What can I expect at an onsite interview with Square? Really want to do well. What type of questions and difficulty level should I prepare for?
The vast majority of our pairing interviews are not found in CTCI. We're asked to either come up with a question of our own or take over a question from someone that left. We did a good job at removing a lot of leetcode questions. There are still some interviewers who use those types of questions, but the majority of them aren't LC. Difficulty isn't really a thing with our questions since they're all custom and the grading is based on how candidates, on average, do on it (scaled to your YOE). Our problems are iterative with multiple parts. Think of being asked to build a calculator with add/subtraction functions. Then needing to add mult/divide functions for part 2, then sin/cos for part 3.
I interviewed a little while back and the process was very straightforward. Three pair programming interviews, one system design, one Q&A, and one manager. Everyone was super nice and sharp. The questions themselves weren't hard, just required you to know how to write clean, fast code. In one of my interviews I wrote almost 150 lines of code to solve the entire problem. No leet code b.s questions, they'll just test you on fundamental concepts like oop, good class design, debugging skills etc.
They will tell you what to prepare for the design and behavioral rounds. For design I was told in advance it would be a hotel booking system (though the specific feature wasn’t mentioned until the interview). For one behavioral round I was told in advance to discuss one project in great detail.
spoke with them once a couple years back and found the tech team very rude and condescending.
When was this? It's unfortunate but the culture has changed a good amount since IPO. You should give it another chance. Every company is going to have some people that are very rude and condescending. It's not a reflection on the whole company but just we found the wrong person to be involved with recruiting at at particular time.
not my experience. everybody i talked to from recruiter to engineer was humble. interviews were original. would love to work there someday.