WiseTech Global reviews

- Demotivating, mismanaged, and poorly thought-out developer induction process. Despite any previous experience, new developers spend around 3 months in a 'bootcamp' where they individually and in strong isolation must learn how WiseTech does unit testing, coding style, work items etc. Which in of itself is fine, except the arbitrary limit of 10 work items that must be completed, which are randomly assigned and range from being incredibly easy to extremely difficult (involving senior developers). Despite an enormous amount of feedback to the small team of two (one twenty year old) who manages the induction into the entire development team of Sydney (about 200ppl), they remain adherent to the rule of one work item completed = one point. Even when a developer may have fixed a bug in a feature which parallel is removed by a senior developer, they refuse to acknowledge or compensate the work put in and the learning involved as contribution to their induction score of 10 completed items. - Little to no appreciation of work or ability. Their chief developer believes that their problem rests with hiring, not retention. Look towards the latter. There was a recent PhD in hardware engineering hired at WiseTech that had to go through 3 months of gruelling C# bug-fixing induction before they were allowed into the telematics team, which uses an entirely different skillset. There are developers who are assigned on rotation to teams where their skills and talents could clearly be of benefit to WiseTech in other places. - Antiquated technical engineering. Their new product is built by enterprise C# developers in web technologies (Knockout.js). Understandably, there is a disparency between the two skillsets and this in combination with a seemingly ignorant avoidance of all of the standards and practices they kept in their flagship product, means it is utterly unmaintainable. The product has gorgeous UX, but for anyone looking for an engineering role, it is terribly designed underneath. JQuery spaghetti code everywhere, clear misunderstanding of CSS practices, including putting text in content attributes, completely ignoring the i18n foundation the company is built upon. The web app fails to load because the theme's styles/colours are stored in a database which is updated by a C# winforms app...each development task in their new product needs to be duplicated twice, once for the Web frontend and once for the XAML frontend. - Stifling culture. WiseTech touts their culture of fostering innovation and change-makers all over its external and internal branding. In my experience this is largely ignored unless you are very high in the organisation. - Documentation is non-existent in many cases. Half of the time this makes sense because there's no need, the other half of the time it's essential to setting up the development environment. - Their self-designed software for managing work frequently didn't work and actually degraded in quality while I was there. After being in beta for 2 years, you would've hoped this would not be the case.

The company developed their own management board, a system that gives people tasks to work on. This made the company become like a "factory", no one talks to each other, people don't help, the philosophy is that if you learn by yourself you are going to remember, while if someone teaches you it's not as effective. They also believe that stress helps people working harder, so every tasks assigned to you has a timer associated with it, and they take metrics to check how well you are performing. There is no involvement in design decisions for new developers, tasks come from "somewhere". People prefer written communication over face to face, even if you are sitting 2 meters apart. I worked in a team for over a month and I didn't even know the names of the people sitting around me. Some of the people in the company have a great IQ but definately lack of social skills. It has definately been the worst working experience of my life.