Wayfair CTO Jim Miller stepped down - successor Fiona T
#wayfair Anyone got any opinions about Jim’s retirement and his ex-Walmart successor Fiona Tan？ At this company stock crisis point any potential conflicts between him and the founders? I understand he is trying to push for stock revaluation and permanent Remote, but things like messy titles and all ML DS strategies are also controversial. Will that have more negative impacts to the current morality?#e-commerce #retail #CTO @Wayfairs
Jim was a decent enough CTO, but he basically came out of semi-retirement to take the job a few years ago, with the understanding that it was likely to be a relatively short-term deal. The plan was always for him to aid in the transition to a new CTO. I honestly don't know enough about Fiona to say if she'll be a good replacement or not. There won't be layoffs, we're struggling enough with attrition as is.
If there’s a downturn, look at a few service centers to be shut down.
Hope they keep the Toronto one to solve all immigrants visa issues.
typical wayfair story - candidate interviews for a role wayfair downlevels and offers L-1 *many years later* promoted to original role candidate interviewed for
The thing is Jim was able to offer CTO salary to a VP which dramatically increased L8 paybands. Extremely smart move. It helps when we hired Niraj N and other external VPs.
oh ok, so it's just us grunts that get stiffed on pay when downleved...good to know
Wayfair has done a few silent layoffs/“restructurings” across the board. Would expect this to be an opportunity to do a little trimming based on how the next quarter goes. If numbers stay down, they’ll have to cut across the board again, as simple as that. We’re Waythrifty!
However we just have a lot of attrition and hard to find backfill . Hiring is not freeze and gave a lot of offers, but you know the stock price…..
No doubt we’ll try to keep hiring and bring new people on, but I’m sure this will be used as an excuse to push the managers to further calibrate in the right direction to meet department quotas for non-regrettable attrition.
Jim was fine, not great. He was better at name dropping his past big tech experience than driving real change at W, IMHO. I think Fiona is a step in the right direction but our engineering middle management and directors need a shakeup if we’re going to climb out of the third tier and not be a laughingstock still in the tech community.
Agree. Recently Jim is hiring a vp of DS and through his LinkedIn it smells full of exaggeration and more irony he’s current stuck at background check and delayed joining multiple time. Current stock price is really hard to attract top tech talents and I believed people joined last year from Netflix Amazon and Google are already very disappointed at this point. It’s more like a vicious cycle to attract people and be a better place.
Yeah I know of a lot of people that we attracted from FAANG that are now leaving in bulk or going to FAANG instead because we don’t recalculate comp based on actual stock price quickly enough (actually only happens once your beat is over). Top talent doesn’t need to wait and hope that Niraj gets common sense on comp since their comp just went down 50%, they walk across the street and get a 60% instead
AFAIK Fiona wasn't seen high potential in Walmart. Good luck Wayfair.
She was let go from WMT but who know..she might do better..aanan was similar case
Yup, Walmart replaced their CTO who went to Pinterest instead of promoting from within.
Will there be full Permanent remote?
Yes, there already is.
Great. I was asking about Wayfair, Germany SWE position. So they let you work permanent remote from anywhere in the country?
If you think wayfair is bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Welcome to walmart
Good luck with Fiona and her posse. Walmart pushed them out.
They’re getting paid like 2x at Wayfair compared to Walmart
Scandalous
Why’d you smell her?
Any comments to explain your votes? #walmart as well Folks I realized that definitely the layoff option is voted by a lot of non-Wafairian.. Blind is a trolled place definitely. But actually I am seeing a soft layoff (a lot people will leave voluntarily) might come if their stock price is reset to a ridiculous price.