They have Walmart Labs [1], which to your point, doesn't seem to have the ability for whatever reason (don't discount the talent, its entirely possible that the bureaucracy in Bentonville, AR is holding them back).
How many designers and engineers who have the choice between Apple, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft....or literally any other company...would choose Walmart? The company known for using the United States welfare program as supplemental income for their hordes of low-wage employees?
Their brand image is a big turn-off for the upper-middle class yuppies who make up the majority of tech talent. They would be smart to lean much heavier on the jet.com brand in the future when it comes to recruiting.
I like to think that too, but a lot of it is all talk. I used to work with this dude in Boulder who was really into virtue signaling. Did all the right Boulder things, shopped at the right Boulder places, drove the Boulder car that showed you "cared", but just couldn't give up that cheap Walmart cell phone coverage. His attitude was "well it's a dirty secret no one has to know", which coincidentally(?) sums up Boulder fairly tidily.
Is Boulder known to have dirty secrets?
Straight Talk
> Is Boulder known to have dirty secrets?
Yes, the best kept one being that it's overblown with NIMBYism. It's residents like to think it's on par with places like Seattle in terms of social progress, but it's all talk and no one seems willing to write the checks. It's very pretty though!
If their upper management has any smarts, they have to know all the connotations and baggage that go along with the name Walmart. I don't think it's a brand they can hang on to forever.
I.e. that they've both been around long enough that their management is staffed with people who owe their live to the company, and therefore have a very different perspective on it than anyone outside the company.
Feed enough corporate rah rah and keep knowledge workers from seeing any of their low level employees, and I imagine it would start to look pretty good.
I wish you the best of luck. Not just for your job, but for Walmart. The world needs competition.
They are doing just that. Have had a couple of contacts from them, and always as jet.com (with a throwaway line in the second paragraph about their exciting recent acquisition by Walmart).
* Owned by Walmart
Well, Walmart is quite well resourced, has a lot of talented folks, the facilities (for engineers) are enticing, they offer the opportunity to work on stuff with huge scale, and the pay is relatively comparable.
What more do you want?
Walmart is a different experience in the places where there isn't social stigma attached to it because normal people don't have any problem going there, but also because there isn't a political apparatus working to deny their attempts to improve their buildings, expand to newer areas, etc.
Apple, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, etc. etc. offer all of these things as well.
The only way for Walmart to win the talent game would be by offering absurdly above-market pay packages or absurdly above-average work-life balance policies. Which I'm quite certain, given their corporate culture based around beating down costs and maximizing efficiency, will not sit well with the lifer-execs back at home base.
Good luck getting a talented engineer without either an Ivy League pedigree or a history of employment at AppAmaGooBookSoft hired at any of the trendy startups you've listed.
SV is a bubble, and there are good people outside of it.
BTW, we're hiring a mobile release engineer for our small Portland office if you're interested.
Fun fact: If you account t for cost of living, Wal-Mart does pay more than many others.
There's also many other perks from working at home base. Massive fitness center (Who else can can claim they have 3 pools), cheap Sam's Club memberships. Add in that you get to try all the cool things like most others do (Savings Catcher, Scan n' Go, Grocery Pickup) and you get a substantial boost to the value.
Also, supposedly the new museum is amazing, for what it's worth.
Probably some interesting engineering challenges to pursue there. Pretty sure there is also a significant chunk of engineers that aren't as concerned about their approach to low-wage management. Amazon seems to have survived that challenge just fine.