Pros
Smart people Easy commute from Manhattan 10-30% discount on Quidsi sites Access to Amazon's network Amazon stock
Cons
If you're reading this in 2015 and you are interested in working for Quidsi, please read this review carefully, since I want to debunk a lot of the lies that HR and management will tell you to get you in: 1) Quidsi is not data-driven like Amazon, it does not have the same tools as Amazon, nor does it actually use the best third-party tools. What this means is that you don't get the same tools and data and dashboards that Amazon has. SO MANY new hires have come here thinking that they'll learn from Amazon, the best in class, but Quidsi is NOT Amazon - their systems and infrastructure haven't changed since 2009. Data integrity is terrilble and you will set up your own manual dashboards in Excel using DIY pivot tables. Depending on which server you download data from, your data will look different. Want to analyze a marketing funnel (acquisition to conversion) - you'll have to use the free version of Google Analytics which isn't set up correctly. Want to do customer analysis (cohort, LTV, etc) maybe using a tool like Custora, etc? Nope, unless you're wiling to get your hands dirty in SQL and DIY, no analysis is done at the customer level. Want to run A/B tests using Optimizely or equivalent tools that allow you to set up a test in minutes to see what converts better? Sorry, we don't have any you can use- there is one tool that only allows very few tests and only on certain pages of the site, so you'll have to work with a software dev to set it up and it'll take forever and you will have to write a lengthy justification. Want to understand what's happening in the mobile apps? Good luck- they don't even track mobile KPIs and there's not even a mobile dashboard. 2) Similarly, you won't learn best practices in e-commerce. The lack of data and tools that automate tracking and monitoring of basic metrics mean that a lot of stuff doesn't get looked at properly. No optimization of the shopping experience itself takes place because it's practically a static site (no personalization, etc). If you work in the retail business you will spend a lot of the time deciding what promotions to run when you get funding from vendors, and creative will put banners all over the site, but forget experimentation, customer segmentation and targeting, etc. The way the retail team is set up is very antiquated and mimics brick-and-mortar, as opposed to online retail structures seen elsewhere and also seen in Amazon itself. 3) You won't have access to engineering resources. None. Here's the brief story: the not-so-brilliant original cofounders of Quidsi outsourced the entire tech infrastructure to a company in China. It's become clunky and expensive and outdated tech and Amazon decided to bring tech in-house and integrate Quidsi into the Amazon stack. The ïntegration" process has been taking two years and is set to take another two more to complete. In the meantime, Quidsi brilliantly fired the Chinese company but there aren't enough engineers to work on the migration process AND be available for any kind of project. If you need any tech resource at all you will need to make a big case with senior management to get any prioritization. 4) Your job will change every 2-3 months. IN A BAD WAY. YOU WILL DO A LOT OF MANUAL ENTRY AND WORK YOU ARE OVERQUALIFIED FOR Let me give you some examples from different sections of the company -Someone was hired to work in merchandising. This person had a good background and career as a merchandiser. After 2 months they decided they wanted more people to work on selling Quidsi inventory on Amazon Prime, but they didn;t have budget to hire. So they put this person on it. Except, as you'll recall, there are no engineering resources, so this process wasn't automated. There is now a team of overqualified retail professionals who are doing manual data entry, uploading inventory on Prime. At one point they asked for temps, teps that didn't even need a college job, to do this work, but that didn't fly. Sorry, no budget. -Another somewhat infamous story is of a senior executive from a large corp with an impressive resume, who was hired at the very end of 2014 to lead and grow Afterschool.com. A few weeks after they started their job in January 2015, leadership shut down Afterschool.com and moved that person to do a completely unrelated job, that does nothing for their career. -We celebrated when they hired a Director of Analytics. The idea was that they would build out an analytics team that would address all the major issues above. Instead, they hired this very senior person and shortly after announced there wasn't budget for them to build a team. As a result, this person is running SQL queries and doing data analysis manually for very specific projects (i.e. working as an entry level data analyst) - and the company still doesn't have an analytics team or analytics in general. -Another person transferred their role as Sr. Product Manager from Amazon, and HR promised that they would have the same type of job. When they showed up, they learned there were no actual product managers at Quidsi. They were then placed to work in a retail role. 5) They are in COST-CUTTING mode Last year the people they hired were pitched that we are in growth, just smarter growth, you know, looking to grow profitably. Within months they changed the speech to cost cutting officially. This month they are back to saying maybe we might be ready to step on the gas pedal again. Realistically, they cut all marketing budgets, froze hiring, took tech resources away from all teams, etc. so don't believe whatever they say. They cut online marketing and the people on the marketing teams spend their time coming up with partnerships/placements they can get for free, and drafting emails to send out. 6) HR and leadership will lie or obfuscate. Communications are terrible They've hired people for roles they removed two months later. They've hired people to build out teams only to say we don't have budgte after all. Leadership knew they would have to fire the few temps we had over a month in advance when results came in - yet some people were told with plenty of time to transition and others were told that they had to fire their temps within the next 3 days. Another laughable case around the same time was when leadership decided to cost cut by slashing off a huge amount of the marketing budget across the entire company. In the all-hands meeting, they spent 15 minutes talking about how nifty-thrifty we were all being by no longer having free bagels on friday or yogurts in the fridge, and never once even addressing the fact that they had cut every team's budget and told them to fire people, which was on everyone's mind. 7) Work in tech? Just know it's not a product managed organization. Retail just owns inventory and pricing. Ops owns supply chain, transportation etc. UX owns little tweaks (remember the site templates and design were set up in China and are static) and is not responsible in any way for improving conversion or accountable for any metric. Tech does integration and that's it, or maintenance of systems. But the site and the shoppping experience is not viewed as a product the way it is at every single tech company. There is a Project Management Org - every time you need anything done (eg. a report created, a bug fixed, etc) you submit the ticket and a group of people will decide where it belongs in the queue. You will not be "making" anything as an engineer. You will be ensuring that crappy infrastructure built over 10 years ago does not collapse. That's it. 8) It's a very top-heavy org. There are more level 6 and level 7s (senior managers) than there are junior people. This means that if you are a manager, you will likely be managing almost no-one and be doing the junior work yourself. It also means that you will have a lot of directors, senior directors, and VPs above you. One of the huge problems at Quidsi is that there aren't enough people to just execute on stuff, and a lot fo people "managing" or overseeing. Every week since the start of 2015 more and more people have been leaving which has made it worse since junior or mid level people are leaving but all the directors are staying. When the cost-cutting mode became official and resources were taken from all teams, even more people began to leave - which management was ok with since having less people is a great way to cut costs! But now it's so bad -10 leaving per week in corporate- that they are forced to hire people. Unfortunately, it seems that again they will hire level 6s or more senior to "build" out teams with inexistent budgets. I cannot stress this enough - you will be doing a lot of stuff (manually) that is fine if you're just out of undergrad, but ridiculous if you have over a year of work experience. While at startups, in the beginning you have to do things yourself and then as you grow you build out a team and move up, that's not the case here. First, there's no budget for anything and they're looking to cost costs further. Second, because the seinor people aren't leaving, you won't get to move up , not really. Just now they announced a bunch of promotions for all the people that haven't quit, so now there are even more associate directors, directors and senior directors because that's the only thing they can offer these people. DO NOT WORK FOR THIS COMPANY. I've been here roughly two years. I was lured in by the story of how the company was in post-acquisition transition mode, that new, smart people (like myself), with great ideas, were being brought in. That they were bring in a brilliant new team to right the ship. This is what they told me when I raised all the objections I had read about online at the time. Stupid naive and egotistical fool that I was, I believed them, that now it was different and they were moving past the transition pains. I suffered from Hero complex and believed that of course I could turn around this company and save it with my brilliance. Alas, it is so so hard to get anything done here, for all the reasons named above. Working here, I can tell you that nothing has changed, it's bad, and you put your career at risk working for this company. As soon as my stock vests, I am out of here. I will have to lie on my resume and LinkedIn about all the things we accomplished as well as how I am in tune with best practices, because I'm not - nobody working here is. Everyone is smart and does the best they can, but manual efforts with no resources just don't scale.