Just got an offer to join a team at Zillow as a SWE. This offer would increase my TC by 42% the first 2 years (due to sign-on bonuses) and 20% afterwards. Both Zillow role, as my current role are 100% Remote and I live in a LCOL zone. I rejected an Amazon offer earlier this year as it involved relocating to a HCOL and that would eat all of my gains. Pros: - Higher base, so less impact from the stock market. This means I don’t have to max out every thing (like ESPP to get the max comp). The new base doubles my base at ADSK and covers the full TC at ADSK. - Would need to wait many years to get to that comp at ADSK (my refreshers where mid). - I feel that Zillow would have a more defined path for promotion, as it is a newer team with more opportunities for leadership. I currently feel a promotion at ADSK distant. - Would be working on more exciting stuff (AI). I could get more exposure to it at Zillow. - Would jump from DE to SWE. Cons: - My current role is very chill. I’ve got a lot of free time. Changing it is always a risk. - Everyone in my team is nice, would be hard to leave them. - Feel ADSK is safer from layoffs than Zillow. - Leaving my current role after 1 year. Afraid it would affect my career. Didn’t want to look like a job hopper. Would you join Zillow? Is it a good stable company? What about WLB? Got a bit of anxiety, since what I have right now is good, so unsure if I should jump. Note. I live outside the US
That seems really low for a P4
It’s not in the U.S. It’s a competitive salary where I live since we got lower taxes and lower cost of living.
Oh I see. Makes more sense now! You have a great setup right now and seem to enjoy the work, company, and people you work with. Kind of hard to give that up for a little more TC and the unknown of if you’ll like the work/company/people. If the TC matters, then take it. If what you have now is good enough, maybe stay put.
Switching from DE to SWE is a smart move. Way more opportunities and you could always return to data-related work in the future if you want.
How easy is to go from back from SWE to DE again? I also want to get as far away from my Meta DE experience
I would say somewhat to very easy. In fact, with many DE roles more general SWE knowledge is what distinguishes the more senior DEs.
If I were you I would not leave the current job. Enough amount of free time, good team and company culture are a blessing these days. I would never trade that for anything. This also allows me to use my free time to generate more income streams and generate more income from that. For example- buy rental properties and na age it by yourself to save on cost to property mgmt Learn stock market and options strategies - start euth lil and as you get more knowledge you will understand how to make fixed income from it Buying new rental properties is easy as there won’t be multiple job changes. Steady job is considered as positive thing while getting approved for mortgage ( I know this is debatable but i hv experienced it and I ended buying few properties in last 5 years and was able to secure a loan. Let’s just say it worked for me ) Use this time to take care of your health - join a good bootcamp/gym , make healthy food for yourself. Sometimes a challenging or new job demands a lot of time until we gain trust from new team and often lose the free time that we once used to hv Take your pets out for walk if u hv one or you can get one - it improves the quality of life. I hv never been happier after getting g a dog Well these are done if things that I am trading for bigger salary hike and I would not trade it at any cost. Of course it’s a personal choice I just shared my experience if it helps. If not, no worries. All the best to u in whatever decision you make.
Very good advice on choosing ur priorities.
Let me know if you want to chat about Zillow, but I've personally loved it here. The people and teams are awesome. You can read the blind reviews to get more aggregate and varied viewpoints though, everyone has different experiences everywhere. We're for sure all in on remote work, we've shed a ton of office space and are prioritizing any still existing office space to be rebuilt/reorganized to be more purposeful for when teams/orgs host retreats 2x a year. No fear about going back here.
1 try to negotiate. The salary hike is negligible. If they’re willing to offer more than it makes sense. 2 The good thing I see is working on AI but really check if it’s real AI work or just to pull you. see if you can get to know the team and tech stack that they’re using, with that you may get an idea if you’ll be comfortable doing that work. Trust me because I jumped the ship thinking about compensation and brand name but had a tough time trying to cope up with the given work. 3 other option is to give yourself more time, grind yourself more on the core tech stack, doing bootcamp work etc. Being at a team where the work culture is perfect and making decent amount of money is a blessing than being at a situation of being fired after couple of months. Rn the market situation is pretty bizarre. Better to be safe than sorry. All the best, OP! ✌🏼
It’s actually an AI team, that I’ll be working with MLEs and Applied DS on gen AI problems. So my work would be very related to AI. I already negotiated, and that’s the best offer. Still the good thing about it is the higher base, cash is king.
^ You do not seem to follow the GenAI trend that much it seems, i do not want to discourage you, but if you are hired as an MLE for GenAI, it is mostly for devops and a little bit of prompt engineering. You won't be doing the actual mathy distributed systems pretraining and post training work that folks at Meta, OpenAI, Google do with 10K gpus. The packaged GenAI term is misleading. You will be a SWE at Zillow and if you are lucky, work with 1 gpu, do some data processing and then prompts, that's it.
What’s the location for Zillow offer
This has to be Mexico
Seems pretty good offer for Mexico
US residential real estate market not so good rn.
Zillow won’t layoff the cheaper Mexico based employees.
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