Great company with work life balance but lack of charm of tech - Senior Software Engineer Zillow Employee Review

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.