ZapLabs reviews

*This used to be a nice place to build great products that used to start with a vision, lot of autonomy to build towards that vision and with a good combination of research, validation, technology and agile processes *Product Managers and Engineers are given 'tickets' to complete, a pretty lame top down approach *Lack of product vision, leadership and experience *Things have gone downhill after the acquisition by Realogy

I've seen reviews that say ZapLabs is top-heavy and reviews that say ZapLabs is full of juniors/associates. The fact is: both of these statements are true. The reason? ZapLabs' idea of career growth is putting employees on the manager track. Promotions come by way of getting senior or lead added to your title and being given direct reports. People are artificially kept at "junior" levels too long and then management quickly becomes the only path to advancement. And of course, people are protective of their "better" titles given that they had to grind way too long for them, which keeps the org from being as flat as it needs to be. - Pay is not competitive for a Bay Area tech company, and that highly compounds the above problem. People might not be so insistent about hounding management for promotions that put them on the leadership track too soon if base pay for individual contributors was more competitive. No one's primary motivator for stepping into a role that involves managing another person should be the fact that that increased people-related responsibility is the only way to get compensation on par with peers who are IC's. - Benefits are not up to standard. Can't speak much on the health care, but offering only 5 days of paid parental leave (you read that correctly) is the biggest offender. If this isn't changed, I worry about the company's ability to retain all of the university grads they're hiring once they get older. - ZapLabs didn't feel like it had the room to be bold, and felt like it was under Realogy's thumb. I'd never expect any big, intentional strategy decisions to come from us, but I'd regularly expect small, less impactful nudges from our parent company.