Here are some of the things in my opinion creating bad engineering culture or at least contributing to it. 1. everything regards to development moves slow, like really slow...this can actually be a good thing for employees looking for wlb, definitely not good for company and product though. It gets worse during promotion cycles. 2. company trying to move to cloud from on prem with microservices with distributed teams but still insisting on centric teams acting as gatekeepers for lots of processes and platform related things instead of acting as enablers. Very small fraction of available capabilities of cloud provider are utilized. Too much guardrails for operating things, ask an engineer and they can't tell you what exactly happens after they push their code. 3. I might be wrong as this is from small sample size but most of the senior technical folks that have been at Wayfair for awhile seems to be the most trouble makers. They have no notion of what are the fundamentals for scalable, maintainable, modularized distributed systems, they likely push choices thats recipe for repeating the same mistakes. 4. arbitrary tech stack and language choices, not sure how to explain it, it's like someone said to team of relatively less experienced engineers "well, pick your favorite language and stack and build with it". Even very close teams under same domain use different tech stacks for no apparent reason. They spread themselves too thin with too many choices. 5. most of the technical flow and integrations are very fragile and not built with right quality. Feels like everything can fall apart with the right trigger. Some teams are not even writing tests for their code. Lots of manual enginerring work to keep everything afloat. 6. big projects or initiatives that span multiple organizations are just not moving forward because of all the meetings and talk but no action or results. When you think things are about to move forward there is always someone join the conversation and drag it all the way to starting point. 7. long and mid tenured engineers are ok with things being crappy and have no complaints. Thank God they are hiring new people to bring fresh perspectives. Also too much reliance on contractors to fill the gaps. 8. big migrations and maintenance are planned with very very loose coordination. Tooling and platform depreciation without fully clear migration path and support along with tight deadline is very common. 9. they use industry well known tools in a very weird and stretched way, "is that data passing between two systems? we must use Kafka let's consider no other option", "is that a recurring or scheduled job? let's use Jenkins while we are at it", "is this kafka message format change gonna break backward compatibility with others? probably, but fuck schema registry that's Kafka's and other teams problem now" 10. if you are not very senior engineer you get to deal with above points and try to fix them at your small scope if you care about your craft, juicy and interesting problems will go to senior people but that will hit #6 pretty quickly. It's possible that you land on a team that is shielded away from all of these, doubt it, but still possibility. Also remeber your experience with a company totally depends on where you are sitting at corporate ladder, bottom part always suffers the first and most. #tech
Daddy chill. I got interview call sometime back.
are you me?
here are my jokes for fellow wayfairians "hey! we sent an email and @here'd in our slack channel about this important infra deadline. if you don't take care of infra changes then your app will break in prod. kthxbai ps: good luck convincing people it's worth working on. maybe you should have attended my TED talk"
infra: we noticed your apps are wrecking our infra. pls fix dev: we have 12 nodes, why are 3 hot and 9 cold? why do you insist on writing dogsh*t load balancer? infra: pls fix the application code. this is an emergency
Hahaha truth
So the work life balance is pretty good then?
Sitting and waiting greatly exceeds actual execution
Couldn’t agree more an extremely slow moving tech org with no focus on product
Yes this is all true and the same complaints we’ve seen over the last 5 years. Culturally W engineering is very bad, mid-lower tier company that most people are ashamed of.
Agree with all
jeezus, I scheduled interviews just today. Thanks for sharing this!
Did you write these from your own experience?