Pros
- Pay is actually pretty good if you're a more experienced hire (as HR/management realizes that they need to jack up the payscale if they want to attract the more tenured crowd) - Good shares package for engineering (stock grants, not stock options so might be actually worth something if company does go public)
Cons
I think as a recent trend Wayfair actually offers a pretty good or at least market compensation package with stock grants vested over a time (which might be actually worth something given the company has filed with the SEC for IPO) for experienced folks in engineering, but not for their college hires. Nonetheless, I'd still dissuade experienced folks from joining. Why? Your career stagnation and personal frustration won't be worth it. First, Wayfair skimps on holidays standard to other companies; so mark off at least 5 days off from your PTO package because you won't have MLK Day, President's Day etc. Second, as other reviewers have said before, the technology stack at Wayfair is very outdated. Your day to day work if assigned to the backend inventory teams, will be maintaining a lot of verbose and spaghetti-code stored procedures in MS-SQL and editing simple .net web services. Your day to day work if assigned to Storefront, will be mostly fighting fire in a bloated PHP stack where most methods and libraries are written in procedural code, implementing marketing-driven tickets such as "adding a new copy-text" to this page or track some variable in A/B testing. Wayfair Engineering blog promotes itself as a place that uses cutting-edge technology such as Solr, machine-learning with Python, real-time task processing etc. All of those work belong to the Search/Data Sciences team, a small team within Storefront. So unless you get hired into Data Sciences (Python, machine learning, distributed systems) or the Mobile Team (JS MVC frameworks, Objective-C), I'd stay away as rest of Storefront is plain procedural PHP from 2004. They have a very strict code review process where you have to get your code approved by a reviewer, sometimes multiple if it involves say, both PHP and Javascript. In practice, this means more refactoring of your code and tracking down people and going back and forth as that process can go several rounds. There is no QA engineers nor suitable staging environment to support you and truly test your code in a quasi-production environment, so you are alone responsible for pushing out code and for whatever reason, bugs happened, stuck fighting fires on the day of push aka test-in-production or worse, several days if issues occur intermittently. The project managers in general, foot-soldiers in carrying out marketing and upper-management directives under the tyranny of agile methodology; and aren't vested with enough power to push back or do any true shielding for engineers on their team. You can read more into the actual cultural and management style of the company in the other reviews which I can confirm as well (basically the culture attracts the type of people who enjoy the HBO show Silicon Valley but don't understand the irony behind it and think it's actually cool). But I want to give day-to-day account of the actual coding experience at Wayfair which is extremely frustrating. I'd advise job candidates to consider how much they'd like to work in a procedural PHP or exclusively with MS-SQL stored procedures.
