Pros
As a first job out of college, Wayfair was a fantastic stepping stone for me and my career. There were opportunities to learn new skills both hard and soft (MySQL, HTML, Offshore management, etc.) that were great resume boosters. Your co-workers will all be your age, also right out of college, and making new friends is fast and easy. Happy hours and quarterly parties abound. Sports leagues and game nights are frequent. If you're diligent and flexible, switching to other departments for further exposure is a great track to take. Wayfair's training programs are very robust. Trainings on effective communication, running meetings, better decision making, how to prioritize your work, etc. are available and running all the time. It's a great way to learn new things and then directly apply them to your job. You will be awash in vacation time as well. When I left, I was given 27 days a year of vacation - over a month.
Cons
The pay. Oh lord the pay. Below market for just about everyone at the company. Engineers don't get paid enough, tech development stagnates using old code and everything is patchwork covering holes because either the good ones left to higher-paying jobs or we never got the good ones in the first place and took the engineers that Amazon/Google/Boston Start ups didn't want. Marketing Ops is laughable - if you have student loans you will not be making enough to save anything at /all. Free beers don't make up for the fact that 1.5/2 paychecks a month go to rent and loans before other expenses. Unless you live with your parents you will be rent-burdened. Wayfair's razor-thin margins means that you're not going to get transportation fully covered either. Co-workers with a second job nights or weekends is not unheard of. That is unacceptable if they want to retain talent. You are eligible for a raise once a year during reviews - up to 10% bump. Bonuses are during mid-year reviews, also up to 10%. They say you get equity. You do - if you're willing to work there for the 5+ years to have your 200 shares fully vest. _______________________________________________________________________________ The work. At least in Marketing Ops, the work is mind-numbing. The job description lists like 10 cool-sounding things, but in reality all you are doing is QA. You are not an "analyst". You are QA. You will be looking at product information filled in by an offshore team of workers in Vietnam and checking it for mistakes, on a clunky tool that breaks/freezes up as often as it works. Recognition will come from getting as many projects done as quickly as possible as perfectly as possible. Even with hard work and high quality there's no guarantee of advancement, however. If you're lucky to get a project that gains you exposure to management then you might be in the running to become an assistant manager. Might. Teams are created and dissolve as quickly as ad-hoc solutions to engineering problems come up. To management level 3 and up, you aren't a person anymore, you're just headcount that can be shifted around at will like one of those sliding 9-piece puzzles. If you complain about being shifted around so much (and not being in a single role long enough to gain traction or any real recognition) you'll get told that you're "not a team player - this is what we need you to do now so please go do it". A curious bell-weather as to how much they value your work: Wayfair continually touts how much the like to "promote from within". Yet nearly every time a role for an assistant manager or above opens up, they hold dozens of interviews for new hires and end up taking someone from the outside. A new manager position would be filled by outside talent 4/5 times. Doesn't inspire confidence and high morale, does it?
