In a lot of ways still great, but developing a lot of issues - Anonymous employee Zillow Employee Review

I want to thank you for the detailed feedback. I can appreciate your passion for Zillow, and the sense of pride and ownership you felt working at Zillow. You are correct that our turnover has been relatively low, something that has been true year after year. On our engineering teams, a big reason why that is true is the strong culture and ownership that comes from the individuals and teams. We strongly favor small teams with big areas of product responsibility. These teams operate like entrepreneurial startups where they own their backlog and service architecture. You are correct that we have several new managers. We take a “promote from within” attitude, which provides leadership and career growth opportunities for our employees. These managers, are sometimes also our technical leads, but we do believe that a great technologist and coder doesn’t always make the best manager. Luckily, there are equal opportunities for advancement and promotion in both our management and individual contributor tracks. We have grown the engineering teams significantly over the last few years, and you are right that the challenge of maintaining a quick and nimble development process can be difficult. We acknowledge this and have done a few things to help address these issues. A few years ago, we formed a Velocity team and engaged all the product teams to contribute a percentage of their time into owning and implementing the tools and architecture work that broadly impacts the pace and quality of our development efforts. The recent shift to getting continuous development further realized within our teams is also a welcomed change. I’m proud of the progress we have made, but again, we still have more to do. While our teams have grown and the product complexity has increased, our release frequency has increased. Improvements to test automation, logging and monitoring, deployment, UX framework evolution, etc. are all moving along appropriately. We find our engineers also engage in these projects during our Hackweeks, which take place three weeks throughout the year. As I mentioned, our product teams drive their product backlog, and we have a quarterly rhythm to the team wide meetings where the past projects and future plans are discussed and locked in. While our teams then go off and use a daily standup, multi-week sprint model of development, we try not to whiplash the team with frequent project priority changes and we cancel projects only after careful thought. I honestly can say, this is an area I am proud of at Zillow. The world you are describing where projects don’t see the light of day, just doesn’t sync with the delivery that I see from our teams week after week. Sometimes we do have to make the tough decision to cancel a product or put an area on more of a maintenance mode while we redirect our product team members on other important areas, but again, this doesn’t happen often, and I believe when it does, it is done with a lot of consideration and communication with those involved. This is good business practice and a sign of a healthy company. We expect a lot from our engineering teams and folks in our product teams and operations teams are very busy building and supporting our products and services. Some times are more intense than others, and with a full backlog of projects, and at the large scale we operate, teams can feel overloaded at times. We don’t want to burn our people out, and we take long term approaches. We’ve been adding people on the product team and IT operations team steadily over the years and we will continue to add staff to these teams. We believe in market competitive compensation, and equally believe that what makes an employee happy is a fun and engaging environment with work that challenges them and gives them opportunities to grow. Manager and employee training has been a key area of growth for us as well. Our Learning and Development team has enhanced existing and built new programs to help our employees grow and work well together in a way that is supportive of our core values. Insights Discovery is a program all our employees go through to better understand their own work and personality traits, which helps them work better within their team and with their manager and direct reports. Unconscious bias training has been given to all managers and many employees within the engineering organization. This has helped raise the awareness of the importance of having and promoting an inclusive culture. We are not perfect, but we want to have an environment that is supportive of diverse backgrounds, experiences and styles. When we work well as a team, we do our best work! Discrimination or inappropriate behavior is not tolerated. Let me end by saying I really want people on my team to feel comfortable coming forward and giving constructive feedback. Any current or former employee can reach me at davebei@zillow.com. I promise your input will be well received.