Great place to work - Manager Wayfair Employee Review

5.0
17 Aug 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

If you are willing to work hard and be patience, CSN is a great place to work. If you want to do the minimum and expect a gold star and promotion for doing your job, look elsewhere. CSN has recently hired some outside senior level management, but it was needed. Even with this, there are many opportunities for entry level employees. Yes, no one wants to go to college for four years and then deal with a customer upset that their headboard came damaged. But you have to start somewhere. CSN has many departments internally that many companies outsource; advertising, PR, logistics, etc. If you prove you are a hard worker and competent, there are other places in the company you can go. Many of these types of opportunities would not be open somewhere else for someone who did entry level customer service or marketing for a year. This chance for mobility made up for the lower than expected/deserved pay. The people are also great at CSN. There are very few I did not care for, but you will find those types of people everywhere. I was lucky enough to have a couple different mentors over the years. And tried to provide mentorship in return. I have worked other places and understand that there is something different about the people at CSN; I think they do truly care about their co-workers and the success of the company. Most of the employees are young and the open office environment allows you be social. Many of my friends out of college were stuck in cubicles or in offices where the person closest to their age was still 20 years older. If you want to, you can make great friends. There are basketball and bowling leagues, tickets for employees to go to see the Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics, and theater events. I have made many life-long friends at CSN.

Cons

Personal moves were often times shrouded in secretly. So much of the company is transparent, but not when it came to this. Rumors fly around the place on a regular basis. Priorities changed continuously, which does happen at relatively new and growing company. This could be frustrating at times, since things would flip 180 degrees every 6 month.

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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