Nice people, good products, but confused leadership
Nice people, good products, but confused leadership
People are always very nice, friendly, and helpful. As an engineer, I have a great work-life balance.
When it comes to delivering on new features, Square's tooling is a bit esoteric but usually gets the job done with minimal waiting. When it doesn't, the nice, friendly, and helpful people I just mentioned will unblock you really fast.
C-Suite leadership makes bizarre decisions (e.g., renaming to Block) that somehow promise to make them a lot of money, but don't contribute towards better products for users (e.g., Jack's obsession with crypto).
There's a mixture of new and pleasant technology, and old legacy stuff that has to continue to be supported. This would not be so bad, except there is a surprising amount of resistance if you decide not to build new things with the old legacy technology.
"Software architecture" isn't a priority for Block's microservices. So, while everything works and individual services have unit tests, creating usable APIs for cross-team boundaries is usually an afterthought that makes it a pain to ever make new connections.
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Block Interview Experiences
Software Engineer
Onsite interview. The workstation wasn't set up, and we spent 10-15 minutes trying to find and set up a new one. We then switched back to the original one when it didn't work. This was problematic because I was only 5 minutes from finishing my code a
Software Engineer
Phone interview: a great experience with peer-to-peer coding. Was not hired due to a lack of required experience. The overall onsite interview was nice. People were friendly and helpful.
Software Engineer
High level: I met with about 9 engineers and other staff in total, all of whom were really pleasant to collaborate with. They made the interview process humane and enjoyable, with the correct level of difficulty (in my opinion). The only downside is
Software Engineer
San Francisco, California, United StatesMarch 1, 2017Onsite interview. The workstation wasn't set up, and we spent 10-15 minutes trying to find and set up a new one. We then switched back to the original one when it didn't work. This was problematic because I was only 5 minutes from finishing my code a
Software Engineer
San Francisco, California, United StatesJune 1, 2018Phone interview: a great experience with peer-to-peer coding. Was not hired due to a lack of required experience. The overall onsite interview was nice. People were friendly and helpful.
Software Engineer
San Francisco, California, United StatesFebruary 1, 2022High level: I met with about 9 engineers and other staff in total, all of whom were really pleasant to collaborate with. They made the interview process humane and enjoyable, with the correct level of difficulty (in my opinion). The only downside is
