Zillow Reviews

Pros

People are passionate about doing a great job in their own realm of responsibility, but also about helping the rest of the team excel in their work because everyone appears invested in having the company succeed overall. Nice, hard-working, people. A pleasure to go to work each day.

Cons

Incredible views from the office can distract you from actually getting work done.
Perhaps too Seattle focused. Would be nice to have more people at the company who grew up outside of the city.

Pros

The quality and diversity of people at Zillow is really inspiring. We are also building a business and a brand that is fun and important.
Great location, building and offices

Cons

Parking is expensive downtown.
Work can be intense and expectations are high. The CEO seems really capable and driven, but runs at a faster pace than the founding CEO.

Pros

Senior Leadership with a vision.
Senior Leadership wants to make the company feel like a startup again.
Opportunities for Advancement.
Great Culture

Cons

In sales, recognition goes to just the best producers that month. And not necessarily the most CONSISTENT producers and ones that help others and are valuable to the team.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide more recognition to those that have the best work ethic, best attitude, team players, provide the best feedback about what are customers are saying etc.

Pros

Fair amount of freedom, reasonable management, good strategical leadership. People are appreciated and treated well by HR and management.

Cons

As in small company there is not much place to move to if you doing the same job for a long time. This in some cases causes some elbow rubbing and politics. Everybody wants to be important and move up but somebody has to stay down and do low level work.

Theres not much you can do about it and any other place would not be much better unless it is a big company with many options.

Pros

Smart co-workers
Fascinating problems
Disruptive force in an old-boys industry
Great location
Good culture
Good opportunities

Cons

Salary may lag a few percent behind other bigger names in the area.

Pros

There are so many opportunities for each of us to shine and really make a difference here. Each person has a lotof responsibility and therefore can make large contributions. I especially like the passion of most employees for what they are doing.

Cons

Intense work environment, and lots of decisions get made by individuals so can lead to pressure to perform. Very metrics driven company for sure.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep hiring great people

Pros

-Fast paced and growing environment!
-Great management and Leadership
-Strong vision for the future
-Great work live Balance
-Great office location

Cons

Tough to stay motivated day in and day out with the sale process.
Lots of favoritism for a select few reps.

Advice to Senior Management

Very political and it seems that the promotions are not always deserved. Micro-managing of the senior reps is very demotivating as well.

Pros

Zillow's in a position to command a market sector, and is gradually developing a substantial internal services architecture that a junior or mid-level engineer can/should learn a lot from.

Cons

There's a strong culture of management/PM making feature/spec decisions and handing them off to developers to implement. Whether your ideas are listened to or not depends heavily on your job title.

Advice to Senior Management

Professional disagreement is a good thing; don't take it as a sign of dissension.

Pros

- Work environment. The office is beyond beautiful, and the people are amazing
- Location! I love this city! (Seattle)

Cons

Its still a startup and with that comes the stress and the salary of working for one. Not for people with low energy.

Advice to Senior Management

The management at this company is great. If anything, maybe more focus should be on creativity and ideas from the very qualified people here.

Pros

1. Excellent knowledge transfer (dev and test seem to share information freely)
2. Low bureaucracy (no trivial meetings, micro-management free, flexible time)
3. Friendly people (definitely less than a 10% jerk rate!)
4. Plenty of opportunities
5. Awesome location (the views really are breathtaking)
6. Free bus pass

Cons

1. Low pay (if company never goes public -- not taking options into account, I estimate about a 20% lower salary than perhaps Microsoft and Amazon)
2. Benefits are mediocre at best
3. People might be starting to worry if zillow will go public (Are we hoping for this to happen in 1, 2, 3 , or more years?)

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the information sharing and keep us motivated. With honesty, remove some doubt about zillow making it as a public company.