- You are in CS. This means other teams treat you like you are at the bottom of the food chain. Nobody cares about the work you do, except your team lead. He, or most likely she (80% of CS team leads are women), will pretend they care. Back in the days they used to have 10 phone hours per month to help customers, now they don't even touch communications with clients. Team leads spend their days "planning" the future and thinking how to make you more efficient. If you received a manger call – you have to spend ages finding another CS agent who will pretend to be a manager.
- Career progression is unlikely, unless you are one of cool kids or formed a friendship with a hiring manager. It doesn’t matter how many years you’ve worked in the company. All depends on whether a team lead likes you and whether they hear things they want to hear during an interview. I’ve seen really talented people not getting a job they’ve done tremendous amount of work for – that’s normal when it comes to CS in TransferWise. Wrong people get promoted for no reason. Also, most non-CS positions are opened to external hiring. Oh, and if your team lead feels you are not performing as well as you should be, you will not get a permission to apply anywhere.
- Toxic "feedback culture". A lot of people in the company don’t know how to give feedback and how to receive it. Even if you did something that wasn’t your fault, I recommend to say “thank you” and suck it up. Don’t give a feedback to your team lead – most of them have a big ego and you will regret it at some stage.
- Performance requirements constantly changing. One month you may find yourself doing a good job, the next month your team lead is telling you it is not enough because it is based on some new “smart” metric.
- Interviews for internal applications for other positions are often done by amateurs who are not really interested in you as a candidate. Sometimes they even make insulting assumptions about why you won't be a good fit. HR doesn't care, they are not interested about the quality of interview neither about bad practices. Team leads decide how they hire and who they hire. If you think something is unfair - suck it up, nobody cares.
