This was genuinely the worst workplace experience I have had in my career.
I joined with years of banking and payments experience behind me and what felt like a genuine excitement for the opportunity. I believed I had found a modern, supportive, high-performing company and a place where I could continue developing my career.
The reality was very different.
I did not struggle because payments are difficult. I have spent years working in operational banking environments handling investigations, reconciliations, payment exceptions, customer issues, operational incidents, SWIFT messages, and regulatory requirements. The problem was not the complexity of the work. The problem was the environment itself.
The company promotes itself as async, high-performance, and focused on setting employees up for success. Unfortunately, my experience often felt very different from the values being communicated.
One of the first challenges was onboarding. Despite being part of the EMEA team, I was assigned a primary mentor operating in a significantly different timezone. This meant large portions of my working day were spent waiting for onboarding support, training sessions, or knowledge transfer that would only begin much later in the afternoon. This arrangement continued for an extended period and felt like an unnecessarily difficult way to onboard new employees.
I eventually suggested that I could use some of those earlier hours to shadow other experienced team members and learn how different people approached their work. To me, this felt like a reasonable request. I wanted to learn, understand different workflows, build relationships, and make productive use of my time.
The response was unexpectedly hostile. What I viewed as initiative and curiosity was met with frustration and a lengthy rant about why I should not be asking for that. I was told that this was the "honeymoon period" and that later I would not have time for such things anyway.
Looking back, that interaction captures much of my experience. Curiosity was not rewarded. Initiative was not encouraged. Asking to learn more was treated as a problem rather than a strength.
The company places enormous emphasis on async culture and self-service learning. In theory this sounds efficient. In practice it often felt like collaboration had been replaced by documentation.
Support frequently meant being directed toward Notion pages, Slack threads, old conversations, SOPs, and internal documentation rather than genuine discussion or knowledge sharing. There was often an assumption that if something had been mentioned once somewhere in Slack, Notion, or a meeting, it was now permanently your responsibility and should never need clarification again.
The result was an environment filled with hidden expectations. Responsibilities, ownership, and operational knowledge often felt assumed rather than clearly communicated.
Async culture can work extremely well when onboarding, ownership, escalation paths, communication standards, and expectations are exceptionally clear. In my experience those foundations were often missing.
Instead, I experienced constant context switching between systems, countries, payment methods, escalations, Slack channels, timezone handovers, undocumented edge cases, and operational firefighting. The supposed benefits of async work were often undermined by the sheer amount of ambiguity that existed around it.
A significant contributor to my experience was the mentoring relationship.
My mentor was clearly knowledgeable and experienced. However, deep subject matter expertise does not automatically make someone an effective mentor.
Questions were supposedly encouraged, but the reality often felt very different. Asking the wrong question could result in frustration, lengthy lectures, condescending reactions, passive-aggressive responses, or being made to feel as though seeking clarification was itself a problem.
At one point I was directly told, "I'm not here to babysit."
That statement has stayed with me because it perfectly summarised how onboarding often felt. There is a significant difference between encouraging independence and making new employees feel like support is a burden.
Interactions often felt highly dependent on mood and timing. There were days where support felt constructive and days where I found myself wondering whether a completely reasonable question was about to trigger another negative reaction.
Over time I stopped feeling comfortable asking questions altogether.
I became increasingly cautious about seeking clarification because I could never be fully confident how it would be received.
Instead of focusing on learning the role, I found myself focusing on managing interactions.
Instead of asking questions freely, I started calculating whether the question was worth asking.
Instead of concentrating on operational understanding, I found myself worrying about communication preferences.
I reached a point where I would second-guess perfectly reasonable messages and replies simply because they were not phrased exactly the way my mentor preferred, even when the operational point itself was correct.
The atmosphere often felt performative rather than genuinely supportive.
Over time curiosity was replaced with anxiety.
Confidence was replaced with self-doubt.
Initiative was replaced with hesitation.
I genuinely stopped believing in myself.
That is perhaps the most concerning part of this experience.
I have worked in payments for years. This was the first role in my career where I genuinely began questioning my own competence.
The culture heavily normalised stress and overwork.
Multiple 12-13 hour days became common.
Not because employees were inefficient.
Not because people were unwilling to work hard.
But because of constant operational pressure, unclear ownership, context switching, onboarding gaps, timezone challenges, interruptions, and the expectation that employees should remain mentally available almost all the time.
Logging off rarely felt like finishing work.
Work followed you mentally long after your day had ended.
One of the company values is "intensity."
In practice, intensity often felt indistinguishable from burnout culture.
Constant availability, chronic pressure, unrealistic expectations, and unsustainable workloads appeared to be normalised and, in some cases, indirectly rewarded.
I was repeatedly told that even receiving a "meets expectations" performance rating was uncommon.
That statement alone speaks volumes about the standards people are expected to maintain.
A healthy organisation should stretch employees.
It should not make reasonable performance feel unattainable.
The phrase "setting people up for success" was repeated frequently.
I struggled to reconcile that message with fragmented onboarding, 12+ hour days, hidden expectations, constant pressure, unclear ownership, and a culture where many employees openly appeared stressed.
What shocked me most was the attitude toward mental wellbeing.
I have never previously experienced mental health difficulties affecting my work performance in any role throughout my career.
That changed here.
The cumulative impact of the environment eventually affected my mental health to the point where I required antidepressants while employed.
When I admitted to my mentor that I was struggling mentally with the environment and stress levels, the response I received was essentially that everyone was stressed, followed by laughter.
That moment captured the culture more accurately than any company value statement ever could.
What made this particularly disappointing was that the people themselves were often genuinely kind.
Many teammates were helpful, supportive, and pleasant to work with.
This was not a problem caused by one individual.
It felt systemic.
The organisation appeared to confuse independence with isolation.
Documentation with collaboration.
Intensity with burnout.
And expertise with mentorship.
Some of the most knowledgeable people I encountered were also some of the least effective teachers.
The company seems to assume that subject matter expertise automatically translates into mentoring ability.
My experience suggests otherwise.
By the end, I found myself no longer enjoying payments.
A profession I had spent years building a career in had become associated with anxiety and self-doubt.
Leaving was ultimately the best decision I could have made for my wellbeing.
I resigned without another role lined up.
That is something I would normally never recommend in the current economy.
However, remaining in the environment felt less sustainable than the uncertainty of leaving it.
The exit process itself felt cold and impersonal.
The moment I resigned, I was removed from systems and communication channels almost immediately.
There was no meaningful conversation with management.
There was no exit interview.
There was no genuine attempt to understand why somebody who had joined so enthusiastically was leaving only a few months later.
No discussion.
No reflection.
No curiosity.
Nothing.
The gap between the culture being marketed and the culture I experienced was one of the biggest disappointments of my career.
This environment may suit people who thrive in highly chaotic, pressure-heavy startup cultures.
For others, especially those who value structure, collaboration, sustainable expectations, and psychologically safe learning environments, it can become deeply damaging over time.
It does not build confidence.
It erodes it.
