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.
