Vantaggi
The people. There are some truly great and brilliant souls across all departments (but especially engineering). God bless them for sticking it out as long as they have. I hope their efforts prove enough to keep the ship from sinking. I truly wish them and Wayfair the best, as I still love Wayfair as a user. Even after my bad experience as an employee I will always be a loyal customer. I sincerely hope they somehow manage to pull through these tough times, because it is a great idea with massive value add for consumers. This also plays into my frustrations as an ex-insider, because I see them headed down that path and feel completely helpless to stop it.
Svantaggi
Wow, where to even begin? When I first arrived at Wayfair, I was hopeful that it would be a great place to grow my career for many years in the future. With that in mind, any possible notes of bitterness peppering this review arise solely out of the fact that I came to this company with high hopes, only to have them repeatedly crushed into an unintelligible pulp by the heels of myopically incompetent leadership. The almost comical if it weren't so tragic (tragicomic?) short-sightedness is perfectly portrayed in how they offered everyone hefty *retention* bonuses in October 2019, only to conduct mass layoffs a few months later. They can’t seem to throw company money away fast enough! The painfully quixotic ‘powers that be’ preach an "every idea wins" culture, but that is the complete opposite of how it actually happens. Instead, L3 managers enforce the capriciously formulated whims of upper-level management on their team, and if anyone (even an IC on the same level) dares to push back on them, they are reprimanded for it in 1:1s and even performance reviews. It was particularly difficult to have no say whatsoever over the nonsensically awful decisions made by leadership during the hiring freezes. They actually raised the onsite interview goal by two per month. It would have been a complete nightmare if the teams had actually hit 10 onsite interviews each, since Wayfair would not have even been able to make offers to a single one of those candidates. The amount of time and money wasted on 5+ hour interviews with multiple Directors, Managers, etc making $100.00+ per hour would have exceeded the measly two weeks of severance that Wayfair paid out to most of its layoffs ten-fold. Yet, not a single one of the L4+ decision makers behind that terrible plan got touched by the layoffs. Instead, the ‘powers that be’ chose to focus on the lower level employees who were actually putting in their blood, sweat, and tears to make a positive impact on the company. It’s truly no wonder why the stock continues to tank deeper and deeper with each day... Clearly, blood, sweat and tears is not the way to get ahead at Wayfair. In my old department at least, it’s pretty much par for the course for top performers to exceed metrics and still get passed over for a promotion, while people who master the art of ingratiating themselves to the right people get promoted instead. Sadly, that seems to be the only way to advance in Wayfair’s toxic culture these days: lose your own voice and identity in order to become a "yes man" mouthpiece for the L3 and L4 Managers who will be vouching for you in the brutally toxic (to the point of being illegal, I have heard) calibration meetings come review time. Beyond that, be sure that you are working on multiple “projects” at any given time, bonus points given for increasing process and chaos with zero value add.
