I was contacted by a recruiter through LinkedIn. We had an initial chat, followed by a "pairing interview" with an Engineer. We walked through a problem together, and I arrived at a running solution. However, I couldn't gauge my performance because the Engineer did a lot of talking, which isn't usually the norm. Generally, in technical interviews, someone gives you a question and then waits to see what you come up with. I prefer this method of working through a solution with the interviewer.

I was then invited on-site to their San Francisco office.

During the on-site, there were three 1-hour code "pairing interviews" and two architectural discussion interviews: one about past experiences and one about designing an application (I received hotels.com, as others have noted on Glassdoor).

I expected my code pairing interviews to be similar to my phone screen. To my dismay, my first two interviewers were not interested in collaboration. My first interviewer had a laptop and was clearly working on something else. My second interviewer didn't say much at all and was yawning throughout the interview. I thought both were a little unprofessional, to be honest.

My third interviewer for the code pairings was much better and might be one of the best interviewers I've ever had. He gave me a problem, and then we talked through it first by drawing out solutions on paper, and then I implemented it. This is what I thought my other pairing interviews would be like. Based on reviews I've read here, it seems this type of collaborative process is what many Square interviewers try to follow. I wish all my interviewers had followed this process.

I had lunch in between my pairing interviews with a Square engineer and was given a tour of the office. I had my two architectural interviews in the afternoon and then finished by talking to the hiring manager and finally my recruiter. I received a rejection two days later.

I could have done a little better on the pairing interviews. Hopefully, people reading this will get more collaborative interviewers during their on-site.

Overall, I thought Square's process is a lot better than most big companies. I do believe Square tries to promote the practice of making their interviews collaborative, but perhaps not every interviewer necessarily follows the guidelines.

So, basically, prepare for a whiteboarding interview on an IDE and to come up with a working solution in under an hour. As other Glassdoor reviews have mentioned, the pairing interviews are not exactly your typical LeetCode/CTCI questions.

graph traversal binary search tree OOP