Recruiter Interview -> Phone Interview Recruiter set me up with a phone screen. Square's interview questions are iterative - they build off previous solutions. They also are created by the interviewer usually. Depending on the interviewer you have, you can get pretty unlucky like I did. I was paired with an amateur interviewer She ended up asking a really confusing final mathematical expression question with "complex numbers." It was not too challenging, but understanding what the question was asking was hard. I ended up spending too much of my limited time trying to comprehend the input and output that once I did, it was too close to the end of the interview. The biggest pain point of this interview was when asking for an example input and output, my interviewer provided me with an incorrect output. That confused me more and when finally asking her how she got to that output, she corrected herself and said "oh, I usually do it with different numbers" Ended the interview feeling like I was not given a fair shot but all you can do is apply again in a year and hope you don't get the same person.

I had a very positive interview process overall. My recruiter was exceptionally helpful every step of the way and provided detailed feedback after each round which really helped me prepare. There was a lot of effort into tailoring the interview experience such that I was speaking with members of the team I was interviewing for directly and everybody was warm, engaged, and helpful. There was 3 rounds: recruiter screen, hiring manager screen + technical screen (vanilla JS related questions), and an onsite with 4 rounds (2 pair programming, 1 system design, 1 project deep dive). Pair programming rounds all involved vanilla JS or HTML/CSS which was directly relevant to the role. They were all pretty fun puzzle-like questions that were very unique and interesting to work through.