Pros: - Benefits - Work-life balance - Home office - Flexible hours - Travel to other offices (though now only 3 times a year)

Cons: - Promotion: almost impossible to get promoted before the 2-year mark, however good your performance reviews are. - Salary: The pay bands are public, but don't expect to earn above the middle of the band if you don't start there. What happens otherwise is that you start at the bottom and get small raises that still keep you in the bottom each year, regardless of your reviews. - On-call: Officially, it's optional, but more important services require 24/7 on-call. - On-call: Instead of paying night, weekend, holiday, overtime, etc., allowances when the engineer is alerted, they just allow you to take the worked time off.

Pros: - Autonomous - Helps each team grow and learn on their own. - Transparent - It's absolutely amazing to know how transparent a company can be. They even publish financial stats as a startup, even when they are not obliged to. That's how transparent a company can get! - Growth - With the company handling scale to a great extent, it is an amazing opportunity to grow as an engineer and be a part of a fast-paced environment.

Cons: Not much, to be honest. If I had to nitpick, I would say scale has taken a very big toll, derailing a dozen new features to be released. That being said, quality is still the highest priority. It's about getting one thing correct versus many things okay.

Pros: The mission: I loved the main goal of the company, which is lowering international banking costs to minimum possible levels while being transparent on fees and waiting times. It is a worthy task, and they have millions of real users with real problems. About company structure: The company is a fast-growing ex-startup, with a mixture of startup and corporate. Hierarchically speaking, it has a flat structure with tribes organized around many consisting teams. All these teams have KPIs to push. Good part of company structure: Since it is not yet corporate, there is still flexibility: people can work on stuff they know best, as opposed to only the things in their contract. Also, there is a lot of trust and openness to recommendations outside of your own team. Good part of engineering culture: * Lots of smart and world-class level engineers * A lot of freedom in doing things * Teams own their process, so no outdated processes to block you * People can be convinced with reasoning; no bottleneck architects * Engineers are treated as partners in the product, not just workers * A chance to talk to the customers, customer support, and OPS as a participant! In my previous company, I could not talk with either of them, so it is a great opportunity to have some ideas * The CEO picks up the phone to solve customer issues time to time, which shows that the company really wants to be customer-centric. The best type of employee for the company (in engineering): * Senior level; has to know how to weigh pros and cons * Has a lot of willpower to tackle lots of threads and lack of direction (i.e., "I don't know, solve it!") * Willing to do non-engineering tasks (gathering product requirements, assessing design, discussing team KPIs, etc.) * Does not fear to decide and risk * Has the necessary people- and verbal skills to voice criticism in a solely positive way

Cons: Mostly there are two sources of issue with the company: one is having autonomous teams in a flat structure _at scale_, which is a very new concept with not so many ready solutions. The second issue is coming from the fact TransferWise is being an ex-startup with breakneck growth; there was no time tackling them. So in detail: Negative consequences of autonomy: * Anything under a KPI gets better and possibly modern as well; anything not measured or easily measurable is not really solved. * That means that problems outside the responsibility of a team are solved very late or not at all; usually these are the really hard problems. * There is a cult of the Messiah Employee, who would be a person who can find time, energy, and willpower outside of day-to-day feature work to fix these cross-team really hard problems. Negative consequences of being an ex-startup: * The company did not invest in people skills; leads don't know how to solve interpersonal conflicts, so they just lay off people; nor are there employees who can intervene in these. * There are senior product managers who make decisions over guesses or their own ideas, regardless of the team investing in data analysis and UX beforehand. * Certain areas like data engineering are surprisingly unprofessional, and a lot depends on the coding skills of a given team's data analysts; the quality varies team by team. * There is a lot of legacy code that is not tackled, and there is no human resource to do it (scaling issue); also, there are product managers who do not want to hear about these problems, consequently there is a lot of guerrilla engineering tackling tech debt. * There are many questionable team leads who might have great technical knowledge but are really not mature enough or ready to tackle human issues. * People are expected to be fine with not-so-great compensation; however, really hard issues require really valuable people who, in turn, might know their price.