Wayfair (formerly CSN Stores) Reviews in Boston, MA Area

Pros

Relaxed and fun atmosphere
Amazing benefits package
Employee perks (parties, free food, mixers)
Casual dress
Employee discount
In-house training

Cons

Low pay
Tedious tasks
Limited ability to advance to higher positions (favortism)

Advice to Senior Management

(employed at CSN from 2007-2008) After working at other companies, CSN still the top when it comes to providing fun and entertaining outlets (parties/mixers) and benefit packages for employees. Establish a straightforward and honest system for employees to advance through the ranks. (I saw a lot of favoritism and ignored requests). Increase the pay, seriously, it’s hard to live in Boston on a $29,000 salary.

Pros

Three weeks vacation upon starting
Summer/winter parties
Lively/mostly friendly employees
Good place to start if you are joining the work force

Cons

The senior management is incompetent
Horrible pay for what you do
Degrading job responsibilities
Favoritism and lack of ability to move up

Advice to Senior Management

Treat employees like people and not playthings that you can use to meet your own needs. We're doing you a favor, not vice versa.

Pros

Snack room - fresh fruit and revolving snack choices helps you forget about how terrible your job is
friendly co-workers
changing work schedule helps avoid monotony

Cons

Tedious
Various performance metrics are a hassle to record - difficult/awkward to show you are doing a good job
Customer Service employees are made to feel inferior to those in other departments. Not the best situation for a service based organization.

Advice to Senior Management

In order to retain talented employees, CSN needs to more quickly identify those that are over qualified (the majority of customer service reps) for a certain position and either pay them more, or allow for more growth opportunities within the company. Most people use CSN as a job to hold while searching for a "real" job. Casual work attire makes the job more reminiscent of sitting hungover in a college lecture hall than an actual career.

Pros

There are a lot of young business professionals looking to to start their career (good culture), and there is plenty of opportunity to move up in the company.

Cons

There seems to be a lot of favortisim involved and a lot of drama between employees who have been with the company for multiple years.

Advice to Senior Management

Do a better job of addressing scheduling needs- In the time I worked there there were multiple different schedules that were always changing.

Pros

CSN gives its employees a lot of responsibility right off the bat. I have a lot of friends who started their careers at the same time in finance and consulting, and the stuff that they're doing is busywork compared to the power to opportunity to drive results that I've been given at CSN. I don't just analyze data and share it with clients who may or may not choose to see it through -- the insights that I generate from my analysis lead to actions (led by me), and the impact that those actions have is often immediate and something I can evaluate in real-time. That feeling of having impact on CSN's growth is really exciting and kind of addictive. If I have an idea on how to change a process or grow one of the categories I'm working on, I'm encouraged to test it. If it doesn't work, I see that it's not working quickly and try something else. It's great to have that feeling of really making an impact to soon after starting a new job, and from what I understand from my friends, I'm pretty lucky to have found it.

CSN's also a great place to make friends and meet new people. I didn't know many people in the city when I moved to Boston, and now I have a whole new crew of friends who I've met through working here. We have a lot of fun together both in and out of the office.

Cons

CSN's growing so quickly, I think being successful here means having a good comfort-level with change. You have to adapt easily and roll with the punches a bit as the business and structure of the company change as we grow. I think that constant change is actually a positive thing -- it keeps things constantly fresh and always exciting.

Pros

Flexability
Work hard Get paid Great
Nice young enviroment
Laughing is a daily chore
Knowledge is power - they hold training to be one of the most important parts of an employee. You will learn a lot

Cons

They tell you when to eat lunch
They are cracking down on the service and sales department

Advice to Senior Management

Pay the consultants more and cultivate them into stud sales reps

Pros

The people you work with are very friendly, and the open floorplan allows for a lot of interaction.
Coworkers are very helpful when you need something explained.
They do attempt to keep morale up through monthly nights out with your team and semi-annual parties.
Good work gets commented on in a special recognition section of the internal website.

Cons

There were a couple of things that I found difficult to understand or accept during my time at CSN. First, the pay is very low, and in the CS department it is based on numbers that are not always accurate, both because they can be gamed by other employees and because the system used to track them is very glitchy. This is a little disconcerting because your pay is based on these numbers.

Also, during my time there, the scheduling system was changed with virtually no advanced warning. Suddenly, you were working a different schedule each month, which was especially frustrating because you are required to book vacation time before knowing what your schedule would be, which made it very difficult to plan.

The biggest issue I had working at CSN, though, was the manner in which promotions are handled. For all the talk of meritocracy (and there is a lot), my experience, and that of many of my coworkers, was the opposite of that. At one point, I interviewed for an internal opening in a job that I had gone to college for and had previously worked in, successfully, for over five years. Several weeks after my interview, I was contacted by the head of the department, who told me that I was "definitely" the most qualified of the applicants. However, I was informed that there was another employee who had been with the company longer and had applied for this position several times before. For this reason, that employee was given the job. At that point, I began looking for a new job. I ultimately wound up working in the same field that I was passed over for at CSN, and making about twice as much as I would have been. I suppose all's well that ends well, but that incident definitely left a bad taste in my mouth. I know that similar things have happened to several other employees at CSN, and I know that people tend to be promoted based on how much out-of-work time they spend with their bosses more than the quality of the work they do while at the office.

Advice to Senior Management

Do more than paying lip-service to the idea of promoting based on merit. Actually following through on that promise will go a long way toward keeping good employees with the company.

Pros

A lot of opportunity for learning and advancement.
Laid-back atmosphere.
Young coworkers create a fun environment.
Opportunity to take ownership.
Management opportunities.
Great location.

Cons

Salaries aren't the highest in the industry, but other benefits (vacation time, healthcare, equity plan) offset this.

Pros

The company is very entrepreneurial and is well poised to maintain that competitive advantage as it grows. The company culture is great - high energy, great mix of hard work and fun. It is a great place to work with lots of opportunity at all levels. Feels like a small business that has the impact of a much larger company.

Cons

Straight up salary is not necessarily as competitive as other companies. However, they make up for it in equity, benefits, company culture and opportunity to grow.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't lose the entrepreneurial edge as you grow. Don't let the dollar signs cloud your vision for the company. Keep up the great work!

Pros

- Fantastic Benefits
- Great work environment
- The people are generally very nice and very capable
- Easy access to everyone in the company (including upper management)
- Huge amount of responsibility given to new engineers
- If you want to work on something specific and you ask for it, they will make it happen
- Equity in the company
- Excellent pay if you demonstrate that you are worth it
- Your changes will be seen by millions of people each month
- The company/department is always open to better ways of doing things if you suggest them in a respectful way

Overall CSN is an amazing place to work, and your happiness level at the company is completely in your control. In tech they will throw you into the fire right away and expect a lot of you, but if you can deliver then the company will take care of you. The people who succeed here are outgoing, creative, and willing to put in effort to do well. If you just want to punch a clock, slack off on your work, and expect to get raises then you should look elsewhere. CSN truly is a meritocracy, and if you are a valuable asset to the company then you will be rewarded for that.

Cons

Things move so quickly that it can feel a bit out of control at times, and sometimes valuable projects get put onto the back burner because we just don't have time for them. This also means that people at all levels in the organization need to take initiative to get things done, since management doesn't always have time to hold your hand through every project.

There are some other minor growing pains, software is adding a ton of new engineers and so the group is a little bottom heavy. This means less oversight and slightly reduced quality control. This gets better every day though, so not a big concern.

Advice to Senior Management

Do a bit more to recognize individual contributions in the tech group. People in tech are rarely on the recognition wall, and when we are it's usually because someone in another group put us there. People work really hard in general and sometimes it seems like the only time we are praised for it is during reviews.

It would also be nice to get a weekly (or even monthly) email about the major things that are going on in tech and who is working on them. The group is getting large enough that there are big projects happening that some people don't know about.