Pros: You might meet a handful of highly intelligent people during their brief stint at the company, before they move on to someplace better.

Cons: Frequent re-organizations, changing priorities, total lack of transparency. Engineers are treated more like tools than anything.

Pros: Work-life balance is decent. Hours are flexible, and people can easily work from home if they can't make it into the office for any reason. Projects are reasonable and seldom require extra hours. There is an engineering on-call rotation, so people are only contacted off-hours when it's their turn. Coworkers are cool and fun to be around. The overall quality of the engineering staff is improving, and this is driving a shift toward better practices and tools. The company offers significant equity to engineers, which may or may not turn out to be worth a lot after it goes public. If you love purple, this is the place for you.

Cons: Wayfair's e-commerce engine is a hard-to-maintain agglomeration of half-baked features stuck together with chewing gum. Code quality is pretty bad, and there are no department-wide initiatives to improve it. The focus is on adding new features as fast as possible, the goal often being to make the site look and work like Amazon (this is openly admitted). In general, minimal time is allotted for improving architecture and performance until things get so bad it's an emergency. Churning out code like this worked great when Wayfair was tiny, but the company is now large and complex enough that the legacy codebase has become an impediment to progress, and management's attitude towards software engineering is an impediment to improving the codebase. Many top people do not have formal training in software management and/or have only ever worked at Wayfair and are not acquainted with modern practices in the field. They are perfectly nice and well-intentioned but don't "get" how to build great software. So, as a Wayfair software engineer, you will work with bright, creative coders, all working on the dull task of fixing your predecessors' follies, or rushing to hack together new features with little planning, against your better judgment, because yes, this has to go out tomorrow. Add to that continual production breakage, and you'll see that doing this kind of interruption-driven development month after month gets pretty frustrating. Did I mention salaries are below industry standards? Also, free cookies and Doritos do not count as awesome perks.

Pros: - Growing company with many career growth opportunities in management and in the technical track. - Great people who contribute to the success of Wayfair at all levels with a strong sense of ownership. - Work with cutting-edge technologies. - Transparent leadership committed to the success of the company and its employees. - Great office location. - Fun, active culture with regular team-building outings. - Free coffee, juice, snacks, beer, and more.

Cons: - Growing so fast makes it hard to keep the same core culture across the company, but we're holding on for now even though there are some inconsistencies between teams. - As part of growing, we can diversify engineering roles even more to keep engineers doing what they do best. - Sometimes it can be hard to find conference rooms, a side effect of the fast growth.