Zillow

Awesome health insurance, nice office/views, fun hack weeks, some really cool people, small teams, very little bureaucracy, very exciting products, sponsors events that encourage diversity, ZSpeaker Series where famous speakers come in, catered lunches often.

Homogeneous, elitist. Sheryl Sandberg is a big hero in this crowd.

Pay is below market rate (you get paid in snacks).

Painful deployment workflow (though they are improving it).

Zillow is a great place to work for engineers who believe in meritocracy. Zillow actively recruits engineers at CMU and Brown, and their elitist culture reflects this.

I changed careers after college to pursue software engineering through a year-long code school that promotes diversity. Zillow sponsored my internship and later offered me a job.

Zillow is a fun place to work in general — there are many cool people, two hack weeks per year (these are a blast!), and the perks are nice.

My manager was not willing to see me as having the potential to become an equal to my coworkers and told me that he’d have difficulty justifying my worth because my skill set wasn’t perfectly aligned with that of someone with a CS degree. He also told me multiple times that I do not know algorithms and data structures, without any evidence at all to suggest this. Later, he admitted (at my coaxing) that these statements were the result of classist and sexist biases.

Zillow’s engineering team is unfortunately not very diverse. While working at Zillow, I tolerated jokes about gender, race, and class. Examples are jokes about rape, women and men being fundamentally different, dolls getting dirty and “changing races,” North Korea, and homeless people. These were sparse, definitely not illegal, not particularly malicious, and not atypical of a homogenous group of guys; they simply reinforced that I didn’t belong (micro-aggressions).

When voicing my concerns with my HR partner, I was essentially blamed for not having the right comeback to “shut it down.” Then, my skip-level had a talk with me about not becoming one of those bitter people who are unpleasant to be around, citing that she has ignored sexual comments in the workplace (not necessarily Zillow) for years. She’s awesome and I look up to her a lot, so this was disappointing to hear. HR and my skip-level both told me that my manager’s wife works, therefore he must not actually be a sexist, so all the offensive things he said to my face multiple times were probably a misunderstanding (moral licensing).

I attempted to switch teams, but HR didn’t allow it, so I got a better job somewhere else. My manager responded to my notice by asking me to leave earlier and warning me that my new employer “isn’t afraid to get rid of people who just don’t cut it.” He then blew up on us in a meeting later that day. Nice.

My advice to minorities applying would be to be careful — if you’ll be the only minority on your new team, run the hell away. If your future manager goes on a self-righteous rant about how much he wants to advance minorities, dig deeper — he might not know any facts about these issues, meaning he doesn’t actually care.

I believe that my personal experience absolutely does not reflect the views of the senior leadership of Zillow. The leadership truly believes in diversity and understands that it benefits everyone (business, customers, society). They sponsor events and organizations that promote equality with the best of intentions, and they go above and beyond to make accommodations to all their employees. I also believe that HR did the correct thing to try to convince me that I was wrong — it lowers the risk to the company. When I left Zillow after a year and a half, I left my manager, not the company.