• Collaboration and communication: How you work together with us to solve the problem and communicate and rationalise your choices. We want to understand how you approach the problem and why you approach it this way, along with how you design your solution and incorporate feedback and suggestions into it
• Problem solving: How you approach a small problem within a set time, how think through the problem and arrive at ideas and solutions
• Code structure: How you write your code – why you make certain decisions over others, how you look at trade-offs when building your code.  We’ll also want to get an understanding of the clarity, testability and readability of your code.

What a Pair Programming interview is about:

• Questions about your frontend experience and modern practices - tools and frameworks, modern techniques for rendering, styling, testing and your understanding on best practices and topics relevant to Wise, like accessibility and performance. It’s an open conversation and we might not cover all these topics, but we expect you to be familiar with most of them depending on your experience.

• We will also spend some time coding a simple exercise in Javascript to understand your familiarity with the language and modern patterns and how you code hands-on.

What a Pair Programming interviews is not about:

• System design – this will be the focus of another interview
• Trivia questions, Riddles, trick questions or logic puzzles

You’ll receive an email from Wise containing the details of the interview: when it’ll happen, who’ll the two engineers be and how it’ll be conducted. 

It can be an onsite interview where you get the opportunity to visit one of our offices (depending on your location), or a video interview via Zoom.

During the interview we’ll assess your familiarity and experience with the frontend technical landscape and if you can write code that’s correct, readable and well thought-through.  

It’s ok to not know some topics or if you forget specific syntax during the coding part, etc. We expect you to communicate and engage with your interviewers on both what you know and don’t know or remember - they are there to help you!

We’re mostly interested to learn how you think so please provide a narrative as you go through the code. 

This interview should not need any preparation, however you might want to brush up on the topics we mentioned above.

• We want to learn more about you and your technical experience, so we encourage you to communicate openly and go deep into your technical expertise
• During the coding part - It’s crucial to understand the problem you have to solve. If the question is unclear or has been left intentionally open – always feel free to ask clarifying questions. We want to understand your thought process so please explain what you are doing and why.
• Ask questions - the interview is an opportunity for you to learn more about us too, so we encourage you to have some questions for us at the end too
• Finally, your interviewer isn’t there to just assess you, they’re also there to help. Don’t hesitate to ask questions and keep the interview as a discussion.

Good luck!