Pretty good place to work at - Senior Software Development Engineer Zillow Employee Review

4.0
Jan 24, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Awesome physical environment. Zillow tends to hire smart people who also have empathy towards others. Lots of room for growth in the business. Decent compensation. No on-call. A lot of promotions from within.

Cons

Slow release process. It's being worked on but was shipping once every 2 weeks, and sometimes once a month, which can be frustrating when what you work on requires iterations. A lot of tech stack is result of hack week projects that doesn't seem to have much ongoing support. Some teams lack clear charter.

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Zillow Response
9y
Thank you for your feedback. I see that you are a former employee, so you might not know that we have moved to weekly releases and are working on improving our deployment and monitoring processes as we head toward a continuous deployment model. Our "Velocity" model of having a small core team working with all the product teams on core tools and architecture is going reasonably well and in the last 3-6 months the ramp of people engaging and projects getting shipped from the Velocity backlog is increasing. There is certainly a lot more time being dedicated (target has been 15%) towards this work, and while some engineers work on these projects during Hackweek (which happens in Seattle 3 times a year), much more is being done outside of Hackweeks. So, room for improvement, but progress is being made. If you or anyone still at Zillow has more specific feedback or ideas on specific projects we should prioritize, please reach out to me and your manager. And if anyone has any doubt what the charter of their team, PLEASE talk to me and your team lead. With our small team model, there should be clear alignment and understanding on this. Again, thanks for your feedback and best of luck in your current gig. - David Beitel, Zillow Group CTO.

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Cons

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2.0
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Pros

Generally the people I work with are great. They are supportive, creative, and work well as a team. Work-life balance is good, although some teams have more on-call than others.

Cons

- Senior leadership has determined that inflation need not be a factor when calculating raises. - Also, we're having record profitability! But also money is very tight and we all need to tighten our belts. - Our stock is down 50% this year, but you all need to suck it up, even though stock is a huge part of pay. - We don't care that you are getting a 30% effective pay cut this year. - Performance ratings are calculated on vibes before reviews are actually written. - We've started outsourcing heavily to Mexico and India. - "We need to raise the bar" ("Please work harder for the same pay") - Health benefits have eroded for several years. - Other benefits have never been adjusted for inflation. - AI is becoming like a cult. We've actually been told that the dream is to never open a code editor again, despite the technology not being remotely ready for that (and with no proof that it is less expensive or saves time).

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