Wayfair reviews

3.1

38% would recommend to a friend

(6,875 total reviews)
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Niraj Shah

28% approve of CEO

27% positive business outlook

Wayfair has an employee rating of 3.1 out of 5 stars, based on 6,875 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Wayfair employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Retail & Wholesale industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

7K reviews
2.0
Sep 10, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Work-life balance is decent. Hours are flexible and people can easily work from home if they can't make it into the office for any reason. Projects are reasonable and seldom require extra hours. There is an engineering on-call rotation so people are only contacted off-hours when it's their turn. Coworkers are cool and fun to be around. The overall quality of the engineering staff is improving and this is driving a shift toward better practices and tools. The company offers significant equity to engineers, which may or may not turn out to be worth a lot after it goes public. If you love purple, this is the place for you.

Cons

Wayfair's ecommerce engine is a hard-to-maintain agglomeration of half-baked features stuck together with chewing gum. Code quality is pretty bad and there are no department-wide initiatives to improve it. The focus is on adding new features as fast as possible, the goal often being to make the site look and work like Amazon (this is openly admitted). In general minimal time is alloted for improving architecture and performance until things get so bad it's an emergency. Churning out code like this worked great when Wayfair was tiny but the company is now large and complex enough that the legacy codebase has become an impediment to progress, and management's attitude towards software engineering is an impediment to improving the codebase. Many top people do not have formal training in software management and/or have only ever worked at Wayfair and are not acquainted with modern practices in the field. They are perfectly nice and well-intentioned but don't "get" how to build great software. So, as a Wayfair software engineer you will work with bright, creative coders all working on the dull task of fixing your predecessors' follies, or rushing to hack together new features with little planning, against your better judgment, because yes, this has to go out tomorrow. Add to that continual production breakage and you'll see that doing this kind of interruption-driven development month after month gets pretty frustrating. Did I mention salaries are below industry standards? Also, free cookies and Doritos do not count as awesome perks.

2.0
May 1, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Smart people who are sympathetic to the conditions, a really great manager (for my last few months), nice opportunities for team bonding if you have a team who will consider spending pod outing money for something other than getting smashed.

Cons

Pay. Pay. Pay. And to everyone reviewing saying that something will be done about the dismal paycheck prospects soon, you must be new to the company or have been hit in the head by a fake Herman Miller chair. This is their business model. They keep the people who have drank the Kool Aid, and the rest are replaceable as needed. No one cares about you or your work, and if you work hard you'll get nowhere, if you don't you'll get nowhere.

4.0
Aug 11, 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Culture - I think the company culture and the people here at Wayfair are hard to rival. The office is a very fun, supportive and collaborative place. Employees are generally young and open to making new friends. I look forward to seeing my coworkers every weekday and often on weekends. Responsibility - I was impressed by the amount of responsibility I was given immediately upon joining the company as a recent grad with essentially no work experience and no background in marketing. Though nerve-wracking at times, the amount of ownership you're given over your segment of the business provides for a great experience. It makes the work more engaging and gives you the opportunity to make decisions that will have a lasting impact on the company, especially during these early-mid stages. Emphasis on making data-driven decisions - By relying so heavily on quantitative analysis, the company opens itself up to contributions from people at all levels. Lack of experience and lack of tenure are not barriers to success. Rather, good ideas can come from anywhere so long as there's empirical support behind them.

Cons

Compensation - Base salaries are uncompetitive relative to those for similar positions at other companies. Unclear career progression - While the open-endedness of the Wayfair career path can be exciting at times, it can also be quite frustrating and anxiety-inducing. Given the company's fast growth and rapid headcount expansion, there are many people in roles that have not existed for long enough to have had someone else graduate from them. There are, therefore, many people whose next step is undefined. Management has done a poor job of giving employees, particularly in those positions, a sense of how and to where they can progress. After a while of being at Wayfair, it seems as though you're just expected to have faith that you'll be promoted to do something that you'll be interested in doing, though there's no model to look to in order to see how that works or when you can expect it. Lack of recognition - The company operates under the mantra "We're never done', which is great for productivity and growth, but which can also take a toll on moral. I find that Wayfair doesn't always do a good job of stopping to appreciate success or individuals' contributions.

Viewing 541 - 543 of 6,875 Reviews

Glassdoor has 7,899 Wayfair reviews submitted anonymously by Wayfair employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Wayfair is right for you.