Wayfair reviews

3.1

39% would recommend to a friend

(6,849 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 6,849 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
1.0
Aug 21, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Beer on tap, fruit in the office, 401k is pretty good

Cons

Talent at Wayfair is a very toxic environment. They have created a place they seems like agency recruiting without the commission: highly competitive, individually oriented, destructive, long hours, and a difficult grind. They sell the exact opposite to everyone coming in. They talk about their "high bar" yet continue to promote incompetent managers who are better at playing politics than managing people. Their promotional track is inconsistent and goes against the "data driven" environment they constantly talk about. Employees not only lack insight into the review and promotion cycle, it is overly confusing and complicated. They measure you on how you are calibrated against the performance of your level and promotions are based on how you perform against the next level (and if you are ALREADY doing that work). Except you have no insight into the performance of anyone at your level or the level above you. Talent is hemorrhaging employees and leadership doesn't seem to care. At least not enough to want to make major changes. Wayfair doesn't do change well. They talk a big game about being an environment that "changes fast" but when it comes down to it, change happens slow and incrementally. Also: for a tech company, they are TERRIBLE at technology. They have somewhat started to learn they shouldn't build it themselves. It took them a while. Yet even when they know something is coming and have the time to roll it out, they still mess it up. They rolled out their Gmail migration and all the conference rooms were down for 3 days for booking. They continue to have difficulty booking rooms and things are often double booked. You think a company that has recruiters preach to people that they are an "$8 billion company" would be able to figure something like that out. I could go on. But mostly it's: poor management, high turnover, a terrible promotion system, and unrealistic expectations.

1.0
May 23, 2018

Poor management is destroying product design.

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I learned a lot here. The people you work alongside are smart, talented, kind, and driven. There is a lot of structure and process in place for a young designer to get trained up quickly. You'll definitely see your work making an immediate impact on the business. Great work/life balance.

Cons

Senior management has created a psychologically unsafe working environment. There has been significant personnel loss to the design team. Despite repeated and continuous complaints and ideas for solutions from current and former employees, senior leadership appears to show no signs of acknowledging or addressing the massive retention problem and the problematic speech and policies that come from the top down. Senior leadership is content to wait for seasoned employees to leave by treating them in increasingly hostile ways, and then replace those folks with outside hires. Expect the goal posts to be moved many, many times over the course of your career. There is no way to tell if your performance will result in success or failure, as decisions to let folks go seem to be made on a whim and never communicated to the rest of the team. Don't expect open lines of communication or any sort of transparency from leadership. Expect to be ground down, and replaced once you're exhausted. Especially if you're a member of a marginalized group -- prepare yourself to withstand improper treatment. You will receive zero support from HR. The company is convinced that because they have a "no egos" hiring credo, that implementing actual policy is unnecessary. Unless you're a director-level person ready to put in the time and effort to turn this culture around, or you're someone who's content to put their head down and pump out mocks, understand that you're walking into an environment where the gossip mill is spinning out of control and morale is at an all-time low. Besides, any other comparable tech company in the area pays 30-50% more than the base salary you will receive here.

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Wayfair Response
8y
Thank you for sharing your feedback and I'm very sorry that you feel this way. While your experience does not align with the type of environment we try to cultivate here at Wayfair, I can say that our product design team is maturing as it goes through a hyper-growth phase. As the company scales, we have developed new roles and responsibilities for the design team, raising the bar for what's expected as we become better partners to our product and engineer counterparts. We always aim to create an environment that is open and transparent and we encourage feedback from all employees. We are sincerely taking your feedback into consideration as we further evolve the team and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow.
2.0
Apr 17, 2019

Disorganized Mess

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good work - life balance Work from home flexibility Some great people on the team Beer and snacks in the office Employee discount

Cons

There is a reason that there aren't many women in engineering at Wayfair. Females are regularly passed over for awards and recognition for the work they do, with male coworkers often given credit when they may have only had a peripheral involvement, if any at all. Other people getting credit for your work is pretty common place, as I just watched in a meeting knowing someone else did the *entirety* of the work and some new hire that just put a file in place got credit for it. Some groups are hostile to females, ignoring them in meetings and only listening when male members of the group repeat verbatim what the woman just said. During promotion season, they promote and give raises to people who take credit for other people's work while not recognizing the people who actually are doing the work. When the workhorses leave because they are rightfully angry, nobody takes over what they were working on or maintaining, leaving things in shambles. This makes the tech stack frequently end up in a state where people have to scramble to upgrade or fix the software in use, as people are forced into fixing it. They just obliterated the entire SRE organization with a re-org just before a big event, leaving that entire team wondering what they should and shouldn't be working on, saying they'd fix it after the event. After said event, many still do not know what they should be working on, who they report to, or what organization branch they're in. People are angry and some are looking for new jobs. SRE was frequently blamed for "blocking" things by the software engineers. The truth was that when they were tasked with the "janitorial" things the SWEs didn't want to work on, they were reliant on other groups who ignored their ticket queues or caused other time sinks out of SRE's control. Because upper management doesn't actually figure out the root causes for issues, they just took the SWEs word for it, and now we're in this disasterscape. Nobody wants people to pay down tech debt, and if you try you are dinged during your performance review for it. You are also penalized during review time for doing things like code reviews that allow other people to move forward doing deploys, so nobody will do them unless hounded. There are programs like "horizontal mentoring" in place in lieu of doing formal training with vendors, as the company seems unwilling to pay for it. The internal training resources are outdated, not actually useful, limited in scope and sometimes flat out wrong. On boarding is terrible. People are thrown in and told "just read the code, it will tell you everything" which is lazy speak for "I don't want to write documentation." When you ask questions, you get dinged in your performance review for it.

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