Google vs Zillow
Hi friends, I need your help with next career choice decision. Got these two offers: Z: Senior SDE (P4): 200 base + 350/4 stocks + 120/2 sign on + 15% bonus = ~ 370 first year. Very interesting project and relevant to my experience, fully remote position. G: got cleared for L5, no numbers yet, recruiter said offer will come after team match. Already 3 weeks in team match, recruiter send about 10 teams, all garbage, 3 teams wanted to match, but it's career suicide. I am looking only for Seattle teams. Tried to ping people from my network who are now at Google, but no real help, super frustrated with the process. Question: do you think it worth to continue team matching with Google and reject Zillow? Zillow will wait for response 2-3 weeks max. How is headcount in Google Seattle/Kirkland, is it possible to get into GCP AI platform or other ML related team as external hire? Current TC: 350k 9yoe
Google L5 will easily beat this offer. Also between google and zillow, google is always better.
Google. Zillow’s annual review is totally ad hoc and highly political. Of course, if you have strong sponsors in your management chain you will be fine.
Google There’s a lot of speculation about housing market - be on the safe side for now
2 coding, 1 project deep dive + codding, 1 design, 1 behavior. Very team specific questions
If a driver is wlb, Zillow engineers have a good life
Depends on the org in Zillow. If it's a role in growing Orgs like AI,ZO etc then the visibility and opportunities can help with career path. Really depends on your team. WLB is valued for sure in Zillow but some high impact projects have caused some stress for sure. Culture and people are really good but Zillow is growing fast so will be interesting to see how we maintain it in future. It seems like a top of the line offer for P4. You said your experience is very relevant then you can quickly make an impact and work with your manager for P5 level. It's possible, but in my experience need support from Management chain as someone mentioned above. Good luck , it's a good problem to have.
Do you have any idea how’s the Zillow Offers org/team, it’s a new product so I think its interesting time to join.
I don’t recommend Zillow over Google. Also I see people at Zillow P4 sometimes move to Google at L4. I’d say try to finalize with Google on the team quickly to be able to make a better decision. At Zillow finding a good team and manager is crucial since everything seems to be very political and often based on relationships. If you end up deciding on Zillow try to talk to a couple of the team members and get some idea beforehand. Even AI org has some bad teams with unhappy people.
Go to Google and come back as a principal. I work in one the ML teams. I question why are MLEs even needed. Most of the work is general SDE stuff. There are probably other ML teams in ZG who do true ML.
I don't think Seattle has many ML/AI teams which might be part of the problem. Seattle/Kirkland is a lot of GCP and Maps teams.
Is it true that recruiters first trying to match your with HMs that they work with and if it doesn't work, they find openings in other teams?