Wise reviews

This can be very very inconsistent depending on the team. In my experience I encountered clueless managers trying to further their own careers over the betterment of the team. There are quite a few living embodiments of the Dunning-Kruger effect! The environment started feeling a lot more corporate. The classic issues of 'waterfall masquerading as agile' have started to crop up. The number of meetings kept going up and don't expect to get any concentrated time to do work as Slack will ensure you're constantly distracted! The company is also in a bit of an identity crisis about what the product actually is. Ask 10 people and you'll get 10 different answers. None of them incorrect but not entirely correct either. The culture and values on paper look great but I'm finding it harder and harder to see those values in a practical way. It doesn't matter what you write on the wall but what you reward and who you promote. In my experience there was a massive incongruity between the written values and practical values. There is a certain kind of person that can succeed at TransferWise. The traits likely to do well are over confident, loud, loves to talk and can make themselves heard in a loud meeting. It's rather sad because here's a company that has literally everything going for it. It's solving a real problem with a product that seems to work (so far) and is profitable. The management seem to be caught like a rabbit in the headlights though and that could cripple the company's long term prospects.

Hyper growth is challenging. When you have a company with over a thousand people too much freedom can lead to chaos. Also, the fact that autonomy is one of the core values of the company has turned teams quite selfish about their own goals. Cross team collaboration is almost impossible. It's so hard that ends up discouraging people from seeking to fix or do any task that involves other teams. It's like living in a country with different factions that pretend to collaborate with one another. The company is divided into several cliques, and the old employees act as tribal leaders: don't even think about disagreeing with them. It's an EXTREMELY political company. If you hate politics, don't bother joining. It's as political as any big old organisation out there (or worse than most). Most leads are quite young and with that comes a huge ego. You will feel like going back to secondary school sometimes. Dramas, gossip, etc. It's a downside of having so many young people together. On the engineering side, it's the most unproductive company I've ever worked for. Anything that took 1 week anywhere else in TransferWise takes 4. Loads of talking, convincing and trying to understand a codebase that has become a huge patchwork of badly designed APIs, very little actual coding. Code quality is average at most. Be prepared to deal with technical debt through the roof. Because the company grows so fast, most of the engineers know very little about the current codebase. No documentation, no javadocs, just hearsay. Last but not least, the perks of being a vibrant startup are mostly gone by now. This is a huge organisation not a small startup anymore. You still get some of the basics, like free fruit etc, but it's the same as you get in any other tech company nowadays.