Wayfair

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

• 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.

Get rid of the useless mid-tier managers. They didn't create any value but instead increased intransparency within the company.

Think about the existing business model. Can the company continue to expand without getting into more small parcel business?

Focus more on engineering, since it has been lagging behind for so many years. It's a bottleneck for the growth of the business.

Stop weaponizing performance reviews and treat your employees like people!