Relaxed Environment, but hardworking - Business Intelligence Analyst Wayfair Employee Review

5.0
Jul 28, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Company does a really good job of getting entry level employees (like me) invested in the business' health and profitability. Data about daily/hourly/etc revenue is available to nearly everyone so you can see how the business is doing on a day-to-day basis. This helps put more meaning into your work and feel more invested in it - Office is great (good location near lots of food, snack walls everywhere around the office) - It has a good tech company culture. A little bit of the east coast vibe is built into it though. The dress code is relaxed, but they do expressly forbid things like basketball shorts, so not quite like working at a silicon valley tech company - Lots of cross team communication. My team gets fairly regular presentations from other teams around the business (from pricing to marketing to supply chain to finance) about what they're working on and how they approach problems they have. These are really cool because you get to learn about and get exposure to areas of the business you otherwise wouldn't know anything about. It also helps keep you in tune with how the business is doing as a whole and what areas they're trying to grow - It's fairly easy to move around from team to team in the company so you don't get bored working on the same thing for years at a time. If you like what you're doing they don't force you to move, but they also have a philosophy of 'people get bored working on things for too long, so we'd rather move them around within Wayfair than have them leave'. Does a really good job of keeping things fresh and exciting - Monthly and quarterly team meetings with various levels of senior management provide really good opportunities to ask frank and tough questions (anonymously if you'd like) to senior management

Cons

- The onboarding process for people in BI can take a long time and be a bit unstructured. They make you take 6 weeks worth of "courses", a handful of which are incredibly helpful, but the majority of which are either a waste of time (going over very basic SQL when I'm almost sure everyone who gets hired into BI must know at least some SQL already) or poorly done. These also get spaced out over 6 weeks so you have to be really proactive in finding things to keep yourself busy in that time period even though they haven't taught you things you really need to know in order to do your job yet (like their internal data visualization tool which people use frequently but doesn't get taught to you until your 6th week) - Hours are a bit longer than 40/wk. I think this varies by team a lot, but everybody on my team is working closer to 45-50 hrs/wk. - They're hiring at such a crazy pace that I wonder how they could possibly navigate a macroeconomic downturn like a recession without having to lay off hundreds of people. The CEO is on the Boston Federal Reserve Board so he is obviously in tune with macroeconomic trends to some extent, but at the end of the day the company isn't profitable yet and if a recession comes the furniture business is going to be one of the first and hardest hit

Explore other reviews about Wayfair

5.0
Jul 9, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good people to work with

Cons

leadership was not organized and business model keeps changing

5.0
May 12, 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