Senior Software engineer Square interview prep

Careem
UHqO48

Go to company page Careem

UHqO48
Jun 27, 2020 5 Comments

I have read through all the other posts and I am confused as some people say they got LC questions while others said that Square doesn't do LC...

So if you have previously interviewed with Square, how would you prepare for the interview as Backend engineer?

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TOP 5 Comments
  • Square
    Sunballz

    Go to company page Square

    Sunballz
    Square doesn't do LC precisely, but rather multi-phase themed questions that can be solved with the same algos most LC questions can. All the interviewers come up with thier own question, usually implementing a popular game or a toy version of some well-known software utility.

    It's not LC in that it's "reverse this doubly linked list, except do it in constant space and logN time" bs, but yeah if you don't know how to generate permutations or traverse a tree or BFS/DFS or understand dynamic programming you're gonna have a bad time.

    being able to describe what you plan to do to solve it before you start coding, and then writing code with multiple reusable functions rather than a big long script (remember the problems are phased and build on themselves) is good. Also as a senior candidate you should pretend you are helping the interviewer solve this problem. Treat it as a chance to show off your mentoring chops, teach them something. I used c# as my language and none of my interviewers knew c# (square is java heavy) so I explained the difference between multi dimentional [,] and jagged arrays [][] in c#, and how for loops don't actually need anything except the semi colons to run: `for(;;){}` though you'd never want that. They seemed to enjoy the tidbits.
    Jun 27, 2020 4