Pros
Many of the negative reviews about Wayfair on Glassdoor seem to be coming from employees who don't properly understand the context of what Wayfair is, how it operates, why it operates that way, and the recipe for our out-sized success. I think some of the complaints are legitimate with interesting suggestions for how the firm can improve systems, but many of the reviews appear to come from a place of misunderstanding and confusion more than anything. Wayfair is a remarkable firm with a bright future, and it is an excellent place to develop a career and build a personal life. I will share some context and observations for your consideration.
We are one of the largest and fastest growing eCommerce companies in the world. At the time of writing this (January 2019), we are generating ~$7B in revenue and that is growing ~40% a year. That is ~$2.8B in growth in one year. That is an outrageous degree of growth at this scale that puts us in a peer group with companies such as Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. To continue to support and fuel this growth, we need to hire, on-board, and deploy an enormous number of people who are very talented at what they do. Just several years ago, Wayfair had ~1K employees largely in the USA. Today, we have ~11K people globally. We will likely ~double our employee base again in the next ~4.5 years.
The phase of our development as a firm is commonly called "blitzscaling" which is a term coined by Reid Hoffman the founder of Linked In and venture capitalist at Greylock. He wrote a book called "blitzscaling" and it's a relevant read to prep yourself for a career at Wayfair or any of the leading technology firms. In short the idea is that blitzscaling is a growth strategy that intentionally prioritizes speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty. During the blitzscaling period, let's be very honest: things do get messy because a lot of critical things need to happen very fast and not every decision is optimal, but on the whole most things work themselves out over time as we learn and improve. This is an intentional strategy with known trade-offs.
When a company blitzscales, it requires that we hire people who are (1) very independent (2) highly adaptable and creative problem solvers (3) tolerant of ambiguity and shifting goals and (4) very analytical and methodical thinkers. In my experience working here, the people that are all of those 4 things, love it. And the people who don't quite embody those 4 qualities have more challenges. And, I believe many of the critiques about Wayfair that exist online are coming from folks who don't understand the elements of blitzscaling. And, for the people who love it, the opposite is true. They grok the blitzscaling strategy and they are down to contribute to this unique approach to growth.
The work culture here is unusually fast paced, and the people are extraordinarily bright in their domains of responsibility. I can only speak for myself, but I learn something new everyday just in the normal cadence of working here and interacting with the people. Now that is true at a lot of great companies, but one factor that strongly differentiates Wayfair is that the people here are very nice and the culture expects people to be respectful and collaborative, and not demonstrating those behaviors is career limiting at Wayfair. From what I hear that is not true at many other elite firms.
Another dimension that really differentiates Wayfair from other high performance cultures is that working here does not consume the majority of your attention and energy the way other leading tech firms (Amazon, Facebook) or professional service firms (McKinsey, Goldman Sachs) often do. You can have a successful and engaging career here doing meaningful work and you can also explore your personal interests and relationships. As you work here and make friends and chat with people, you'll always find out peculiar things about your coworkers/friends (like Jessica is a singer in a David Bowie cover band, or Michael is a competitive cross country skier, etc. ) People here are eclectic, eager to learn, and fun.
Overall, I think this company offers a great balance of interesting career challenges, career trajectory, personal development, and space to build the personal dimensions of your life in a way that I think other firms really struggle to balance. It's also a very strong company with a strong growth trajectory, so you will not be making a mistake to make a big bet with your career by going in with the Wayfair team.
I hope you found this helpful! Good luck!
Cons
For most roles, the compensation approach here blends, a cash salary, an annual cash bonus, and RSU equity shares that vest on a quarterly basis with a one year cliff.
Many employees or prospective employees have a hard time understanding how to value the company and how to value the equity grant and don't properly price in the upside. So optically, many people feel the compensation is low because often the cash portion is sometimes lower than the cash they earned in a prior job or may be lower than the cash component of other job offers they have. However, if you understand how to properly value the Wayfair equity, what you'll often find is that it is quite competitive.
This is the type of company you want to make a 4-5 year bet on. For people who do that they are often very happy with compensation as there are (1) many promotion opportunities and (2) the equity growth story is a very strong one. And, the longer you work here and the better you understand our market, business, and positioning the more confident you will be in the company.
