Wave Reviews

If you identify as Black or POC, don't work here. Why? You will get treated like a sevond class citizen and unfortunately leadership has no financial motivation or incentive to change their policies/structure to support you. If hired you will experience 'from pet to threat' and there isn't a POC or Black executive member in a position to endorse. You will however get tokenized. I was a Waver for 3+ years. During my time I experienced (and witnessed) the consistent lack of awareness, empathy, or respect for racialized employees. Being a product company, Wave is an Engineering first culture. In my tenure only 9/100 POC engineers were promoted and 0/100 Black engineers. Within the larger organization these promotion trends were consistent. What you can expect? Anything from microaggression to overt racist statements from leadership like "If we have to hire Black people, we will have to lower our standards." Still unsure? Check out Wave's social media pages. Celebrating Uncle Tom for Black History Monthy 2021 might have been an unfortunate misstep but its #onbrand. Additionally it's another clear example that not a single Black person (employee or consultant) was included.

Wave has been struggling since its acquisition and the founders cashed out and left. It was bought by a traditional retail company that doesn't understand tech and has different values about people. The people they've brought in to run the show have old-school corporate mentalities and don't understand why employees are checked out, are underperforming and don't trust anyone. There is truly bad senior management right up the parent company's CEO. The skilled leaders have either been fired, laid off, or are leaving for greener pastures. Huge levels of burnout. Many people sticking around are just going through the motions, or resort to manipulation and tribalism. Wave is still trying to figure out its product direction or how to be valuable. Decisions are made top-down in a vacuum, with poor integration between product and engineering. Technical debt isn't managed. Engineering teams struggle to deliver new features and are slowed down by poor, overly complex, and unmaintained tooling.