Like Star Wars, started great, ended poorly.
Pros
Working at Wise is generally pretty good on the surface, its manageable and you can work here a long time but if you expect upwards movement please know you will need to be burned out or very intense in your motivations as it is not easy. A great company to get involved in this industry with, and then move after 2-3 years to a better environment. Good healthcare, a travel stipend, amazing offices, decent smaller benefits. I have worked here in 2 different roles, an upwards movement they recently put a stop to in order to 'manage training costs' as they told us in the meeting where they shared they no longer encouraged CS or operations workers to move upwards out of their role. The coworkers are fantastic if you find your people, generally your Team Lead will have your best interests in mind, and with some management the handling times and inner bureaucracy is manageable. I deeply enjoyed this job when i first started, I felt the role was meaningful and that I was actually helping people and that the company ethos was actually something the stakeholders wanted to uphold. I was very naive. If you can get through the fact that this is indeed a very corporate place and as soul-sucking as they come, you can make it and make it well, I know many people that have been here for years, and just as many who quit within 1 year as it wasnt worth the salary.
Cons
The salary is straight up not meeting the standard for this role when considering the income tax in Hungary. I end up with around 1000 GBP (450,000 HUF) in my account per month after taxes, when my salary is 1460 GBP (660,000 HUF) per month. Other than the salary, the company is well known for its judgy cliques, favouritism, and in the european offices its known for its racism and bullying. I have not worked in the Asia and Latam offices, so i cannot speak for them. The European (and some of the USA) offices are very racist towards the Latam and Asian offices, and any POC coworker. Besides that, personally I have dealt with misogyny/sexism, antisemitism, and discrimination based on appearance. I have witnessed racism, misogyny/sexism, antisemitism, islamophobia, homophobia/anti-LGBT+ behaviour and language, and more. NONE of this is dealt with well or at all by HR (which went through a change to be called the People Team, but is called ER now, which is kind of ironic) - reporting your grievances will NOT stay confidential, the offices are open and you can just see what people are doing at any time, so there is ample opportunity for retaliation especially if you are reporting someone senior than you. The teams are small, the social circles smaller, people will find out, people will talk. Only a handful of the 30+ people I onboarded with for this role have stayed at the company in the time ive been in this role. Thats terrible. If you can handle the salary or are a non-english/american white guy, you will be fine here and will not face the above issues. What you WILL face is aggressive mismanagement of entire sections of the company, micromanagement from the higher ups regarding your office attendance, where every minute of your day is spent (they time your lunches and breaks), increased pressure for handling times as the workload steadily increases but the time you get decreases, poorly managed knowledge bases that are frequently contradictory of eachother, and a lot of confusion day to day among agents and team leads. If its not clear, im leaving this role.
