Be cautious joining a regional expansions team in Singapore
Pros
- People you work with in Singapore office are generally pleasant - Product you work on does help people. It doesnt help people the best, but it does help.
Cons
I want to stress cons here are only relevant for regional expansions teams in Singapore. There are other teams not suffering from these problems, they are pretty ok, not FAANG ok but ok for the tier Wise is in. - Your work is highly derivative. Product and engineering leadership in this office do not believe in building/owning anything new, nor do they believe in localising the product better. As a result, a large portion of your work revolves around adapting something built explicitly for Europe (but said to be "generic") to Asian market. It is simply very boring work on archaic tech stack. - Your hours can be very long. Something is constantly on fire and your regular workload isnt exactly light already. I found myself constantly shifting gear from 120% to 150%, never getting a break. You need to work with a lot of people in EU timezone on services you do not own to get anything done and they will not accommodate you. The result is a lot of compulsory work in your evening. In the entirety of the company (which is not bad frankly for engineers), you will find regional expansions team's long hour vs uninspiring work produces the worst payoff for your perf and learning.
