Wise

TL;DR

This is still a good company to work for, but don't just go with the hype or believe these reviews. They are a reflection of what TransferWise does best: indoctrination. If you have a similar offer from somewhere else, you should definitely consider it.

Other upsides:

• Freedom
• People can have a say (comes with a price)
• It's a quite transparent company; everyone is always been told what's going on
• Offices are quite nice
• Quite social crowd (if you are into that)
• Mission is ambitious. You can feel like you're making a difference.

Hypergrowth is challenging. When you have a company with over a thousand people, too much freedom can lead to chaos.

Also, the fact that autonomy is one of the core values of the company has turned teams quite selfish about their own goals. Cross-team collaboration is almost impossible. It's so hard that it ends up discouraging people from seeking to fix or do any task that involves other teams.

It's like living in a country with different factions that pretend to collaborate with one another. The company is divided into several cliques, and the old employees act as tribal leaders: don't even think about disagreeing with them.

It's an EXTREMELY political company. If you hate politics, don't bother joining. It's as political as any big old organization out there, or worse than most.

Most leads are quite young, and with that comes a huge ego. You will feel like going back to secondary school sometimes. Dramas, gossip, etc. It's a downside of having so many young people together.

On the engineering side, it's the most unproductive company I've ever worked for. Anything that took 1 week anywhere else at TransferWise takes 4. Loads of talking, convincing, and trying to understand a codebase that has become a huge patchwork of badly designed APIs, with very little actual coding.

Code quality is average at most. Be prepared to deal with technical debt through the roof. Because the company grows so fast, most of the engineers know very little about the current codebase. No documentation, no javadocs, just hearsay.

Last but not least, the perks of being a vibrant startup are mostly gone by now. This is a huge organization, not a small startup anymore. You still get some of the basics, like free fruit, etc., but it's the same as you get in any other tech company nowadays.

Hire more experienced people. When you get this big, you need more than youth.