Zillow 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.

- Many of the negative parts of Amazon culture are taking over at Zillow, most likely as a result of many former Amazon employees now working there - "Toxic positivity": People you work with are very nice to you but don't fully support you unless it benefits them. They are more inclined to share negative opinions of you with your manager than to offer constructive criticism directly. - Leadership is frequently changing priorities and strategies which makes it difficult to show any real success with initiatives you're working on - A focus on heavy documentation slows everyone down and greatly increases the workload. The number of meetings required to finalize each document is also excessive. - Very risk averse. There is a lot of talk from leadership about taking "big swings", but in reality most of the leaders in the company are worried about taking any kind of risk even when there is a potentially big reward. - Unless you know people on the team you're joining, you are rolling the dice on what your work experience will be like. The quality of the experience can vary greatly from team to team. From what I've heard from coworkers it is best to stay away from any team in the Zillow Home Loans org.