I was interviewed by two Java developers. The interview was in a room for playing ping pong, which would be OK for a new startup, but looks somewhat strange for a company with more than 300 employees and almost $100M in funding.

There were no technical questions about front-end web development. The interview was wrapped up when a group of people came into the room to play ping pong.

Several days later, I received an email saying that I am not motivated enough for TransferWise. Since there were no motivation-related questions during the interview, it looked like a generic, non-constructive excuse to reject me without any useful feedback.

1. If I start a startup, would I prefer writing unstructured code in two months or clean, efficient, testable code in a year? (Comparing two vs. twelve months is a totally unrealistic example. An experienced developer would add new features faster when she/he has a clean and well-designed codebase. There will be fewer bugs also. A good codebase would never take six times longer to develop.)

2. Would I spend time adding a feature to a web app or migrating it to ES6?

3. Why do some TransferWise users drop off at the fourth transfer flow process, which is entering billing information?

4. What would I change to make more users enter their billing information?

5. How would I know that my change improved the statistics if there were ten more changes?