Pros: After interviewing with 20+ small to mid size Canadian firms, I decided to join the Wealthsimple team [early 2017]. Their biggest differentiator [compared to other Canadian-based startups] was their ambition: they are attempting to build a multi-billion dollar business, and are placing their bets on international growth (in 2017, they've expanded the business to both the US and UK!). The leadership team understands the importance of being a technology-first company; nearly 50% of the company is engineering/product, and their competitive compensation structure has helped them hire an impressively strong and diverse team of experts. The fast-scaling company means that even new employees can take on a lot of responsibility; my day-to-day work has a very direct impact upon the company. The culture is comparable to an SF or NY based startup: catered lunches, monthly team events, fitness benefits and more - the company really values its employees, and wants to help them work as efficiently as possible. They also place a focus on constant learning - there are both company-wide and engineering-specific 'Lunch and Learns' every week. Overall, I have no doubt that WS is one of the most exciting companies to work for in Canada: my only regret is not being able to join them sooner!

Cons: The fast-moving "ship-it first, ask question laster" culture can lead to unexpected issues or surprises that affect clients and other teams across the company, forcing them to drop what they're doing and step in to help find quick solutions. This environment can also lead to scenarios where teams end up building quick or 'exciting' solutions, rather than focusing on longer-term, high impact projects. For teams outside of engineering, the workload can be quite demanding, especially during tax/RRSP season. While it's something that company is attempting to address, it is certainly a pain-point as the business continues to scale faster and faster.

Pros: There are catered lunches, friendly people, pretty good benefits, and various technologies used in different places.

Cons: Few years ago company had great culture and great values. Nowadays, the values are just mentioned time from time while nobody is really following them anymore. For instance, company constantly advocates itself as being completely open about everything. While at the same time a whole project and respective team was disbanded with 1 day notice, being a surprise even to the team itself. New projects are being announced with extremely short deadlines, and without even consulting about resource availability with teams in advance. There were cases of "secret" projects, that nobody in the company knew about but the team working on them. And even though company has a "Town Hall" type of meetings, most of the really difficult questions are answered with non-answers like "isn't this a great problem to have? this means we are growing!". Amounts of tech debt is staggering. Whenever there's a choice of doing something good for short-term vs something good long-term, short-term always wins and long-term problems will be solved when they become fires. A lot of services still do not have proper tracing/monitoring after literal years of raising this issue. Technical direction is provided by design-by-committee or in other words - there's no technical direction. Either nobody cares about an issue, or everyone discusses it into the ground for few weeks, then gets tired and forgets about it.

Pros: Wealthsimple has a lot of good benefits and good people working there.

Cons: I am interested in general politics for a big company.