Wayfair

The only actual pro to Wayfair is that it pays very well for the Boston market, particularly for PMs and generic front-end / back-end engineers.

A "pro" is that if you're a decent engineer, your work/life balance will be fairly good because you won't have to do much to keep up with the mediocre engineers that are left at Wayfair.

Oh boy, where to start. Wayfair could be a case study in how to crush company morale and force out talent.

To start, go look at Wayfair's stock price. You'll see it track the pandemic boom/bust very neatly. Basically, Wayfair doubled its corporate staff during the pandemic, only to immediately realize that was a huge mistake as sales fell. What's worse is that Wayfair decided to start offering near-FAANG-level wages, particularly for PMs and staff engineers/senior EMs.

Now, many tech companies over-hired, but the issue is how Wayfair handled it. Instead of pulling the band-aid and having a single, large layoff, Wayfair has had 3 layoffs in less than 18 months. Unfortunately, these layoffs have been more or less at random. Each one has happened before performance reviews, and I know personally several people with perfect reviews who were let go. To make things even more volatile, Wayfair has been running "Flash Fire Fridays," where each business unit seems to arbitrarily lay off staff every Friday.

If this wasn't bad enough, Wayfair redid its comp and promotions. When I joined, roughly 20% of the entire corporate staff was Associate Director (basically M2) and up. That's...insane. Clearly, that wasn't sustainable, so roughly 50-70% of those folks have been fired.

However, to keep costs down, Wayfair has basically stopped promotions to that level. And, as an added "bonus," the raises are now dramatically capped. If you get a perfect rating but are near the top of your salary band? Congrats, you might get a 4% raise (nominal, not real). Slack off and barely do the minimum? Congrats! You get a 2% raise. Oh, and keep in mind that despite leadership's repeated lies, the performance ratings are absolutely scaled to a curve, so there are only so many "good ratings" to go around. I personally had to "down-level" my direct reports a level or two based on my boss' demands.

The bottom line is that anyone talented with options is scrambling for the exits. The only folks that are left are:

• Those folks on visa who can't leave
• The folks who are so dramatically overpaid that anywhere else is a 40-50% pay cut (i.e., most of the product managers)
• The people who have "quiet quit" and are in at 10 am and leave at ~3:30 pm

Keep in mind that the business outlook for Wayfair is...challenging, to say the least. Most significant business initiatives launched in the past ~4 years are struggling. And the ~$3.5B in debt taken on to support these initiatives has to be painfully refinanced over the next few years.

The fundamental issue is that consumers are incredibly price-sensitive, and Wayfair sells the same cheap crap that Amazon, Ikea, Temu, etc., all sell. And unlike those other businesses, Wayfair doesn't have a high-margin business to offset the modest margins of e-commerce.

If you're financially secure and just want to join a company to completely coast, Wayfair isn't a bad option. Depending on how interest rates move, you may even catch a short-term stock bump.

Just keep in mind you'll work with mediocre talent at a company that may fire you randomly every Friday.

Sell the company to a PE firm, let them fire most of the staff, and let people move on with their lives.

This is a classic example of Schumpeter's creative destruction.

Wayfair is a heavily indebted, mediocre e-commerce vendor with no competitive moat that will likely be crushed by some combination of Temu, other Chinese vendors, Ikea, and Amazon.