10y
Sorry you had a negative experience with Zillow. I'm glad you liked the flexible environment and location, but I respectfully have to provide an alternate perspective with some of your other comments.
As our product teams continue to grow, we are constantly looking for opportunities to promote new managers from our existing employees. As a matter of fact, the large majority of our engineering manager positions are filled from internal employees (some with past management experience and some new managers). Our training for new managers is also improving with more formal training and mentorship. I'm proud to look back and see how many of our most senior managers (including those at our VP level) have risen within the ranks of our engineering teams over the careers at Zillow.
I'm also proud of the leadership talent at Zillow. From informal feedback and the formal employee surveys we conduct each year, our managers are getting good marks from their teams. Good leadership starts with clearly communicated strategy, involves building and mentoring great teams and removing roadblocks and providing guidance to shipping great services. When I look at the teams we have built and the products we are delivering to our customers, I strongly believe our strong leaders are a key ingredient to this success.
We have been building an incredible amount of product over our 10+ year history, and that has required us to look for ways to evolve the technical stack and use new tools and frameworks. New systems are often built up front with newer technologies, but even our older services are getting rebuilt over time. We have more work to do, but I am glad we have a plan in place to continue to push these technology advances with front end frameworks like React.js and mid tier and backend services in Java, Python, Spark, and a growing number of AWS based technologies. Our major releases are happening more frequently, even as we grow in team size. There is no doubt more to do, but again, I am proud of the progress the team is making.
And lastly, our business model is going quite well. We are a public company and release a lot of financial information to provide supporting evidence of this. Our revenue growth is strong and we continue to look for ways to continue to further evolve our strong Premier Agent business. Ultimately, we focus on building products that help make all our customers (buyers, sellers, homeowners, agents and brokers) successful at accomplishing their goals of finding the right home, selling their property, understanding their home value, neighborhood and how they can continue to invest in their property and finally for our agents, connecting and managing the relationships with buyers and sellers in productive way.
I would be happy to talk with you about this further. While I am confident in our team and products, I appreciate constructive criticism. We always have room for improvement, so I do value the feedback. That is true for others who want to provide feedback or see things that don't seem right from our technology roadmap or management team. Please reach out to me at davebei@zillow.com.
- David Beitel, CTO Zillow Group
