I got an offer from Klarna, which was really good from an economic standpoint, but I decided to accept another offer at a London startup.

1. Klarna has a horrible recruitment process, the longest I've been through in my career. I went through 10 stages/appointments, including on-site interviews, calls, and their online logic test. I was handled by 3 different recruiters/coordinators who, ironically, were pretty uncoordinated. I even had to go through the exact same interview twice (two identical peer programming interviews targeting the same problem). On the bright side, one of the recruiters, Philip, was great and communicated really well.

2. I got the impression that Klarna has a lot to learn in terms of culture:

• I could feel some internal conflicts between teams (the old Erlang system guys and the new Java system guys).
• One interviewer was a bit full of himself: he spent 25 minutes of a supposedly technical interview speaking about himself and his great career progress, non-stop, without letting me talk.

1. The offer was really good from an economic perspective but very aggressive:

• They gave me a 4-weekday deadline to answer. There was no urgency to get me started; they did it only to strong-arm me into discarding other prospective offers (I explicitly asked them if this was the reason, and I got an evasive answer).
• When bringing up discussing the contract before getting the formal written offer, the answer I got was, "It's a bad sign when people want to discuss clauses. Contract changes are not on the table."

Peer programming