Wayfair Software Developer reviews

3.5

80% would recommend to a friend

(293 total reviews)
avatar

Niraj Shah

48% approve of CEO

56% positive business outlook

Software Developer employees have rated Wayfair with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 293 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Developer professionals have a good working experience there. Wayfair is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Developer professionals compared to other employers within the Einzel- & Großhandel industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

293 reviews
4.0
Jan 28, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Laid-back environment, many of the other engineers are quite talented. Managers seemed to be hit & miss -- mine was astoundingly excellent but friends I had there would often complain about theirs. Great work-life balance. Only had to stay late once or twice in a year. Plus it's right within walking distance of a ton of good restaurants and you can go out whenever for food....nobody's staring over your shoulder.

Cons

There are a few people who are a bit difficult to get along with, but that's true of anywhere. Some of the managers are a littttttle incompetent, so you might be very happy or very frustrated depending what team you're on.

1.0
Sep 24, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

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 Second, as other reviewers have said before, the technology stack at Wayfair is very outdated.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.

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.

Viewing 283 - 285 of 293 Reviews

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