Pros: * Plenty of onboarding / ramp-up time * Work-life balance * Great mix of interesting challenges and reasonable delivery expectations * Company lives its values

Cons: I ran into some team-level "ownership" issues: both "we don't want this particular piece" when it makes sense to include it, and "we want to keep control over this other piece" when doing so makes life difficult for other teams for no good reason.

Pros: Awesome physical environment. Zillow tends to hire smart people who also have empathy towards others. Lots of room for growth in the business. Decent compensation. No on-call. A lot of promotions from within.

Cons: Slow release process. It's being worked on, but we were shipping once every 2 weeks, and sometimes once a month, which can be frustrating when what you work on requires iterations. A lot of the tech stack is the result of hack week projects that don't seem to have much ongoing support. Some teams lack a clear charter.

Pros: What's better than a job that provides 3 weeks of vacation? A job that provides 3 weeks of vacation, plus 2 'hackweeks' in the year, where you get to team up with anyone else and let your creativity run wild. (I'd even trade one of my vacation weeks for an extra hackweek). To top it off, it doesn't hurt spending the remaining weeks innovating with dedicated and motivated teammates. In five months here, I've had a chance to work on a pivotal feature, win at hackweek, and know that the senior folks are listening if I need them. Zillow places a lot of emphasis on culture and looks for ways to keep innovating. If you're talented and motivated, consider spending your energy at Zillow, and my experience here so far says you'll get more energized in return.

Cons: Some of the legacy code can be challenging to navigate. On the positive side, most dev managers seem to be open to refactoring small chunks of code despite the obvious risks.