Let me say this first: every company has room to improvement, TransferWise no exception. I've always been keeping a critical eye on things because I care about the company. The scale and field TransferWise is operating on is very different from another company, so the problem we're facing sometimes exposes our shortcomings.
In engineering,
- Tech leads are very overloaded. From the start, the requirement is that they have to be good at both engineering and people management (as we don't have engineering manager setup like some other tech companies), as well as understand how TransferWise works. Any one of those would be a big ask, let alone three. I personally would start introducing engineering manager (people manager) in the structure. Recent career map on new IC levels also paves way for some leads who may not want to pursue a people management career to stay on the technical track.
- Speaking of career, it's hard to see us offering a lot. When we were small, it's all about having the impact, not your title/level; Now we're relatively big, still with the very flat structure in engineering, there isn't much for a promising engineer to go up to, other than being a tech lead, which as I mentioned above, is pretty overloaded/overworked. Hopefully the new levels would help a bit but we may need to change something more drastically to improve that.
- Diversity: not that we don't care (at least I care deeply), it's tricky to make start on this when you have an all-male and sometimes all-white interview line-up. There are some good initiatives but we can definitely do more at intern/graduate/experience levels.
- Communication: it has improved greatly over time but still room for more. It's difficult given our global presence but I'm confident we'll do better.
- Compensation: no bonus or performance related pay is fine when the company is small, as stock options is doing the job; as we grow, stock options may become less relevant and to attract talents who may have a preference on cash over options, this is something we should consider.