Wayfair

Wayfair at its core is a tech company, which means that as an engineer, you get a lot of opportunities to explore different technologies as long as you can make a business case for it.

Man, where do I start?

First of all, upper management touts that they are transparent, but the truth is that that's just a facade to make you feel like this is a great place to work. But when things go bad, you'll be the last to know.

Last year, right before COVID hit, Wayfair decided to have a massive layoff because they weren't on track to hit their projected revenue growth (which is fair, since a company is a business that needs to hit goals and satisfy investors). What wasn't fair was how they handled the layoffs.

What they did was blindside everyone with an org-wide email sent at 9:59 AM to attend a meeting at 10:00 AM THE SAME DAY. In reality, there were two meetings: one for the people who were "safe" and another for the people who were let go. This created an uneasy and distrustful environment between employees and upper management.

People were obviously unhappy with how this was handled. When asked about how we could trust upper management moving forward when they did something so terrible, their answer was equally terrible: "If you don't trust us, then you shouldn't work here."

And if you think they only laid off people who were bad at their job, then I have some bad news for you. Many people who were incredibly good at their jobs, who had worked at Wayfair for many, many years and given their blood, sweat, and tears to the company, were laid off simply because Wayfair didn't see a need for their team anymore.

And how did Wayfair try to help these employees? By giving them two weeks' severance pay. This screams that the company has absolutely no loyalty to their employees and is willing to backstab you any time for their own benefit.

Advancing your career based on merit is an absolute joke here. It's purely dependent on whether your manager likes you and your tenure at the company.

You can give your all at work, but if your manager doesn't like you, then you'd have an easier time working with Elon Musk trying to figure out how to send people to Mars than advancing your career.

In my first year and a half here, I had led multiple projects, working off-hours and through the holidays, just to see people in the same position as me get promoted before they even began to run their first project, simply because I had nothing in common with my manager. He sold me short to the rest of the managers when review time came along.

I also had friends who worked 12-hour days, 6 days a week, and what did they get? A virtual pat on the back and a note that they would not be promoted for their hard work because they hadn't worked at the company long enough.

Oh great, thanks for letting us know our hard work was for nothing after we're burnt out and don't even have enough brain cells left to get angry.

The company is also trying way too hard. The entire time working here, the only things I heard was, "How do we beat Amazon in this?" "How do we beat Amazon in that?"

Like, chill. You aren't even the market leader in selling furniture. Why are you trying to compete with the largest company in the world? Relax and get more than 50% of your website working at a time before trying to compete with them.

Finally, the benefits are terrible. It's the barest of the bare minimum.

You want a competitive salary? Sure, but it'll be the absolute minimum of industry standard.

You want catered lunch? Sure, but you'll have to pay standard prices for food that's not even good.

Want stock options? Sure, but we'll give you just enough so that you can tell your friends that you get some and don't feel left out. Otherwise, they're absolutely worthless.

The only good benefit of working here is there are two ping pong tables in the entire building for 1000 people.

Oh wait, just kidding. You won't even have time to play because you have to spend all your time trying to beat Amazon. And if you somehow miraculously find the time to play, there are 80 other people waiting in line.

Treat your employees with respect, and stop trying so hard. Just focus on a few projects that are really important to the growth of the company, rather than doing all these random projects that make you sound cool so you can bait unknowing new graduates to work here.