Block interview questions

I submitted my resume to my university's career website, after which I received an email to complete a coding challenge online. This was used to determine whether I got an on-campus interview. There were two questions, both of which I put below. I finished the first and got halfway through the second one. After that I got the on-campus interview, which was pair-coding style. We implemented a least-recently-used cache in Java. It was fun, and I was able to Google syntax I didn't know, and we ended up getting it to run. A bit later, I got an email to set up an on-site interview at Square in SF. This consisted of breakfast, three pair coding interviews, lunch, a few talks, coffee at Sightglass, and then that was it. The three questions I got were: 1. find all prime numbers under a given number 2. Fraud detection: if two merchants have swiped the same card, they are part of the same component. Find the size of the component. 3. parse TVL bytes and return cardholder name. I struggled with the last one in particular. I was notified of no offer after a week.

I applied on the Square site, and about a week later a recruiter contacted me to set up a half-hour phone screen. Beth asked about 4 questions, and then asked if I had any questions. The whole thing took 20 minutes. A few days later, she emailed me back, and wanted to set up a phone interview with someone who'd been in this position for a while. That went very well, we got on great, he asked a lot of behavioral questions, and then happily answered any questions I had. After 40 minutes, he apologized, and said he really needed to get to another meeting. Fair enough. Then Beth got back to me, and wanted to set up a 3 hour, in-person interview with a number of people and asked when would be good "next week"? I gave three possibilities (Wednesday morning, Thursday afternoon, or all day Friday), and also offered to meet early the next week if none of those worked. I got scheduled for Friday of the next week. It seemed a bit weird to ask me for a time, and then completely disregard it, but that happens. I showed up, and the first half-hour was with two people. Another peer interview. They were both extremely awkward, read questions off their notes, and stepped all over each other. It felt like they weren't used to interviewing and didn't particularly want to be there. The second half-hour was another peer interview with a wonderful person, who had excellent questions (mostly behavioral and about my experience/history), and was very happy to answer questions as well. After 15 minutes, she had to go to another meeting. Then I waited for another 15 minutes until the third interview was supposed to start, and then the person who let me in said that next interviewer had another meeting and wouldn't make it, that the recruiter wasn't in the office that day, and she'd walk me out. Yep, a 3 hour interview got whittled down to 45 minutes, because people couldn't be asked to show up to the interview. I never talked to any manager, just peer interviews, and the recruiter wasn't even in the office on the day she scheduled me. It was glaringly obvious they already had someone, and were just going through the motions. I'd rather they had just canceled so I didn't have to come in.