I had a negative experience interviewing at Squarespace.

On my initial phone call with a recruiter, he emailed me at the same time the call was supposed to start to tell me that he had to reschedule. I did eventually speak with him, took the HackerRank code test, and then had a phone interview with two developers.

During that call, I had to answer some of their technical questions by typing code into a Google Doc (so no indentation, syntax highlighting, and Google's auto-correct text formatting). Aside from the awkward format, some of the questions they asked fell into the bucket of typical interview test questions that are impractical for real-life coding.

One of the JavaScript questions was to come up with a function that multiplies, but not use the multiplication operator. Instead, use addition, subtraction, and recursion to return the multiplied result. So the task to come up with a clunky, roundabout way to solve a problem (when an obvious solution exists - just use the multiplication operator for a multiplication function) is counterintuitive to programming best practices.

I don't know that I would have accepted an offer if I had gotten one. Overall, Squarespace's engineering teams seem too unstructured.

Write a multiplication function without using the multiplication operator. Instead, use addition, subtraction, and recursion.