Wayfair

Some genuinely nice coworkers and smart people.

Depending on the team, good work/life balance.

Depending on the team, a lot of autonomy.

Engineering leadership is absolutely inept.

Many engineering leaders don't have strong technical backgrounds, or they have been so far removed for so long that they don't really know what they're doing. They make all the decisions without technical knowledge, and it trickles down to the rest of the department.

The CTO was brought on this year and has a very impressive resume, but change has been slow to nonexistent.

People get promoted to leadership positions not based on merit, but by tenure. Ongoing politics is really harming engineering as a whole, and the quality of the products is decreasing every day.

The compensation is below average compared to other tech companies. Wayfair claims to be a competitor to the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley, but having only an office in Boston and paying well below what big tech pays means they cannot recruit quality engineers.

The only reason I was okay with my compensation this year was because the stock price soared, but we all know that's not going to last after the pandemic ends.

If Wayfair wants to grow and be respected as a true tech company, then it needs to increase compensation to its senior engineers and look to open a location with better candidates. The CEO is against working remotely, so that discourages people from applying if they're outside of Boston.

If you want Wayfair to compete with Amazon and other big tech companies, then it's time to invest more into engineering and start paying what other companies are paying.

The old tech stack needs to go, and you need to get some capable leaders to make technical decisions.

If Wayfair wants to grow, you need to allow remote work, either permanently or the majority of the time.

Restricting yourself to Boston's pool of engineers is really limiting the engineering and product departments.