Software Engineer Interview Experience - Boston, Massachusetts
Process
This is for the Entry-Level Software Engineer role for the Wayfair Labs program.
I applied to Wayfair through an Employee Referral in the first week of January. I was contacted by a recruiter within 12-15 days, and the whole process took 2 weeks.
Phone Screen: The recruiter scheduled a brief call and asked about my experience, what I know about the company and their program. They might ask a couple of questions regarding your projects and how well you have worked in a team. Having PHP on your resume is a bonus as they work on that a lot.
Coding Challenge + Code Sample: The recruiter sent a CoderPad link with a question. You have to complete it within 60 minutes. The question is fairly easy. They will also ask you to send them a code sample. It can be any project you have worked on that can show your coding abilities (make sure it is modular, well-commented, and follows coding standards).
Technical Interview (60 minutes): Once an engineer reviews the coding challenge and your sample, the recruiter will schedule a phone interview with an engineer (60 minutes). You will work on the same CoderPad link as the coding challenge. The engineer will ask you about a couple of projects you have worked on. They will then ask you to explain your code from the challenge. Make sure you read it before the interview and analyze its time/space complexity, and consider if you could have approached it better. They will move on to a PHP question. They will provide a PHP code snippet and ask you to explain and debug it (mostly related to an edge case), and then try to determine its output. This part can be tricky because not everyone has extensive experience with PHP. However, you can ask for clarification on syntax you don't understand. This part checks your presence of mind. The last leg of the interview was a very easy array-based question. Try to offer a couple of alternative solutions and compare their time and space complexity.
Behavioral Round: After I cleared the technical interview, the recruiter scheduled a behavioral round of 30 minutes. The Wayfair Labs program manager will typically conduct this round and ask behavioral questions. They will focus on how you handle conflict or work with difficult people.
Final Call with the Recruiter: After the behavioral round, the recruiter scheduled a call within 2 days to provide an update on my candidacy.
Overall Experience: Very good. The recruiter was prompt. The interviewers made sure I was comfortable talking to them. They were looking for a conversation rather than a traditional interview.
Tips/Suggestions:
- Try to come up with alternative solutions to the problems you solve to give them a better understanding of how you think. Explain your solution clearly.
- Prepare your projects well and try to articulate what you learned from them.
- CULTURE FIT is something they really care about.
- Prepare good questions to ask them.
- Research the company thoroughly. Follow their tech blog and learn about their work culture from the engineers working there. They appreciate this during the interview.
Good Luck!!
Questions
PHP Question.
Explain the code, find bugs/correct them, and show what output it will generate.
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Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 68 interview experiences for the Wayfair Software Engineer role in Boston, Massachusetts.
Success Rate
Wayfair's interview process for their Software Engineer roles in Boston, Massachusetts is fairly selective, failing a large portion of engineers who go through it.
Experience Rating
Candidates reported having very good feelings for Wayfair's Software Engineer interview process in Boston, Massachusetts.
Wayfair Work Experiences
- 3.0A good place to start your careerSoftware Engineer • Former EmployeeBoston, Massachusetts, United StatesSeptember 7, 2022Pros: The bar is not extremely high; it's good for getting your feet wet.Cons: Engineering culture is not the strongest.
- 5.0Dinamically growing company, a lot of new opportunitiesSoftware Engineer • Current EmployeeBoston, Massachusetts, United StatesJuly 13, 2019Pros: Many opportunities to learn new things for newbies and career growth for experienced persons.Cons: Because of really fast growth, projects can be a little bit unstable. Sometimes you have to redo the same features because some requirements changed.
- 1.0Wouldn't recommend anyone to joinSoftware Engineer • Former EmployeeBoston, Massachusetts, United StatesSeptember 24, 2014Pros: Pay is actually pretty good if you're a more experienced hire. HR/management realizes that they need to jack up the pay scale if they want to attract the more tenured crowd. Good shares package for engineering (stock grants, not stock options, so might be actually worth something if the company goes public).Cons: I think as a recent trend, Wayfair actually offers a pretty good, or at least market compensation package with stock grants vested over time (which might be actually worth something, given the company has filed with the SEC for IPO) for experienced folks in engineering, but not for their college hires. Nonetheless, I'd still dissuade experienced folks from joining. Why? Your career stagnation and personal frustration won't be worth it. First, Wayfair skimps on holidays standard to other companies. So mark off at least 5 days off from your PTO package because you won't have MLK Day, President's Day, etc. Second, as other reviewers have said before, the technology stack at Wayfair is very outdated. Your day-to-day work, if assigned to the backend inventory teams, will be maintaining a lot of verbose and spaghetti-code stored procedures in MS-SQL and editing simple .net web services. Your day-to-day work, if assigned to Storefront, will be mostly fighting fires in a bloated PHP stack where most methods and libraries are written in procedural code, implementing marketing-driven tickets such as "adding a new copy-text" to this page or tracking some variable in A/B testing. Wayfair Engineering blog promotes itself as a place that uses cutting-edge technology such as Solr, machine-learning with Python, real-time task processing, etc. All of those work belong to the Search/Data Sciences team, a small team within Storefront. So unless you get hired into Data Sciences (Python, machine learning, distributed systems) or the Mobile Team (JS MVC frameworks, Objective-C), I'd stay away, as the rest of Storefront is plain procedural PHP from 2004. They have a very strict code review process where you have to get your code approved by a reviewer, sometimes multiple, if it involves, say, both PHP and Javascript. In practice, this means more refactoring of your code and tracking down people and going back and forth, as that process can go several rounds. There are no QA engineers, nor a suitable staging environment to support you and truly test your code in a quasi-production environment. So you are alone responsible for pushing out code and, for whatever reason, bugs happened, stuck fighting fires on the day of push, aka test-in-production, or worse, several days if issues occur intermittently. The project managers, in general, are foot soldiers in carrying out marketing and upper-management directives under the tyranny of agile methodology, and aren't vested with enough power to push back or do any true shielding for engineers on their team. You can read more into the actual cultural and management style of the company in the other reviews, which I can confirm as well (basically, the culture attracts the type of people who enjoy the HBO show Silicon Valley but don't understand the irony behind it and think it's actually cool). But I want to give a day-to-day account of the actual coding experience at Wayfair, which is extremely frustrating. I'd advise job candidates to consider how much they'd like to work in a procedural PHP or exclusively with MS-SQL stored procedures.
Wayfair Interview Questions
