I applied through other source. I interviewed at Wise (New York, NY) in Mar 2021
Interview
The first interview was the typical phone screen with a recruiter. Why you want to leave your company, why us, etc.
The next round was a pair programming exercise in HackerRank. I didn't pass it, but it was an interesting problem, closer to a real life problem than most leetcode type questions.
My biggest problem with the interview mirrors the experience of another applicant, where they give unnecessary advice. Instead of asking if you could spot the mistakes in line X, they would go on to say you made a mistake and then a long explanation of why it wouldn't work. But the mistakes were silly ones that you make when you're coding under pressure, and immediately noticed and fixed when pointed out. There was no need for full explanations, which didn't give me a chance to show that I understood what the problem was. Felt a bit like one of the interviewers in particular was just stroking his own ego, but I don't think that was his intention. Overall they were both nice, but the constant tips were more annoying than helpful.
Their feedback was fair, however. One note: they sent over a blog post with what to expect from the interview, and from that I got the impression that I'd be getting more of a leetcode type algorithms challenge, but it ended up being more about OOP and data structures. Caught me a bit off guard, but they were right that my design wasn't great.
The interview process was long but designed to test soft skill along with the usual coding. I felt the interviewers looked more at my thought process and evaluated how good of a teammate I would be in Wise’s environment.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The pair programming round was generic one. They gave a class with methods to be completed.
In pair-programming round i got the question on circuit breaker.
They gave an object oriented skeleton code with some placeholders to fill-up. Evaluation criteria would be mostly on if u knew about the circuit breaker before, if u are able to think and propose multiple approaches, how well you can collaborate with the interviewer.
You need not write syntax perfect code as you need not compile or execute it but the code should be optimised enough with right data structures.
I found the overall experience to be quiet good and easier than FAANG.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
About Circuit Breaker that count failures in time based window
Applied online. Received online assessment link. Gave their hackerrank test which had 2 coding questions. All test cases passes. Immediately received automated mail that recruiter will contact you. After few hours got email that they have decided to move forward with other candidates.
That is my application was not even reviewed by the recruiter(which usually takes 1-2 mins) before sending the test link.