Disclaimer: This is my opinion and my personal experience. Please don't take this too seriously. :)
I've been working as an SWE III at Walmart for almost a year. Due to a new opportunity, I have decided to take on a role more aligned with my personal and career goals. In this post, I will walk you through my experience working at Walmart now that it's still fresh in my mind. Hopefully, you'll find this helpful.
We will cover:
- The interview process
- Getting the job
- My first day
- My responsibilities
- What I learned
- Who Walmart is for
- Life working at Walmart (Bentonville version)
- Would I recommend a friend work for Walmart?
Interview process
I joined Walmart in September 2023. I got the chance to interview for the role thanks to a referral from a Walmart employee that I know.
One thing I noticed about roles at Walmart, especially for SWE II and III, is that even if you have the same title, your responsibilities can vary a lot. You should review the job description for the specific SWE III role because you might be working mostly on frontend, backend, or even be expected to work as a full-stack developer.
In the case of Senior SWE and above, I noticed that they don't code much. It's mostly SWE II and III who get the job done.
In my case, the role was more inclined towards frontend, so the interview process was mostly about frontend topics.
I won't detail the exact questions I was asked because that would help no one. In short, I had four rounds of one hour each.
The first round was with the hiring manager. The interview was technical but verbal, mostly discussing what I would do in certain situations, like handling errors in React components.
The second round was coding. Surprisingly, there were no data structures questions. Instead, we spent an hour building an app using Expo Go. I really nailed and enjoyed this interview, haha.
The third and fourth rounds were half technical and half behavioral. I did great on the technical part, but behavioral questions are not my strength. I didn't know much about CI/CD pipelines and best practices for error logging. Basically, they wanted a strong foundation in DevOps, which I really lacked at the time.
Going through the entire interview process took about a month.
Getting the job
Surprisingly, two weeks later, I got a call from the recruiter saying they had decided to move forward with a stronger candidate from a bigger company. Later, I found out this person was from Amazon, so they gave him the role.
Luckily, the recruiter told me she received very good feedback from my interviewers and asked if I was interested in another similar role. I said yes. I had one more interview with the hiring manager, and after that, they extended an offer. I know, I got really lucky, especially for someone without real-world experience.
I accepted the offer and started the relocation process. At the time, I was living in Atlanta, GA, so I moved to Bentonville, where Walmart headquarters are located. The relocation process was smooth, and someone from Walmart was on top of the process, helping and recommending all sorts of things I might need.
I had a great experience relocating, and so far, I'm in love with Bentonville. It's a small city full of friendly people. It's very peaceful compared to Atlanta, where I had to fight to find a parking spot. The cost of living in Bentonville is lower, which is a huge plus for me. This allows me to save more money and invest.
One downside is that now that I'm leaving the company, I have to return the relocation money because I'm leaving before completing a year of work! FYI.
My first day
I believe no one realizes how big Walmart is until they see it. Walmart employs more than 2.1 million people across the world. You can imagine the company as a small country; there are millions of people working for the same company, but you may never talk to the majority of them, just your team which you can think of as your family. You can get to know more people if you are good at networking, which you can think of as cousins or friends of cousins. That's how I think of it lol.
Anyways, I got my onboarding instructions via email for my first day. I needed to go to a Walmart building to pick up my computer, so I was there on time! I started to notice the size of Walmart. There were around 30 people outside of the building waiting to get a computer, just like me. There were Walmart personnel giving boxes and bags quickly to the people in line, like when someone is giving something for free and people are in line waiting for their stuff. So I started thinking, wow does this happen every day? And yes! Every day hundreds, maybe thousands or more, leave and join Walmart.
After getting my computer, I went to my building to meet my team for the first time. My manager met me at the lobby and took me to my desk. I met the team and I started to set up my computer and go through some onboarding videos. The process is well-structured! You'll join meetings with hundreds of other new employees that are also getting onboarded.
Then I started to learn more about the project I was going to be working on.
My responsibilities
In my team, my main responsibilities were maintaining an internal mobile app built with React Native and a website built with React. I also quickly learned the basics of Java, SpringBoot, MySQL, NoSQL, CosmosDB, Microservices Architecture, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Azure, and more to contribute effectively.
I enjoy learning new things, so this opportunity was valuable. Working at Walmart helped me understand how a large company manage and scale thousands of projects and microservices. I believe this experience pushed me out of my comfort zone as a software engineer and gave me a broader view of how real-world apps are made.
What did I learn?
During my time at Walmart, I learned several important lessons. Firstly, production code often isn't as flawless as one might assume; imperfections are a reality. I also discovered that striving for extremely high code coverage—like 90%-100%—can significantly slow down development, sometimes leading to inefficient workarounds just to meet coverage targets. Navigating rapid progress in a large organization is challenging, and Walmart, while heavily reliant on technology, operates more as a tech-utilizing company rather than a tech-centric one. Lastly, I learned that DevOps practices are crucial for building and maintaining scalable applications.
On a personal note - I noticed that not all software engineers are like me! I am deeply passionate about coding and building great platforms. I enjoy spending time behind the computer implementing new libraries and solving bugs. I also noticed that while I did work in a hybrid environment I was most productive while working at home. While I was at the office, my team mates, maybe because we hadn't seen each other in a few days, would love to chat and spend time together. Although I enjoy their company and friendship, I felt while I worked from home I didn't encounter much distractions and my results were higher quality.
Who's Walmart for?
For everyone! Literally any person can find a role and career at Walmart. For young engineers, it's a great place to learn and understand how a Fortune 100 companies does software in the real-world. It's also a great place if you value work-life balance.
For engineers who want to build a lifelong career at the same company, Walmart is perfect. They really care about employees staying for years, and very frequently, you'll see them recognize these employees in front of everyone.
If you want to work with the latest tech, frameworks, etc., Walmart may not be the place for you. For example, I was very surprised to find that no one on my team knew about NextJS, Expo, GitHub Copilot, and things like that. That was very shocking to me, lol. Maybe it was just my team; and to be fair, we were maintaining a 5-year-old app.
Regardless of where you are in your career, Walmart is great place for job security. Though similar to other companies, they've had to lay off several employees, so I guess I can skip this part, lol. No one has a secure job nowadays.
Life working at Walmart (Bentonville version)
I worked in a hybrid setup, which meant going to the office two days a week (Mondays and Wednesdays), with the rest of the week being remote. This arrangement was great! However, Walmart is planning to bring everyone back to the office full-time, which is unfortunate. :(
My typical work hours were from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. During my first couple of months, I often worked late into the night because I wanted to get up to speed quickly. Personally, I'm passionate about coding and sometimes get hooked, working until 10 p.m. or later. I eventually stopped doing this after my teammates asked me not to work after 5 p.m. We worked in an Agile environment, and most of my days were spent coding and attending meetings.
Would I recommend a friend work for Walmart?
Yes, definitely. While some of the points I've mentioned may sound challenging, overall, my experience at Walmart has been great. The people are friendly, the culture is supportive, the salary is decent, and overall, it's a great place to stay for the long term.
If you are someone like me, who has side projects, Walmart might be a great place for you as they have great work-life balance. Once you clock out, you may still have the energy to work on your personal projects. For me this was important, as I could continue working on my YouTube channel and codewithbeto.dev.
Walmart also offers great benefits, including education programs, insurance, 401k, and all the other perks you'd look for in a job.
Walmart is a well-established company, and you can rest assured they will be around 50 years from now.
Overall, Walmart was a great place to work. I had a friendly team and learned a lot. I'm thankful for my manager who took a chance on me and gave me the space to grow as a SWE. Again, I recommend Walmart as a place for SWE. If this new job offer hadn't come my way, you'd probably find me here a few years later.
Disclaimer: this was my personal experience working at Walmart for less than a year. This doesn't mean that all teams or Walmart operated in this manner.