Wayfair

Great engineers; some room for growth depending on the team. A good place to learn how to build apps that scale.

Free snacks and beer.

Overtly biased towards extroverts. If you know how to sell your work and yourself, then you will shine! If you don't, even if you contribute a ton, nobody cares.

Some of the organizational teams are incompetent to the core. For example, the hiring team forgot that I was joining on my join date. They haphazardly completed my onboarding and made multiple mistakes while filling in my job title, immigration status, and financial information. This gave me a really hard time later on because this blunder resulted in me having to pay back the IRS a huge sum later in the tax season. Not getting onboarded on time, I didn’t have my laptop with me for the whole of the first week and felt unproductive. The incorrect immigration data also gave me grief while I was setting up my brokerage account, which took months thanks to Wayfair’s onboarding team.

Open office is super noisy. So if you decide to work here, please invest in noise-canceling headphones, unless you are prepared to listen to how much someone enjoyed their avocado toast. I personally don’t care how much they enjoyed it.

Meetings, meetings, meetings. So many meetings!

Product management is not great! For example, many product managers do not know the first thing about the platform (which they should know). Some of them also happen to be fresh out of college. This being the case, engineers need to work extra hard to explain even simple things to them. Also, many of the bigger teams are poorly managed, and senior engineers are expected to fill in for deficiencies in management.

Hire PMs who know how things are supposed to work. There is a difference between a product manager and a project manager. A product manager needs to understand the product and must be familiar with the product’s platform at least on a high level.

Keep track of all the small things engineers do to make Wayfair great. This should be a hard requirement because often managers are spread thin across a lot of stuff, and they forget about the main thing: managing their team.