interesting work but massively disorganized
Pros
This may sound corny, but the best part of working at Zillow was having really talented and thoughtful coworkers. Historically Zillow has set a high bar for hiring and it's led to coworkers who are great at their jobs and also great at collaborating - and this made big complex projects feel really fulfilling. When Zillow laid me off, many coworkers reached out not just with kind words but also offers to help me find jobs elsewhere in their professional networks. Zillow also took remote work fairly seriously. You really can do the job from anywhere in the United States, and they don't seem to ever plan to go back into the office. This is incredible for work-life balance and I think it really opens up roles for people with family care commitments or chronic health conditions.
Cons
Working at Zillow was unfortunately fairly chaotic. The company is sprawling, verticals are inconsistently organized, documentation is spread across multiple platforms (or wholly nonexistent), teams can have many layers of management with unclear responsibilities, communication often happens in private Slack channels. This leads to many hours spent trying to determine who owns what, reduplication of work, multiple conflicting messages reaching leadership, projects abruptly starting and stopping, and long games of telephone. Expect a ton of time in Zoom calls trying to determine who owns what and who is able to make decisions. For early-career junior employees, this is honestly not a huge problem, as your manager should shield you from this. For mid-career and senior employees who are expected to go out and engage with stakeholders and coordinate their own projects, it creates a huge obstacle to your long-term progress. Your ability to advance your career really depends on whether your projects have well-defined long-term stakeholders and partners or if they're floating between half a dozen teams. A concrete example of all this: when my team at Zillow laid me off, two other managers doing very similar work in completely different parts of the company immediately reached out to offer me work. As far as I can tell, my team hadn't been aware of openings elsewhere when they laid me off and those two managers weren't at all aware of each others' efforts when they reached out. Under the current operating procedures there's apparently no discoverability across the company. (Zillow is also going through a lot of the same processes as other mid to large tech companies lately: a lot of struggling to find the Next Big Thing, a hiring freeze that gives rise to various shenanigans to preserve headcount, and a disappointing backslide on diversity and equity initiatives. Much of this is just the reality of working at a tech company in Seattle in 2023, though. As the market heats back up, I expect all of these problems to dissipate.)