Wealthsimple

WLB is a mess. The company believes that giving company day offs once in awhile create work life balance when in reality it doesn't help at all when workloads don't change. If you truly want to improve WLB in the organization, have realistic expectations and don't under resource your teams, then you won't even need to give company day offs.

If you are a engineer, oncall practices are 24/7 every 3-5 weeks, with no lieu time or overtime pay. You will be paged regularly during your oncall period outside of working hours and even during sleep. Every oncall issue must be responded and fixed asap. There is no compromise even on low hanging fruit. Engineering leadership is resistant to the idea of having SREs, support teams or a sunshine model when engineers are free labor around the clock.

As the years have gone by, I am witnessing less and less people speak frankly (negatively) about projects, processes or issues. The vibe seems to be that no one wants to risk being offensive or assertive when speaking the truth hence why the culture has become very dishonest and pretentious.

DEI practices within the company including hiring are purely political rather than representing the wide and expansive diversity of Canada which would be the client-base. I've seen banks have better representation of immigrants in Canada than Wealthsimple. The company tries to mimic itself under an American woke culture which may or may not benefit in the near future when it comes to the overall demographics of Canada. I will say that they are trying hard to make DEI work for everyone and it is a difficult task to get right but they should be vary of the messaging they are sending to employees with merit that would get sidelined due to practices outside their control (ex: identity).