Zillow

1. Competitive pay, excellent benefits (no cap for SDEs on PTO, health coverage, signing bonus + annual "merit" increase raise).

2. Great culture. I would say people in engineering (or around it) are generally nice and/or helpful and motivated. You know you're working with smart people, but you'll still almost always be able to find someone who's willing to help, or something to get involved in to network with or meet nice people with common interests. Stuff like getting involved in affinity networks feels encouraged, although sometimes there's a struggle to balance time and work, like anything.

3. Excellent work/life balance. This depends on your team and manager, but executive leadership encourages it. In all my time at the company, this has generally been met. I feel able to take advantage of this and sign off when I need to. Generally, my coworkers will respect that.

4. Almost every time a major event occurs, ZG will address it from leadership. Whether it's the "Racism has no home here" callouts and actions in response to BLM protests, natural disasters occurring in the states, or handling the pandemic with an early full-time WFH response, it feels good to work at a company where leadership seems to push for true transparency, instead of sweeping major political issues under the rug or treating employees like disposable workers. Leadership is aware and acknowledges the importance of personal lives outside of work, which was HUGE during the pandemic. I'm not a parent, but there was a struggle across the company with work/life balance - which we know because they took polls and showed results at meetings. It felt acknowledged, and that even when the company isn't solving something, they're actively working on things where employees are taken care of. It took a long time to finalize when we'd be back in the office and what that meant, but the decision to move full-time remote for most workers felt like it took employee feedback into account. They care about retention and consistently get culture awards, and I think those things are true.

Depending on what team you're on (like in any company), you might get a bad manager and/or a team that doesn't fit you. This heavily impacts how your team does things because although there's a bigger push to standardize things, there's a lot of fragmentation on how to do things – whether it's process or implementation. That comes with pros and cons, especially as the company continues to grow. I've had both bad and good experiences with teams, although I felt mostly supported when it came to moving teams.

Some legacy work, though again it depends on your team. Some teams are working on all cool, brand-new stuff. Some are stuck in legacy work that's no fun.

More work still needs to be done across equity and diversity at the company. It feels like the company is a few steps along in this area – gathering data, discussing importance, establishing it in core values for culture, having paid positions in leadership to address equity and belonging, etc. But there's still so much work to be done across gender, race, LGBTQ+, and other underrepresented groups. It's talked about and "valued," but despite the awards we've gotten for diversity, it feels like a low bar. Like we've hired some people (more than the tiny average at other companies), but how much has been done beyond that and talking? For instance, how much is career leveling and guides catered towards a certain demographic?

I've been through a lot of reorgs. Not that people are getting fired, but so much is changing in the company over the years. I'm curious to see how full-time remote and all this hiring impacts our overall culture.

Continue funding, hiring, and pushing for diversity and equity in leadership and across the company, especially engineering.

Show those results, admit to mistakes, and stay committed every year.

Hire people that are core members of marginalized groups into paid positions instead of allowing it from full-time employees already doing their paid work.

Allow safe ways for underrepresented employees to express feedback and shortcomings from the company, outside of their manager or team.