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Software Engineer Interview Experience

August 1, 2020
Negative ExperienceNo Offer

Process

The application process involved one telephonic code pairing round, followed by an onsite (virtual) interview.

The onsite interview consisted of:

  • Three code pairing rounds
  • One system design round
  • One past experience discussion
  • A final round with the hiring manager

A week later, the recruiter called and informed me, "There was nothing majorly negative feedback from the team, but you weren't quite there."

I've given many interviews and can almost always tell if I performed well. This time, I expected an offer based on my performance, but it went another way.

In retrospect, what did I do wrong?

In the first code pairing round, I completed three parts of the question: the first part was large, and the other two were smaller. In the second and third code pairing rounds, I only managed one part before I ran out of time.

In all three code pairing rounds, and in each part of the coding, they had their own test cases, all of which I passed. So, logic wasn't the problem; then what was?

I selected Golang as my programming language, and it's a bit more verbose than C# LINQ or Java lambdas, which consumed some of my time.

Therefore, I think to clear the coding rounds, one must complete at least three parts.

Even though you have the liberty to Google for syntax or other information, it eats up your precious time.

After spending seven hours in the process, I feel like I shouldn't have applied for the position. It has definitely hurt my confidence.

Questions

Other than the telephonic round, there were no data structure questions, which was surprising.

Telephonic:

  • Top K Frequent Element

Onsite:

  • Select k random items from an array of size n.
  • Some gaming question, pretty easy; one can't go wrong on that.
  • Some selection of items from n elements, a medium-level question.
  • Design a hotel booking system.
  • Past experience.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 158 interview experiences for the Block Software Engineer role in United States.

Success Rate

18%
Pass Rate

Block's interview process for their Software Engineer roles in the United States is very selective, failing most engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive49%
Neutral25%
Negative26%

Candidates reported having good feelings for Block's Software Engineer interview process in United States.

Block Work Experiences