Zillow Employee Reviews about "work life balance"

Pros

- Direct management in my experience is often great - People really care, even if morale recently took a large hit - Hired fantastic ICs, some managers are really good as well - Work-life balance is great; I often feel supported to do what I need to do to be successful at work - Remote-positive work is great

Cons

- Accountability and root cause analysis of what lead to ZO are completely missing - All-Hands are used to talk about warm & fuzzy things, not about where we are, where we need to be, what data is there to support that we're going int he right direction - Leadership that oversaw ZO is still there to a large degree, not clear what the take-aways are - Skip-level leaders are often times not very technical which hinders their ability to critically discuss crucial data that's used to make important business decisions

Pros

Nice benefits and a great culture. The work life balance is good and it's clear the company actually values its employees.

Cons

Stock has been a bit low since the ZO wind down, but other than that, everything is running smoothly.

Pros

- Benefits cannot be beaten - Diverse cultures across teams was great to experience - Compensation was good - Cross pollination was insightful

Cons

- Difficult to have a work life balance when you're asked to work unreasonable amount of hours - No room for career growth or opportunities to learn from past mistakes - There were many cases of miscommunications/poor assumptions made of team members. This led to many cases of office politics, gossip, and poor efforts on management to handle.

Pros

Leadership has done a great deal of things right and I applaud them for it. Culture has still been very good despite *insane* growth. The work life balance is generally has gotten a lot better since the startup days. Probably a lot better than many other tech companies in the area.

Cons

I miss our company ski day, but luckily vacation scheduling is flexible for those pow days

Pros

Zillow has a very inclusive culture and strives to create a great working environment for its employees. The company will consider input from all levels and fosters a great work life balance.

Cons

The transition from start up mind set to mid-large size business is still going on in the tech org. This means there are some areas for growth, but it is great that everyone can get involved if they want to pursue that.

Pros

work life balance is pretty great not gonna lie....its pretty easy to coast by months without doing anything actually. Pay used to be competitive but not so much anymore. If I leave (which I am planning to), I'll miss the WLB the most.

Cons

leadership is awful in all orgs from the conversations I've had, nepotism is real and everywhere, managers are mangers from tenure, NOTHING to do with actual leadership skills. My current manager I've had the manage-up the whole time, she is only a manager from tenure - which makes sense because her manager is also a manager from tenure, its a systemic issue at Zillow and it's not going to change anytime soon.

Pros

I love the collaborative energy here. They really care about their employees. They survey the entire company to see what we would like to get added to the long list of benefits. I have great Co-Workers that are helpful and fun. Also, I love the fresh fruit that comes twice a week. They care about work life balance and know the importance of having fun at work and away from work. I come from a large software company so I went from feeling like a small cog in a large machine. I had an office with no windows and no sense of team in a very 'office political' environment. Here I am an important member of a team with a great view.

Cons

Would love to see Zillow offer in-house child care. This is the one area I think we could improve on.

Pros

Smart people, unlimited problems to solve, ability to innovate quickly and test new ideas. You are encouraged to think and go big instead of simply iteration on the existing product. The work life balance is very good for a company that is growing this fast.

Cons

The development effort moves fast and spec light so if you want a detailed spec to code to this isn't your company.

Pros

My decision to join Zillow was heavily influenced by ratings/reviews here, months after joining I realized its internal environment is not always same as the public image Zillow maintains on media or this platform, may of my colleagues expressed similar opinions. I gave it one star simply because I am a tech person disappointed by Zillow. But certainly there are people with other preferences enjoying Zillow. So my review is not to complain but trying to list some pros & cons from an internal view for job seeking candidates, so hopefully if you do decide to join Zillow, you have a realistic expectation about what you are getting into. It's just my two cents and I try to be objective here: (1)for most org, work life balance is awesome, considering the salary. I have seen some few teams with high pressure/work loads, if there is politics or you need to deliver important projects, but for most teams work load is not heavy (2)the salary could be very competitive if you have previous big tech companies working experience or elite university degree on your resume. (3)For most teams, the hiring standards it very high, I have observed a strong favor towards ivy-league & top universities (4)Zillow is a MBA/sales& marketing/PM culture dominating company instead of technology & start-up spirit dominating company. If you are coming from banking/consulting/sales/finance background, but want enjoy the salary & work-life balance of tech company, Zillow could be the best choice for you in Seattle. Actually I also found people from above background tend to stay at Zillow longer than people in engineers/tech/science, probably because other big four consulting companies/banking/sales positions in Seattle couldn't offer a better package. This eventually could cause some disadvantage for people in engineers/tech/science, as I will mention in the Cons part. (5)Work life balance make it perfect to raise family if you have kids or are planning to have. Lots of ex-employees from other big tech companies choose Zillow due to this, at the same time they can get a better pay. I never seen so many pregnant people in other companies, the maternity leave is also very generous. (6)Good for young people. If you are fresh graduate just starting your career, Zillow is a decent choice to put on your resume. Many social events, snacks, candy wall, game room, parties. It's like a fraternity with many elites from elite schools. (7)Location in Seattle is perfect, the building has awesome view. In summary these are following type of people I found successful & enjoy working at Zillow: - elite schools - Project management/banking/consulting/sales/marketing - stay here for family, kids, work life balance - fresh graduate starting career

Cons

- Company's major revenue sources are driven by sales/platform traffic instead of technology innovation, mostly coming from agent advertisement and potentially instant offer. 10+ years after started, Zillow was still lacking of core innovations/engineering products that generate stable revenue. Google has PageRank, maps, chrome, Android and many others, Microsoft has windows/office/cloud/Bing, Amazon started with platform but later has AWS and Alexa. Zillow is still like Expedia mostly relies on sales & business strategies, and maybe acquiring more companies. - Engineering spirit & tech innovations are below industry standard. There is not enough innovative/engineering/research products that supporting revenue generation. Mostly innovations are just auxiliary parts added to Zillow website/platform, make it more user friendly. This make the situation ridiculous sometimes, on one side this company claim it's tech company, many hack-week initiatives, but most projects/research/engineering product delivered are just adding icing on the cake. I have seen many projects not delivered on time, but there is no consequences simply because they don't matter that much. Politics of ownership happens all the time, simply because capable/talented people are not essential to keep the ball rolling. On the other side, sales & business strategy orgs could be stressed out to meet KPI. In reality when a start-up pass the organic grow period, it will get saturated after a while. - Many leaders are not tech-driven or young, but they joined Zillow at a good time when it was small. Later on as Zillow expanded, they got promoted due to seniority, not because their ability/merits. For security purpose, to keep their positions, they also hire even younger managers or employees and adding layers and layers beneath them. Then soon you found for such a small/mid size start-up company, the number of leaders are overwhelmingly high. You are either in a meeting/social events or on the way to a meeting/social events. - Not so diverse here. Zillow is dominated by elite and aristocracy. To make up for it, there are also lots of diversity hires or promotions due to diversity consideration. - You have to know the right leaders, and fit in their styles to climb up. Again deliver results doesn't always get rewarded, it really depends on whether your leaders are confident and competent, or your leaders are insecure. - Your credits of hard working could be easily taken by some slackers. If you are not happy with that, - Turnover for tech talent is high. When I was at Zillow, there were a chart showing percentage of employees joined the company after you. I found many Zillow employees left the company in 1.5 - 2.5 years. In around 2 years or so, I was ahead of >50% of company employees(partially due to expanding), due to several reasons mentioned above. - Zillow could FIRE PEOPLE WITHOUT WARNING, IMMEDIATELY. Under the shining surface of vivid, young, vibrant, caring, tech-start up image of this company, you will see a culture very different if you stay long enough. During my not so long tenure with Zillow, I saw 4 of my colleagues terminated all of a sudden, additional 2 terminated but they were not colleagues I had direct working relationship with. The politics here could be scary sometimes, leaders were in a hurry to mute the disagreements & conflicts. Please consider this carefully if you rely on the salary here for a stable income or for visa sponsorships. There is no PIP or similar plan which provides you several months of cushion time.

Pros

The top rate talent for co-workers is the norm. The ability to have ownership of projects makes the work meaningful. They create a culture of high expectations and reward accordingly. Work/life balance is important and they do a good job of balancing that for the employees.

Cons

I enjoyed the start-up ethos the company displayed in the early days, but after becoming a public company the level of bureaucracy increased to a point where innovation was slowed down