Zillow Software Development Engineer reviews

This is a pretty lame company for an engineer. tl;dr - you will not get to make any decisions, you will not even be given any information until it's time for you to grind out some code, there is no sense of career growth whatsoever, and your coworkers will be lazy. Orders and all company decisions are handed down from the top. If their decisions are wrong, they'll fire some middle manager scapegoat and craft new ones without listening to their employees. Product managers will hangout in meetings and won't invite engineers even when they're discussing important details and information about the products said engineers will be working on. You will be told what to do, you don't contribute to the vision. Zillow has a lot of B-rate "senior" engineers who will stop any change, regardless if it's beneficial, to the code/stack. A lot of them are pretty lousy workers too. If you're not brought on as a senior hire, you will get the monotonous work. This is not the place for any sort of career (or personal) growth as an engineer. HR is trying to engineer the company culture, which means you have to do stupid things to entertain their whims and a lot of awkward, low-budget events happen around the office. Many people just take the opportunities to go home early, so much for the company culture. The finance department is very bureaucratic, it will take a long time to get anything, to say the least.

Obstructive policies and processes are few but growing As headcount grows, relationships across teams become harder to maintain and collaboration becomes harder