Zillow reviews

4.6

92% would recommend to a friend

(1,700 total reviews)
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Jeremy Wacksman

96% approve of CEO

75% positive business outlook

Zillow has an employee rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars, based on 1,700 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Zillow employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Tecnologías de la información industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
2.0
Mar 27, 2014

Look closer

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great benefits and beautiful building

Cons

The organization has not figured out how to grow. They do not want process in place to slow down their rapid speed but need it desperately to support growth. Generally the right arm doesn't know what the left arm is doing. People will jump so quickly into action with a new idea that it doesn't matter the amount of money or energy they put into this idea. The company is not data driven in it's business decisions. There is not software in place to help the company scale and everything on the business side is done manually and with tons of pain. They are not ready to be a mature company.

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Zillow Response
12y
I am disappointed to read your feedback. I do agree with sentences like this though: "They do not want process in place to slow down their rapid speed but need it desperately to support growth." That is our conundrum - trying to stay nimble and with all the benefits of a small company, while still benefiting from the resources of a large company. Threading this needle is my #1 priority for 2014 personally, and for the company. On the product side of the company, I am trying hard to keep our teams as small as possible which I think helps a lot, and to empower PTLs and others at that level to be as autonomous as possible. I wish some of your feedback was more specific and actionable. If you want to follow up on any of this, please feel free to reach back out to me via email and we'll set up a call or meeting, or to anyone in HR (e.g., Kathleen, Annie, Corina). It says here that you're a "former employee" but if you want to make Zillow better for those you've left behind, I would always like to learn from experiences like yours. ------------------------------- Spencer Rascoff CEO, Zillow Inc. 1301 2nd Avenue, 31st Floor Seattle WA 98101 Twitter: @spencerrascoff
4.0
Mar 14, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1. Great and friendly people. 2. Clearly defined project and well executed 3. Great executive leadership, clear roadmap on what they are doing. 4. Schedule is reasonable and not aggressive. 5. Easy problem to so solve if you like it.

Cons

The following cons are from engineering/eng-management prospective, may not related to other orgs: 1. Engineering talent/leadership is not top level, and if you are the top ranked engineer, you will feel a lot of push back and dragging. And great idea is not easy to spark out. 2. Mid-management is very laid back, need to be more aggressive to help the company moving to the right direction. 3. Granted, long staying people are now in mid-senior management level, but this is the problem of allowing the company to move forward. They have a lot of legacy, which *should* be fixed long ago if committing to it, but unfortunately, the safe route is always selected. 4. A lot of cost optimization can be done within the technical stack, but hard to convince people to care. 5. The technology management/development is traditional, you will see a bunch of Unix admin/DBA and ops, and handing day to day ops and also the blockers of moving fast in SOA world. I understand a lot of companies have similar problems, probably Zillow is better than all of its peers, but given Zillow is young and want to move to next stage, then it has to do something different.

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Zillow Response
12y
To Former Senior Software Engineer in Seattle, Thank you for taking the time to provide the feedback regarding your experience at Zillow in the Seattle office. I am sorry your experience here wasn’t as positive as I would have hoped it would be. I must take issue with your comments around the Engineering talent at Zillow. Our engineers are some of the best in the industry and I would stack this team against any other. We maintain a high bar during the interview process where we look for strong technical ability as well as people who we believe will support and enhance our collaborative and open culture. Our engineers have built some impressive technology that has scaled with our data and traffic growth and allowed for a powerful user experience. When I look at how often we are shipping software (major releases every two weeks and some areas daily), the quality of the code, how well it is scaling and the creativity of the products our teams are building, I am incredibly proud of our results. We have also chosen to organize our engineering team into small product teams of around 4-12 engineers to provide clear areas of ownership and focus. I love how these teams drive their backlogs, working closely with the business team and senior leadership to review those plans, set goals and key metrics. These teams feel empowered and have a strong level of product ownership and understanding of how their products fit into the overall company strategy. Of course, there is always room for improvement, and I challenge our teams and individual engineers to look for better solutions, development processes and tools. Twice a year, during our HackWeeks, many engineers and small teams help move our architecture and development processes forward. We also created a dedicated team, called Velocity, which is working with all our product teams to ensure we are making investments in our core architecture and development tools to ensure ongoing developer independence and efficiency. Paying this development tax along the way is a great investment and helps us avoid large scale rewrites or product delays. Many companies don’t provide their engineering teams with the time to work on infrastructure based projects or clean up code, but we have strong support for this, including our CEO and senior business leadership. Different companies have different approaches to Operations. I prefer a model where the first tier of support for build out, deployment and monitoring/troubleshooting is being handled by a team with a clear operational focus and skillset. Our product teams need to be closely aligned with our Operations team, ensuring that the products are built with operability in mind. We have found that a strong operations team of DBAs, Systems Administrators, Network Engineers and System Operators can provide high value and allow the other engineers to focus more time on new product development. These teams work closely together and I think we are better off because of it. I do want to thanks you again for your feedback. It has taught me that we need to do a better job communicating internally and providing additional methods for individuals to share frustrations and provide solutions. - David Beitel CTO, Zillow P.S. To any other former, current or even potentially future employees, you can always reach me at davebei @ zillow.com to provide feedback or ask a question related to any of our product development technologies, processes or culture.
1.0
Mar 14, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The best thing about this company is you get free food all day, and catered lunches on Fridays and randomly throughout the month. There's no dress code,decent base pay. Games and bonuses.

Cons

If your seriously considering working for this company you should read this. The job sounds really great at first, your told you have an opportunity to make 6 figures a year and you get a competitive base, which isn't bad. What they DON'T tell you is if you don't hit quota which by the way is ridiculously hard to hit every month since most of the product your selling is sold out, they will literally fire you after 2 months of not hitting......Your quota increases each month which is called your ramping period. you literally can never take a vacation, get sick, etc.... Doesn't matter if you get 3 weeks of vacation time., the job gets easier is a load of you know what, if you increase sales goals how can it get easier. On top of that you have to have a minimum talk time for 210 minutes, the problem with that is you will spend most of the day leaving voicemails which are about 1 minute each, you literally have to push through a call to talk to someone which gets difficult because most real estate agents don't want to talk to you, they get the same call all day by everyone else, also forget about breaks and lunches or you will be there all night trying to hit call time, call time can only be accomplished by working through breaks and lunches and a little extra after work hours, the reps that hit it talk to there old clients they have known for a while, the problems is if your new you don't have that luxury.The reps who do well are the ones who been there for a year that have a large book of clients ( by the way there are literally 15 reps who been there that long), they just call there old clients and up sell them, this is easier for them because product was plentiful, and easier to sale when they started,, and most of these reps are burned I've seen reps making good money quit, that should tell you something. The worst thing is the turn over, they literally have a sales class every month to replace reps , I guess this shouldn't matter, but its show's instability, and that's a turn off especially if your looking at this as a long term career.. I think most people quit because they simply run out of gas, there is no balance with personal and work life, this is the most intense sales job, and I have a extensive sales background, most reps have anxiety working here, it will do that to you, and you will have to deal with it everyday . The main thing that shocked me is how unprofessional it is, managers use a ton of profanity, and have questionable activities that ill keep to myself, which made me lose respect for a select few, you should look at a person in authority for comfort and reassurance and guidance, there a bunch of cheer leaders who will only talk to you and give you a high five or recognition if you make a sale, other than that, they are not that approachable no managerial skills at all, that may be do to the fact there all recent college students with no leadership background . I'm writing this because I have seen many good people lose there jobs or get stressed and quit. I feel if I can help someone before they consider working here it was all worth it. I encourage you to ask lots of question before you join this company. There are great sales jobs with less stress and a better quality of life.

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Zillow Response
12y
Thank you for your feedback. I'm sorry to hear about your experience at Zillow. There's no question that sales is a hard job anywhere, and you're right that we demand a lot from our team. I speak with new salespeople every few weeks and I always tell them that this job is hard, especially right out of the gate. It's hardest at first because they don't have any existing clients from whom to draw confidence in the product; they can't reach into a bag of anecdotal successes and use them to soldier on when they're having a hard day. I take solace though in the fact that we have a lot of very successful salespeople here from all walks of life and from a variety of prior experiences. So I know the job is doable, and I know that many people are very successful at it. It's not for everyone though - I will concede that point.
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