Wayfair

Teams and working conditions at Wayfair are widely different. If you're lucky, you can be on a team where there is good work, innovation, and good team culture. This really depends on the team members and the manager. Wayfair also restructures all the time, so this won't last long.

Salaries are above average, especially because of the stock options and bonus they provide.

Office is in a central location, brand new, and has lots of benefits in the office.

Really too much bureaucracy, too much politics in the office.

Company does not measure success or keep senior-level management accountable. So somebody or a team would be working on something that is really useless but can get promoted easily. Little after, you would see that the upper management suddenly decides to shut down that team. It does not make sense at all.

In the Berlin office, there is no vision. Lots of leaders quit recently, and they were really useless. They did not do anything rather than going into endless and purposeless meetings.

Wayfair is an old engineering company. When they were already big, Jira, GitHub, etc., did not exist. So they are used to reinventing the wheel. This culture is slowly changing, but it is really slow. The backend codebase is a monolith PHP app. It is really hard to decouple and practice good engineering practices. Even with brand-new projects, they don't go for third-party systems but try to build themselves. This process, of course, takes years. And as mentioned above, they shut down projects even before they finish.

Berlin Management needs a clear vision, which must be transparently communicated to every single employee.

Keep your senior managers accountable by demanding concrete business value and cost optimization every quarter.