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.
