Analyst - Anonymous employee Wayfair Employee Review

2.0
19 Apr 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

(1) Awesome people - my manager was friendly and brilliant. My manager taught me a ton about business and understanding business data. My co-workers, with few exceptions, were extremely smart and helpful. How Wayfair got these awesome people is a bit of a mystery considering con number 1. (2) Great learning experience, especially for data analysis. If you're working in any of the analysis positions (marketing, data science, pricing, planning, business intelligence), you're going to learn a ton of SQL. That's a ridiculously useful skill across many industries, because just about every companies uses a relational database to store data. You'll also learn some Excel, which is often quite useful as well. Biggest pro for me: I landed my current gig because of what I learned at Wayfair.

Cons

(1) Low pay. As pretty much every review here says, the pay is awful. Don't expect it to increase anytime soon. That's because the company operates in online retail, which has notoriously bad margins especially in non-luxury categories. Since Wayfair is already bleeding cash from online ad spend (which anyone can see from the 10-K, now that the company is public), the company needs to keep costs down. Even if Wayfair eventually achieves household name recognition, their low margins aren't going to mean big increases in your paycheck (2) Ancient technology. Internal systems routinely break. When they're not broken, they're taking an eternity to load. This can make doing your job very difficult. The engineers work like mad to get things fixed, but there's only so much they can do when they have to deal with con # 3 (3) Turnover. Unsurprisingly, low pay across the board means people leave Wayfair quickly. (4) Limited ability to fix technical problems. Maybe this is true of all large corporations (which Wayfair has been for at least the last couple years), but your access rights are going to be restricted. So if you figure out Excel and SQL and need to do a little, say, Python to automate some aspect of your job, you won't be allowed to except for a handful of teams. Get used to lots of manual clicking and lots of frustration with your computer.

Explore other reviews about Wayfair

5.0
16 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Extremely bright and talented colleagues, and supportive managers - Highly supportive of internal mobility - Incredible learning opportunities - you get much bigger scope at Wayfair than you would at other companies at the same level (this is true from entry level all the way up), and a lot of autonomy to drive meaningful progress and make an impact

Cons

-Required 4 days in office

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.

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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.
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