Pros
- The people really make this place. Everyone's very dedicated to learning and career development, and because Wayfair is growing so a absurdly fast, the corporate ladder is easier to climb and move around. In just 5-6 months, my manager listened to me speak about what I'd like to be focused on, and I moved to a team that fit my interests. -Lots of young people. Great for learning the tricks of the trade as a fledgling artist. L2 management isn't much older than 25-30 in many cases, and they know what they're doing. -Work/life balance is great! After a couple of months of getting used to the work, it's perfectly reasonable to expect to leave by 5:00 most days (unless you're on a special project or in Labs). -Open office format. Things feel very horizontal and everybody is fairly approachable, there's no "separation of management" in any case. -Diversity is fairly decent, gender diversity is good especially with a decent amount of women in artist/stylist and leading roles. -Free beer and cider on rotation, AWESOME company parties, and a cool game room with ping pong and Xbox.
Cons
-The work and associated standards are pretty hard relative to the pay. 45K is fairly low for a 3D artist's salary, and the introductory 42K for Labs artists is a turn-off and insult for many. Senior management expects a quality of work akin to an Apple product artist, at about half the pay, in the city of Boston. I know of several good potential artists who immediately looked elsewhere for work. It's a very regular complaint in Imagery--my manager even told me that sometimes it isn't worth going up the ladder because your pay doesn't increase enough. If they don't work soon to resolve this, it's going to become a problem. -Management needs to improve on how regularly it distributes feedback. A couple of times in the Labs program, we went from "doing fine, no complaints" to "fix the million and one problems that we didn't mention before." This led to a few skilled, developing artists being dumped while other artists in the company who regularly under-perform get off scott-free. -At times, the company can be very slow moving. I've been working on a terrible computer rig for nearly 6 months, but am still expected to hit the same weekly goals as everyone else.
