WSO2 Reviews

Pros

Flat culture Really good Awesome

Cons

focus on one stack of technology

Pros

An excellent place to work.

Cons

Quite challenging and awesome environment

Pros

Work with cutting edge technologies A multi cultural global team Work with customers in 90+ international markets The next best thing to go public very soon, so the ability to be part of that journey

Cons

High intense work place, not for the faint hearted

Pros

In the 20 months or so since joining WSO2, I've found everyone supportive and encouraging - like a real team. WSO2 leadership consistently demonstrates compassion for everyone. Sanjiva Weerawarana, CEO, has set a bar that makes WSO2 the best company I've ever worked for. Wish I had come across WSO2 many years ago.

Cons

The pace may intimidate some, but I like it.

Pros

You will get an excellent learning opportunity.

Cons

Nothing much to complain about.

Pros

Learning opportunities Working with real deployment in world-leading fortune 500 customers Cutting edge technologies

Cons

The initial learning curve is high

Pros

Culture, people, benefits, pay, fun, innovation

Cons

In house tech, product based so not much diversity

Pros

Very smart and motivated technical people developing and architecting solutions. The technology can have it's place to stay in the infrastructure as code future if the business does things right. There are some really nice friendly people too.

Cons

This company exhibits "Day 2 Culture" from the top down. By "Day 2", just find watch Bezos speak about day 2 in many situations or read his letter to shareholders in 2016. For non technical roles, such as business and operations, management auto-promotes based off office politics and seniority and would rather see people working long hours (as percieved hard workers) over productive workers. They have no clue who is an effective worker vs just a hard worker because they do not measure anything. Even worse (outside of IT) there is not ticketing or other service to assign tasks and follow to completion to obtain these kpis. They feel since the bulk of their employees are in Sri Lanka where labor costs are lower than western countries, they don't need to use a task-ticketing system. They're wrong. From what I recall, there is no accountability. No shared knowledge resource. No internal wikis, barley any docs. It's a bunch of he-said-she-said with micromanaging where you had to jump from person to person and follow up then run it by your manager all the time to get what you needed. Everyone played office politics and passed the responsibility onto someone else with no SLAs at all, waiting for responses, leaing the customer/lead hanging. This created an easy opportunity for people to seem hardworking but not productive at all, and leads to turn elsewhare. Each task to/from another team should be a ticket wiht SLA's and the team can pick it up (not an individual). When you bring this idea up, it creates friction, and gets shot down immediately. Leadership doesn't want to hear how things can be improved internally. They dont want to hear how they are doing. There is no "skip level" reviews. Managers review those below, but people do not review their managers (which is really weird, many companies get feedback from people about how the manager is doing on a weekly basis). So it shows they are on the wrong path and will continue on this path, promoting b-list talent with a cut-throat business mentality and no metrics to know who really is contributing value to the comapny. They like "hardworking managers" who like to put their subordinates down in inaccurate boilerplate reviews that make the manager look like a tough manager rather than a manager who takes the time and initiative to develop their subordinates talent in hopes to see them move fast through the ranks. You are ranked from the review and your promotions are tied to them. Managers are generally scared of the ideas of subordinates and shoot them down repeadely to a point there is no longer a reason to offer them. Because they have no measurement and little organization, especially in marketing they have lots of last minute requests that ofen go outside usual working hours and resisting them to uphold some kind of work-life balance makes you look like less of a team player, even when you're a high performer.

Pros

Passionate leadership, wonderful people, lots of opportunity to learn and grow.

Cons

hours tend to get long working across time zones.

Pros

Pretty much everyone below leadership is warm, friendly and eager to do good work. If only leadership would get their heads out of their posteriors.

Cons

Loads. This is a zombie company, and nothing will revive it. They still celebrate wins that are decades old while watching their market share continue to perilously shrink. All of this can be pinned to a single person - CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana. Sanjiva sees himself as a brilliant entrepreneur with Silicon Valley cred because he spent some time at IBM. As impressive as it is that he and his team created an open source SOA and integration management system in Sri Lanka that was adopted world wide... what has he done lately? WSO2 is so unbelievably behind in the market they may as well be selling mainframes and buggy whips. They did a massive round of hiring recently with the intent of modernizing everything, from their infra to their marketing. But Sanjiva can't get out of the company's way. As a CTO, I'm willing to bet he's pretty amazing. As a CEO, he's dog feces. His strategic vision is incredibly dated and too deeply mired in the underlying technology with absolutely zero focus on what customers actually need or want. If you make any attempts to try to explain any of this, he arrogantly dismisses you out of hand. If he doesn't understand something - and there's a shocking, terrifying amount he doesn't know about running a successful business - he simply dismisses it, along with the person who suggested it. His ego keeps this company from growing. The only fix is to be rid of him completely - not temporarily replace him so he can chase some pipe dream of creating a new language, not put him on the board so he can keep his replacement on a tight leash, but completely remove him from WSO2 as an organization. They got lucky once about 15 years ago when they saw an opportunity to bring an open source enterprise-level integration and services management system to market and sell ancillary services as a business model. Since then, they have done absolutely nothing but flounder and flail, but they tell themselves they're on the cutting edge because it's beyond Sanjiva's capability to see beyond the tech and actually care about growing the business. He surrounds himself with lackeys he hired young and mentored directly, so they practically worship him. The number one answer from any member of leadership aside from Sanjiva himself is, "What does Sanjiva think?" He has created an environment where original thought is punished unless it originates with him and is echoed throughout the company immediately. All of this is a real shame since there are some fantastic, smart, hardworking folks who see all of this, but are frustrated by any attempts to change it. Though the company is global and touts a remote working culture, if you're not in the Sri Lankan time zone, you don't get to sleep. I literally found myself working at all hours based on their needs in Sri Lanka with absolutely no consideration for my health or well being. This, too, is driven by Sanjiva, who may tell you one day to take your time to come up with the right solution to something, then berate you the very next day for not having done it. I have worked for a number of tech companies in my career - this was my most miserable experience, and I was not alone in that sentiment.