Full stack engineer - Full Stack Software Engineer Wise Employee Review

2.0
Jun 10, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Extremely friendly people, the office team is the best I have ever seen (so many fun things are organised, delicious Friday buffet), the satisfaction of making a contribution in people's lives by helping them save money (compared to banks)

Cons

The company has recently digressed a lot from its core values. It is no longer a "revolution" because there are so many companies who are doing the exact same things and they do it better. There is no sense of urgency of "getting things done" - people are focussed on turf wars, there is lots of politics going on with respect to ownership, the oldies in the company seem to think they are the powerful authorities, forming cliques amongst them - backing each other, giving promotions to their countrymen, not listening to criticisms, but overly eager to project the negative effects (arising from their behaviour) on the other members of their teams. We no longer keep customers first - we regularly increase prices to get more profit margins for the investors (but blame the increasing costs of employee salaries, which are way below market standards), we no longer are transparent to the customers, we are regressing on the speed of transfers the last few months, the product is unusable, the tech stack is unstable - but the product managers don't seem to care about them. "No drama, good karma" - literally the opposite happens. There are ego problems with the oldies and leads, they can't take negative feedback and escalate to their leads if you tell them about these, code reviews will get blocked because it is not written as per the other person's whims, leads and product managers regularly do catch-ups as part of their day jobs, but nothing concrete ever comes that improves the product for the customers or the employees' careers, leads getting away by doing only easy tasks and literally exploiting the travel and remote opportunities to the maximum for themselves. There is no autonomy anymore - please don't get fooled by the blog posts, the company is growing big and it is the leads who will be the managers and have literally unlimited control and zero accountability.

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Wise Response
7y
Thank you for your time to share your current experience at TransferWise. Feedback is really important to us and we encourage people to take an active role in shaping and preserving our culture so we can stay focused on the mission and stay true to our values. We are concerned about some of the details mentioned here and to our knowledge, these have not been raised to our people or through one of our many feedback channels/options to date. As you will have seen, Mihkel (one of our Engineering Managers outside of tribe) has made himself available to look into this feedback so I would encourage you to reach out to him to discuss further. We hope you follow up. Thanks, Kate

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5.0
Mar 12, 2026
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Pros

flexible review pay lots of feedback

Cons

repetitive long hours can be frustrating no sponsorship for visa

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Wise Response
2mo
Thank you for taking the time to write a review. We’re pleased to hear that you appreciate the flexibility, benefits and culture. We hope you continue enjoying your experience at Wise.
1.0
Jul 13, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

Good PTO, and friendly Wisers.

Cons

Management is totally micromanagement, and the People team does not advocate for employees; they appear present only in name. If I were in Kristo’s position, I would conduct a thorough top-to-bottom review of the entire HR department of U.S., and replace all of them. If over 70% of the Austin team would never recommend this workplace, it is a significant warning sign that needs to be addressed.

3
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