Pros: They do a decent job hosting events for teams.

Cons: Managers look out for themselves.

Pros: You get some chance to learn something new if the team is adopting new technologies.

Cons: - No planning. It had no long-term planning, but it didn't even have any short-term planning either. The team spent a lot of time in the quarter struggling to find what to do for the next one. There was no direction from above, telling us what's more important for the business. Instead, they asked the teams to tell them what to do next. This might work for some companies like Google or Facebook, where engineers try some new projects and see if they can work out. But here? This model only works for companies that are well-established, having an abundance of resources to spend, which are mostly the major players of their fields and have reached global monopoly. Wayfair matched none of these criteria but tried to copy this model anyway, and it failed disastrously: It only had limited resources it could spend and it operated at big losses every year; it failed to establish a creative environment because it treated engineers as expendables. Without top-down planning, some teams literally picked up something they really shouldn't be doing, causing wastes of resources. Some OKRs were created not because they were important, but just for the sake of OKRs. The company did massive hiring before 2020 but it mismanaged its staff like this. No wonder why the business couldn't expand but was suffering with losses. - Political and back-stabbing culture Resources were very limited, but some incompetent managers were so eager to get promoted. What did they do? On one hand, they held unrealistic expectations for their subordinates, putting a lot of pressure on the team, but blaming them for not performing even though they worked 10-12 hours a day, only getting paid with a below-industry-average salary. On the other hand, they created an unhealthy competition between teams and back-stabbed each other. All of their time was 'managing above,' not 'managing down' – they spent little time with the team. They did not coach or did very little coaching, yet they put new hires into immediate use and let them make mistakes. - The career paths were jokes Especially for the tech track because it was not established at all. The only way up was the management track, but not everyone is capable or suitable of being a manager. Yet they wrongly promoted a lot of people to be managers, especially those who didn't have much experience but just being loyal to the company by staying for a long time right from graduating from school. Some of them were definitely not qualified at all. Like some engineer managers promoted from engineers – they might be great engineers, but managers require totally different skill sets, or even personalities. Good training might solve the problem, but it turned out some were not trained well to be good managers. - Very subjective performance evaluation By subjective, yes, I mean unfair. No matter what the team members evaluated you in your performance review, the final judge was the manager. Thus, it was used by the management and the company to manipulate and lay off employees. Also, since the evaluations were not data-based but opinion-based, your relationship with your manager would play a significant role in getting a better reviewing result. Besides that, with some very generic performance evaluation guidelines, it was very confusing in the first place what the expected behavior for each type of role should be. They evaluated everyone in the same framework, which meant they didn't respect different personalities, like being extrovert or introvert. It created a very exclusive environment which only welcomed certain types of personalities. Good managers put individuals to their best use by respecting their strengths and weaknesses. Bad managers simply get rid of people they don't like. - Very poor engineering practices. I was shocked when I first looked at the codebase, how many years of tech debt do we need to pay here? A monorepo is acceptable, but we were having a monolith! How many times did our code need to be rolled back because of some bugs introduced in the same bulk of deployment? Besides, many systems had scaling problems. Some important processes were throttled by DB performance. And it was strange that there was no established NoSQL service available within the company. There were so many problems, including the 'no lock' that was seen everywhere in the code, which could be solved by the introduction of some NoSQL databases. On top of those, engineers were not appreciated resources here. The CTO changed frequently, and they didn't have much tech experience either. There was no focus on paying the tech debt, but they still held on to the 'Move fast, fix later' company culture. Wayfair had long passed the stage of being a startup, and it should do more quality work than fast work. To sum up, Wayfair is definitely not a tech company.

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.