Visa

Visa does give quite a lot of flexibility in terms of WFH and WLB. They also show some appreciation for employees, although for such a well-off company, they come off as very stingy in terms of rewarding employees (e.g., end-of-year celebrations).

Their new grad program isn't what you would usually expect, where you rotate around different roles to try out different positions in the company. Instead, they use these roles internally for headcount reasons, and there isn't much added benefit between joining as a new grad compared to a normal full-timer.

Teams have managers, and sometimes engineers are in their positions not because of their technical ability, but instead because they play politics or have been there for an extended period of time. This has resulted in the way things are done here becoming very archaic and frustrating, with extremely misplaced focus.

If you're someone interested in engineering problems, it will be painful to work here. A lot of the time, you will instead be dealing with irritating, arbitrary problems like lengthy scrum meetings or being pulled into calls repeatedly.

A lot of the way to progress in Visa's Singapore branch seems to be through fluffing your way through the system. You can be very technically inept but still progress if you speak well enough. I have seen engineering managers here without an ounce of proper engineering knowledge, but still make it to their positions.

Even if you do work hard, their internal review system forces managers to choose between their employees as to who has done "badly" this time round, leading to a lower rating and a lower raise.

There is also a strange and misguided internal push to use AI tools for everything. Some orgs even try to track this by checking for "lines of code generated by AI".

It also does not pay well compared to other tech firms in Singapore.

There are too many middle managers here for things to get done. Pushing things through requires a manager to liaise with so many stakeholders that important work is just halted because of the need to appease so many people.