Merchandising Analyst - Merchandising Analyst Wayfair Employee Review

1.0
21 Dec 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Young people out of college which is fun for a bit but then no one knows what they are doing. Free beer every 3 months.

Cons

Easily the worst job I have ever held. Extreme incompetence of any Senior Management. Anyone who is senior management is just whoever has lasted at the company the longest and who hasn’t been ambitious enough to leave the company for better pay. In my 2.5 year span at the company I had 8 different reporting managers and would often find out about switching managers the day it was happening and would be given no indications this was happening. None of these managers had any managerial experience and were all just promoted because someone left for a better paying job, micromanagement was prevalent with almost every manager. Pay is laughably bad and there are many fake promises about promotions to drive up work. If you do not take part in ‘weekend shifts’ you will have a harder time getting a promotion and will be viewed as not being a team player. I was even lied to about being issued a raise because the manager who promised it was too inept to go through the proper channels to have it approved. I would advise you not to accept a job offer from this department, you would be better off staying unemployed and waiting out for a better role. Some of the people you work with, often times the ones who get promoted, do not know the most basic Excel functions or even how to format a cell, I even had a reporting manager tell me they did not know how to open SQL. The average tenure in this company is about less than a year and this is a situation that they continue to not address this issue. There is barely any Holidays and when you factor in not getting any Holidays off the PTO is a joke, there is also no true sick days so if you are sick you are dipping into you PTO. It is hard to say how most internal recruiters still have jobs with the company. I knew of several different people who applied internally and sent several follow up emails over the course of several months and never were even able to find out if they were a candidate or not for the open role. Many other people I knew who applied internally would be given word of weather they found out if they got the job and if they did it was a canned up automatic email response. Also, in regards to HR, no one ever set up an exit interview with me so I had many questions about benefits that went unanswered.

Explore other reviews about Wayfair

5.0
6 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Smart colleagues tackling interesting, business relevant problems.

Cons

Long-term projects sometimes significantly modified in response to short-term business needs.

5.0
12 May 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Wayfair is a fantastic company if you're a software engineer who's looking to keep quiet, and not speak up when management treats you like garbage. And it excels at finding leaders who are willing to go the extra mile to be untrustworthy and make you feel like your job isn't safe (and for real, it's not).

Cons

Let's talk. The company has been growing like crazy, and one thing that was never thought about was "can we actually hire at a sustainable rate, and scale accordingly?" The answer was no on both counts. Software engineers at Wayfair have a history of disappearing. People who enter labs have an especially low success rate (70% make it through, and less than 50% last a whole year). It's basically their way to run people through a burnout gauntlet, and see who survives. And then you have the stories of the people who come in to work and are just asked to resign. You'll see hints of it here on Glassdoor if you dig, and it's even worse than what you read. They actually gathered all the engineers for a big meeting at the beginning of this year. And they said that they were sorry that people felt scared and were sad that people felt like management didn't care. Which is exactly how we felt. They promised that their door was open, and they were going to work hard to set things right. One person out of 500 stood up and asked a really cutting question. AND THEN THEY FIRED HIM! And there were 3 completely different official reasons given about it. It's crazy. The leaders also started up an engineering meeting to keep everyone on the same page and answer anonymous questions. One time someone asked why we couldn't get snow days off, because it was tough to shovel for 3 to 4 hours and still work an 8 hour day. So the leaders proceeded to talk down to us and reprimand us for even thinking about asking a question like this. Turnover has been high over the past year, and the best people are leaving. This worries management, but they still have no idea that the problem is actually them creating a terrible environment. So if you're a good person who cares about the person next to you and leaving things better than you found them, don't bother applying here. But if you're not, and you just want to keep your head down and not question anything, then this is the perfect place for you. And if that's what you want, Wayfair gets 5 stars. Amazing career opportunities if you want to have the same job forever. Incredible senior management that value untrustworthiness. A fantastic culture of watching people next to you disappear. It's truly a perfect company.

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Wayfair Response
8y
First, I wanted to thank you for providing feedback. Second, I am very sorry to hear that your experience was far from ideal. I know it can be hard to give feedback if you feel management is the problem, but leadership would love to learn about these issues to refine the Wayfair employee experience. We do try to create an open and transparent environment; one thing we’ve started doing is department-wide anonymous surveys. This has been helpful in identifying issues where people don’t feel comfortable speaking up for whatever reason and pinpoint where any issues may exist. As you noted, the company is growing very quickly - our Engineering team alone has grown tenfold over the past five years. I won’t pretend we get it right all the time, but we do aim to scale our teams and our systems reasonably to meet the rapid growth of our business, and we rely on employee feedback to refine these processes. To that end, we’ve put a lot of time and energy into our interview process. And, we closely track our voluntary and involuntary attrition rates to make sure we are keeping high employee retention and so that we can immediately nip any potential issues in the bud. For Wayfair Labs, we’ve made huge strides since the beginning of this program, and our average success rate is now over 90%, with several classes at 100%. We also run management trainings on giving, receiving and soliciting feedback. In these trainings - and in general - we encourage respect for all teammates and partners, communication and collaboration, and we try create opportunities for people to take on new challenges. I am very excited about the work we’re doing to solve tough challenges and there’s an exciting opportunity for our employees to do big things – our goal is to build a team that feels encouraged and empowered to do so. I’m very sorry you didn’t have the experience we try to cultivate. Once again, thank you for this feedback.
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