Pros
Good location, beautiful office layout
Cons
Wayfair is a tennis club for privileged kids in the Boston area. A daycare for them to attend until they have their first child, their trust funds kick in, or both. Merit and hard work will not advance you here. If you're an elitist brat with a massive inferiority complex, you get to spend your days walking back and forth from Starbucks, gossiping about the co-workers you can't stand (read non-snobs), and which ski resort you visited last weekend. You don't actually do any work -- the substantive part of your days is spent in meetings writing buzzwords or venn diagrams on whiteboards. Oh, and "replying to all" emails with played out memes to praise those of the same ilk over trivial stuff. Twice a month you'll travel to one of the other offices on the company dime, to attend meetings that could have been done via Skype. But, hey, you're part of the in-crowd so you can do what you want and expense it back to the company. If you happen to be an unfortunate soul who went to college on scholarship, even a top school, you'll be micromanaged and minimized within an inch of your life. You'll be quickly made to realize you're not part of the in-crowd -- if not by the treatment you receive, by the derogatory skype messages you can see from the corner of your eye. If you dare submit an expense report, expect to get berated for an hour by a 200k a year executive about a $5 receipt that didn't scan properly. You'll put your head down and try to endure it. But occasionally, you dare to remind yourself that this isn't some Skull and Bones firm where you might expect some degree of old fashioned classism. This is Wayfair, and this is supposed to be LAST place where this happens. Let's talk pay. Don't be fooled. They barely pay market wages. You can't assume you'll ever see a dime of the stock options they purport during negotiations. There's no guarantee they'll give you your performance bonus, and your stock options take years to vest. They know you'll be long gone before then, or the company will implode, so don't think of that as money in the bank. Your base salary is all you should expect to see. Revenue is growing strong, but the company has not shown an ability to turn a profit. The stock price fluctuates violently. What's especially concerning is that the problem of profitability seems to be getting worse, not better. The market is skeptical that the business model works. Wayfair provides customer service for home goods. A high percentage of orders has an issue that requires follow up (more cost.) Realistically, how many sofas will a customer buy over a lifetime? How long will it take to recoup the losses from all the orders we comp for minor reasons, such as 'the cardboard box was dirty' or 'it smells funny'? Yet the company has been hiring like CRAZY, which is only going to lead to more fixed costs. Overall, it feels more like you're working on a team project at college than for a real company. Plenty of intelligent people work here, but very few can appreciate the difference between academic theories and real world practicality. The generation that was never allowed to fail has landed its first job, and it's here. Insecurity runs rampant. So much is done simply for the sake of proving it can be done. Wayfair would spend $100 million designing its own spreadsheet software, and when complete they'd use it to add two cells together. Is this the kind of environment in which you'd like to work?
