Wayfair

Great people to work with.

Competitive salaries (for engineers, at least).

Solid middle-management (in my department).

Minimal opportunities for travel.

Only perks are mediocre snacks and free beer.

I've worked at Wayfair for more than a few years. In that time, I left to work at another company, a software company that was already public. I learned that while the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence, sometimes you get to the other side of the fence and find out that the grass has just been spray-painted green but is really not as nice as it was on your side.

Wayfair has faults, for sure. Some managers are worse than others, but some are pretty great. Some teams work on boring projects or are inundated with operational tasks. Some teams have worse work-life balances than others and are constantly being called in the middle of the night, sometimes because their systems are super critical, but sometimes because some teams just can't seem to build quality systems. Your experience here definitely varies from team to team, manager to manager, role to role, so take all these reviews with a grain of salt.

The one thing that's consistent across teams is how the company prioritizes spending. We used to get free t-shirts, the company would buy engineers pizza and bagels for Cyber Monday and SysAdmin Appreciation Day, and we'd get a tangible branded umbrella or duffel bag for Christmas. These days, there's a hard ban on company swag (unless you work for specific teams or belong to some kind of Employee Resource Group, apparently). You can't expense lunches or even order pizzas (the exception here is that we'll apparently buy lunch for people we're considering hiring; once you actually work here, though, no dice). The employee Christmas gifts disappeared years ago (the company now makes a series of donations to regional charities, nets itself a tax deduction, and calls it our Christmas gift).

If you don't drink alcohol, you might find yourself frustrated by the fact that you have to pay 50 cents to buy a soda, while the company spends ~$10,000 a week on beer kegs so employees can drink free beer. We won't spend money to efficiently mail MBTA passes to employees' home addresses, but we WILL have employees waste their time standing in long lines to pick them up in person (hope you don't have any PTO lined up for the end of the month).

Overall, it's a good company to work for, and I'm glad I'm here. Every company has its share of office politics and workplace drama, and a 15,000+ person furniture company is no exception.