Block in Nov 2020
Interview
I completed the coding interview with Square and haven't heard back from them. The coding interview was standard coding questions (4) that were all pointed so you could get partial credit (300pts/?).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write code to generate the sequence of numbers per alphabetic character input that corresponds to a phone dial pad
Asked a simple technical question about data structures and algorithms. Process was super fast and interviewers were all very nice people. Great experience overall. No brain teasers either which was very nice.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How can you design a voting system with a binary tree?
I applied through university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Block (San Francisco, CA) in Nov 2016
Interview
Applied on college's career website. The HR scheduled two initial rounds of on-campus interviews which were a little bit different from the common in-person interviews. Instead of doing white boarding, they made us code on our laptop while they sat aside and looked. I cleared the on-campus round and interviewed at their HQ in SF. The onsite round consisted of two similar interviews in which you coded on a PC with the interviewers sitting beside you. The interviewers were really nice and helpful and Square is awesome as a company. They have amazing office views and canteens.
My experience after the interview was extremely unfortunate. They contacted me shortly after the interview and wanted to schedule a phone call to discuss next steps. However when the scheduled time arrived, they canceled it and said they needed to finalize something. And a week later they told me I did a good job but they were short of openings and asked me to wait. We sent email back and forth for about like two months and they failed to place me into any of their offices. It was really unfortunate. But I will still apply next year for full time role.
Hi,
Thank you for taking the time to tell us about your experience with Square. We always appreciate comments and feedback from our candidates so that we can improve our process and we are continually working on our candidate experience. We are sorry to hear that the scheduled call commitment was not held and an opening was not available but we value you taking the time to write your feedback and appreciate you sharing your comments so that candidates can get a sense of life at Square.
Best,
Square Talent Team