Wise

People you work with in Singapore office are generally pleasant.

Product you work on does help people. It doesn’t help people the best, but it does help.

I want to stress cons here are only relevant for regional expansion teams in Singapore. There are other teams not suffering from these problems; they are pretty okay, not FAANG okay, but okay for the tier Wise is in.

• Your work is highly derivative. Product and engineering leadership in this office do not believe in building/owning anything new, nor do they believe in localizing the product better. As a result, a large portion of your work revolves around adapting something built explicitly for Europe (but said to be "generic") to the Asian market. It is simply very boring work on an archaic tech stack.

• Your hours can be very long. Something is constantly on fire, and your regular workload isn't exactly light already. I found myself constantly shifting gear from 120% to 150%, never getting a break. You need to work with a lot of people in EU time zones on services you do not own to get anything done, and they will not accommodate you. The result is a lot of compulsory work in your evenings.

In the entirety of the company (which is not bad, frankly, for engineers), you will find the regional expansion team's long hours versus uninspiring work produce the worst payoff for your performance and learning.

The Singapore office needs different technical leadership. Current leads have too much emotional baggage; they constantly reject changes because "historically it didn't work." Oh well, historically the company was worth 12 billion GBP, so what's your point?