Interview experience at Square

This is a summary of my experience interviewing with Square. The good the bad and the fugly. The Good: Coding interviews, pair programming. Great questions, progression based, some are even real world problem based. Not the I'm trying to prove I'm smarter than you so I'll ask you the hardest most far fetched question that I can think of. I liked the coding questions style so much I'm going to adopt it and try and implement it as wide spread as possible at Google. Leadership and past experience Q&A. Your place to shine as a senior engineer. My panel was really awesome on both sessions. Square has 2 interviewers per session. The Bad: Architecture Q&A. Why is this bad you ask? Square uses the same architecture question for all candidates. Hotel booking system. So easy to prepare... Except, most often than not there is a huge misalignment between interviewer and candidate domain knowledge. I will never ask a system design question in a domain I'm not an expert on. Which is exactly what happened to me. As a distributed systems engineer I have a very different knowledge base than iOS and Web FE engineers. The Fugly: One of the interviewers was wearing an undershirt only. I mean WTF? I get WFH and all.... But have some respect to the fact you're interviewing a candidate. Summary: Went with a different company. #engineering #software #interview