- 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.
