Unhappiest time of my life - Senior Engineer Wayfair Employee Review

1.0
13 Jan 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Can't really think of any.

Cons

As a senior engineer, you are expected to work under very rigid (and dare I say extremely questionable) coding guidelines. If you wanted people to follow something like that, hire contractors. Senior folks are going to have opinions! The culture that this creates is that it is extremely hard to care. What else do you expect when you are forcing a senior engineer to do something against their gut on a daily basis? I care about the company that I work for and its products so this lead to a lot of internal conflicts for me. I was so depressed! Leaving Wayfair was the best thing that has happened to me! Who likes it here are people fresh out of colleague or those without any experience outside of Wayfair. Or if you like to keep your head down. Code review process is extremely frustrating to the point that once you are done with (multi-level!!!) approvals, you can hardly recognize your own code! Oh yeah, that process can take WEEKS. That's right - weeks. Bugs? You betcha! For a (storefront) codebase that is a hot mess, so much red-tape is comically surprising. But then again, with the horrible, logic-defying coding standards, what else do you expect? Here's a funny story: some random developer asks about adding a linter rule for comma dangle. Gets implemented immediately. Apparently the benefit is "cleaner diffs". Except that nobody bothered to get the whole codebase up to date with that rule update so hundreds of developers saw comma diffs for months for every file that they touch!! I mean, really? This isn't some high-school project. Despite of being extremely rigid on how development should be done, onboarding is useless. You will hear about random corporate crap. Oh, did I mention that part of WF's culture is to reinvent the wheel. Custom everything! Because why industry standards, right? They have something called "Labs" where they teach interns and fresh out of college folks about the codebase. Those poor souls are then scared for life because they probably think that spaghetti code is what development is all about... Remote employees? Don't even. It's a pilot program in which nobody actually thought about how it is going to work. They instead expect remote employees to actually take charge of driving that culture. If you ever worked in a distributed environment you will know that the pilot program set up this way is a huge waste of money and everyone's time. By far the worst position I've ever had. Extremely high turn-over shows it. Don't even think about it. Run away! Seriously. No matter how good the pay is. Money isn't everything if you are going to be hating your job and yourself every day.

Explore other reviews about Wayfair

5.0
6 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Smart colleagues tackling interesting, business relevant problems.

Cons

Long-term projects sometimes significantly modified in response to short-term business needs.

5.0
12 May 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Wayfair is a fantastic company if you're a software engineer who's looking to keep quiet, and not speak up when management treats you like garbage. And it excels at finding leaders who are willing to go the extra mile to be untrustworthy and make you feel like your job isn't safe (and for real, it's not).

Cons

Let's talk. The company has been growing like crazy, and one thing that was never thought about was "can we actually hire at a sustainable rate, and scale accordingly?" The answer was no on both counts. Software engineers at Wayfair have a history of disappearing. People who enter labs have an especially low success rate (70% make it through, and less than 50% last a whole year). It's basically their way to run people through a burnout gauntlet, and see who survives. And then you have the stories of the people who come in to work and are just asked to resign. You'll see hints of it here on Glassdoor if you dig, and it's even worse than what you read. They actually gathered all the engineers for a big meeting at the beginning of this year. And they said that they were sorry that people felt scared and were sad that people felt like management didn't care. Which is exactly how we felt. They promised that their door was open, and they were going to work hard to set things right. One person out of 500 stood up and asked a really cutting question. AND THEN THEY FIRED HIM! And there were 3 completely different official reasons given about it. It's crazy. The leaders also started up an engineering meeting to keep everyone on the same page and answer anonymous questions. One time someone asked why we couldn't get snow days off, because it was tough to shovel for 3 to 4 hours and still work an 8 hour day. So the leaders proceeded to talk down to us and reprimand us for even thinking about asking a question like this. Turnover has been high over the past year, and the best people are leaving. This worries management, but they still have no idea that the problem is actually them creating a terrible environment. So if you're a good person who cares about the person next to you and leaving things better than you found them, don't bother applying here. But if you're not, and you just want to keep your head down and not question anything, then this is the perfect place for you. And if that's what you want, Wayfair gets 5 stars. Amazing career opportunities if you want to have the same job forever. Incredible senior management that value untrustworthiness. A fantastic culture of watching people next to you disappear. It's truly a perfect company.

915
avatar
Wayfair Response
8y
First, I wanted to thank you for providing feedback. Second, I am very sorry to hear that your experience was far from ideal. I know it can be hard to give feedback if you feel management is the problem, but leadership would love to learn about these issues to refine the Wayfair employee experience. We do try to create an open and transparent environment; one thing we’ve started doing is department-wide anonymous surveys. This has been helpful in identifying issues where people don’t feel comfortable speaking up for whatever reason and pinpoint where any issues may exist. As you noted, the company is growing very quickly - our Engineering team alone has grown tenfold over the past five years. I won’t pretend we get it right all the time, but we do aim to scale our teams and our systems reasonably to meet the rapid growth of our business, and we rely on employee feedback to refine these processes. To that end, we’ve put a lot of time and energy into our interview process. And, we closely track our voluntary and involuntary attrition rates to make sure we are keeping high employee retention and so that we can immediately nip any potential issues in the bud. For Wayfair Labs, we’ve made huge strides since the beginning of this program, and our average success rate is now over 90%, with several classes at 100%. We also run management trainings on giving, receiving and soliciting feedback. In these trainings - and in general - we encourage respect for all teammates and partners, communication and collaboration, and we try create opportunities for people to take on new challenges. I am very excited about the work we’re doing to solve tough challenges and there’s an exciting opportunity for our employees to do big things – our goal is to build a team that feels encouraged and empowered to do so. I’m very sorry you didn’t have the experience we try to cultivate. Once again, thank you for this feedback.
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All