Wayfair

Fantastic benefits and compensation. Fun culture.

Seems to combine the worst parts of a large, established tech company and a startup, all to the end of assuaging an inferiority complex with Amazon. "A tech company that sells furniture" is one of their motto, which in practice means a lot of arbitrary use of in-house tech tools and resources misspent on developing proprietary tech the engineering department can't sufficiently support.

Poor communication channels exist between project managers and senior engineers. All assessments had to pass through a project manager with a non-tech background before reaching me. I never got to hear personally from senior engineers about my performance.

Let go after several months with no warning. Up to that point, I'd received no feedback indicating that my performance needed improvement. I was given no thorough explanation and no opportunity to speak to the engineers who made the final call.

Hard to recommend a company that treats its recent hires as being completely expendable and deserving of no due process.

Improve communication channels in the lab program.

Clarify expectations.

Encourage collaboration and test the ability of recruits to work as a team in the lab program.