I applied online. I interviewed at Block in Oct 2025
No offer
Negative experience
Easy interview
Application
I applied online. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Block (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 2019
Interview
Great phone screen. After which I am told the position I was applying for is no longer available - I wish they had communicated this before.. But then the recruiter routed me to a different role.. The phone screen was good - Truly tested everyday coding skills.. Question was easy with more focus on what data structures to use, how to use interfaces, etc. On screen was a terrible experience. I was supposed to be there by 9:45am to be shown around by the recruiter and then have interviews from 10am - 4:00pm with an hour for lunch in the middle. My recruiter never showed up.. At 10:15 I'm asking the receptionist to try and contact him.. Still nothing.. At 10:30, my interviewer comes out, because he had been sitting inside waiting for me.. After this i have 3 shortened 40min coding interviews.. One of the main feedback i got for rejection was that I didnt show enough CSS skill - i was given the last 4min of an interview to show those skills, so clearly it wasnt great.. There were also interviews on system design and past project after lunch.. The engineers interviewing me, who were tech leads of certain areas, seemed rather inexperienced and barely even asked questions.. Finally i had a 30min interview with the hiring manager, who didnt ask me anything and just expected me to ask questions.. After having spoken to him on the phone already, and most of his team through the day, this didnt seem that necessary.. At the end they finally rejected me for lack of CSS skills, and not enough leadership experience.. Which was too vague and clearly there was no consideration for my recruiter going MIA. With regards to lack of leadership skills - i dont know who else was being interviewed so clearly can't comment..
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
More focus on everyday code.. What data structures to use to solve math problems.. Would recommend doing more data \ math sort of questions. They focused on the right set of skills for sure.
I had a call with their recruiter first, talked about my past experience and what I'm look in for in my next role. Then had a technical front-end screening with two engineers where I needed to build an application. I thought I did well, I was able to implement a working app, but I did not pass. Not further feedback was given.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement a memory game in any JS framework or vanilla JS. You need to implement this game based on some demo app that you can play around with before hand. You need to implement the HTML/CSS and JS all from scratch. The game has the following behavior: you need to display N x N cards in a grid lay out. The number of N should be configurable by the user through a slider. When the user clicks a "start" button, N cards a highlighted for 2-3 seconds. Then the user needs to click on the cards that were highlighted. If the user clicks on the correct card, it changes the color to green, otherwise it changes to red. If all the initially highlighted cards are clicked the game is over. What to watch out for: you need to track the cards that were clicked in the grid, you need pick N random cards to be highlighted for each round of the game. You need to make sure the gird of N cards can be increased and reduced. It's not enough that the app works, you also need to write clean/readable code. You have about 40 minutes to implement this, and you need to talk through your work.
Long process. System design felt like I aced it but they didn't pass me. It was the classic design a hotel booking platform question. They put you through a lot of rounds up front.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Block in Feb 2025
Interview
Two rounds: the first was a technical screen and hiring manager interview, and the second round was 5 interviews (2 coding, 1 system design, 1 technical project review, 1 leadership interview)
