Block Software Developer interview questions

I have interviewed here twice, both times had a very similar and positive experience. They give you all the information you need to prepare, including the system design question. They like to ask multi-part coding questions that build on top of one another. They are looking for code fluency, debugging, clean code, code that compiles and runs, rather than the most optimal solution. The questions aren't hard as long as you know your basic data structures and object-oriented design in your language of choice. Personally, I'm not very good at finding the most ~optimal~ solution right away but I'm pretty good at communicating so these questions were not difficult to me, since they are pair programming and the interviewer will help you out when needed. They don't care about the most optimal solution but you should still be able to tell them the runtime and memory complexity. For the behavioral interview make sure you know how to talk about your past experience and projects well, and you will do fine. My only complaint is that the recruiting turnaround time can take a while. The first time, they took three weeks from my onsite to tell me that they are extending an offer. By that time I had already signed another offer. This time I made sure to give them deadlines. I think the technical bar at Square has gotten worse over the couple of years unfortunately, if you ever get the feeling that you're smarter than your interviewer

There was an initial phone screen. We then followed up with a full day of interviews. After that I had several other calls trying to find a team that would be a good fit. The actual interviews were fine, but the handling by the recruiter was a mess. I started with one recruiter, completed the phone screen and was told I did well. I had to follow up 3 times over the course of three weeks to finally get my full day of interviews scheduled. Those interviews in general were fairly easy and went pretty well. They ranged from technical topics to leadership questions (tell me about a time when..). Strangely though, my very first interview of the day was with my "hiring manager" who let me know that the position I was interviewing for had just been filled (great :/ ). I was assured both by him and my recruiter that they would still find a team for me if they thought Square would be a good fit. After the day of interviews, I again got good feedback and was told they'd be reaching out with potential team matches. Shortly thereafter I got an offer from another company, so told them that I needed to speed the process up as fast as possible to avoid leaving the other company waiting. Over the course of the week I had 4 phone calls with two different teams. The first had a near perfect domain alignment in terms of the things they were working on with my background, but was a different tech stack than most of my experience. The other was a tech stack fit, but not domain. The team with the tech stack team though said they were early in their process of talking to candidates and didn't want to decide on my timeline. The other one seemed like the option then. It went to hiring bar (after over a week of back and forth), but they decided I needed to do one more interview before they'd be able to decide. I did that, seemed to go well, but at the hiring bar the next day they told me "well we think you'll be great at square, but we're not quite convinced. That manager wants to talk to more people so just sit tight". All while they knew I had another offer and a deadline on the table. I ended up with no offer because I wasn't willing to wait. It was especially frustrating because throughout the whole 2 month process the recruiter started every call with "are there any timeline constraints? We can speed the process up if need be" which was certainly a lie. It felt like my time had no value to them. It's incredibly disheartening to hear nothing but positive feedback, but no offer being made. They put so much effort into the interview process, but their HR team really dropped the ball with me.