Walmart

• Good salary
• World's largest retailer
• 401K
• Few good humans
• 10% discount at stores
• Opportunity to work and change exciting areas in eCommerce
• Generous H1B & PERM processing (Amazing (4) people in Immigration team)
• Annual Incentive
• If you happen to work in Walmart.com on a good area, you are lucky
• Proud brand
• Good place to learn don'ts
• Great place to learn how not to be!
• Ping pong

Teams to look for: Few teams in Customer Promise, Digital Mobile, OneOps. Avoid other market teams if possible.

It's a great company, it's WALMART for God's sake! But if you are very ambitious, very intelligent, very passionate, and have other choices at the same salary level, you can probably give deeper thoughts and analysis and ask a few more questions.

If you are mid-level in your career, it's a good choice.

Where do I start:

• It's humorous to watch people managers that have 90's degrees trying to prove technical. This is the Bay Area, home of the best universities! Please wake up! It sounds childish when you folks talk in meetings. Let the people you hired do their job.

• Managers can travel business class and spend irresponsibly (and proudly chatter) with no purpose except eating food. But initiatives will get declined with silly reasons like no budget for 10TB of memory. If this sounds good, you have a problem.

• Paradise for contractors (spouse referrals). Lethargic approach in hiring contractors. There are a lot of nice and deserving people that work like crazy, but won't get recognized. But contractors that plan their vacations during 5 days of work for the coming holiday can survive with 3-digit/hr billing rates. No issues.

• The group that I worked in had few adult activities during business hours, affecting other folks for a prolonged period, but the management only showed blind sight.

• Internal transfer process is almost non-existent. People that have a proven track record, crave to work hard and grow organically will find no takers even after literally touching a manager's foot.

• Most promotions are not deserved. It doesn't matter how much you know; who you know matters.

• Have witnessed managers cook up and manipulate reports/charts etc., when presenting to leadership. Not once.

• Largely dominated by one ethnic group. No bias. When it brings an ugly culture to the whole company, it needs a check.

• Anyone with access to check in a piece of code can break things and affect a solid 2 days of work easily. I bet! No concept of sanity or continuous integration. But there is a team that dedicatedly works in engineering tools. I really don't know what the directors' and Sr. Directors' day-to-day routines are.

• Do a simple test. Break a very, very simple integration on purpose in Production. It will take 10 minutes for site ops to reach the support team, the support team will take 10 minutes to log in, 10 more minutes to recognize there is a problem, 20 minutes to find a relevant team, 10 minutes for the relevant team to come in contact, and at least 1-2 hours to even recognize the problem. If it involves Bentonville, add a bonus 2 hours. By now, there would have been tons of orders lost. Such is the volume. Just do this exercise and see yourself what happens. No joke!

• When someone asks me, "How is the culture in Walmart eCommerce like?" I am like, "Depends on the manager." If this sounds good, why do we need many layers of leadership beyond managers? Let them report to the CEO?

• 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people.

• Credit stealing is the primary occupation for the majority of folks in the above 80%. Been a victim, many times.

• Many capable people are sticking for Green Card, looking for right opportunities, or waiting for the right move. Many good leaders have left.

• It's a great place for people in Washington D.C. to conduct campus recruitment on Walmart eCommerce premises. The drive would empty almost half of this company. Why? Such is their political skills. You can find some best people that can be employed in lobbying! D.C. folks, are you hearing?

• People could go any extent to capture power. Even to the extent of humiliating sincere and passionate efforts. Been a victim.

• Seldom have looked upon someone as a true leader. In fact, got more inspiration from my peers.

• Managers and reportees keep each other insecure with simple strategies.

You need not send any managers to Stanford course. A 1-day gardening class will do, where they can learn how to water, fertilize soil, and help plants thrive. If you think you have hired common-sensical humans as managers, then please ask them to apply the learnings in the class to humans and teams.

Please provide some good food options in the cafeteria. One can earn multiple thousands in here, but only to buy dry pizza slices? It's the very basis of existence. Please do that.

Just like food is the basic reason for existence for humans, code is your lab's business! Invest a lot around it! Your charts, your business, your jobs are non-existent without a focus on this.

Please keep groupism in check over time.

Adopt a global strategy: Hire attitude, train skill.

Let Bentonville decide your budget, but that doesn't mean you won't be able to run this awesome technological company at least closer to the good of fellow technological companies.

I do know the salary ranges and understand it's tough to hire only the best in the market being in the Bay Area.

But the good news is, you don't need to have the best except in few algorithm-heavy areas.

Hire lots of passionately-attituded folks! Pump in some inspiring blood into the stream.