Really sorry to hear that you are facing a layoff. This seems like it could have been prevented after 100-200 bad purchases. How could this be blamed on an algorithm? What really went wrong?
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Women, help me understand why this is inspirational
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80L INR Bangalore or 200k CAD Vancouver?
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What happens when most of your team is Indian?
There were multiple instances of offers made by the algorithm for 150%-225% of the market prices for some properties. If Zillow acquired a significant amount of those houses at such prices, what’s their profit margin after flipping and trying to sell? Either negative or very small. Also, too much demand that it’s almost impossible to find contractors right away now.
How was there no human oversight from Ops or others to let this happen? We are not talking about buying paper clips. This feels like a catastrophic failure on multiple levels. How did it go unchecked for so long?
ML Eng was a Stanford graduate. They trusted his model doesn’t need human intervention
It's because they rejected me and I wasn't there to stop it.
Ok sleep well!
This is the only correct answer.
Are folks from eng and product affected?
Yes.
Ex-Zillow from AI. So I was pretty close to teams affected. They are trying their best not to. Many AI people in ZO are being reorged into other teams as much as possible. Some roles just aren’t possible, but not as much in eng/product. Zillow has been having far higher attrition this year, this will make it far worse. They will try to hold onto as many people as they can because eng from all over the company will be looking to leave. This is devastating to morale/mission.
Their problem did not fit an LC pattern
No one told them zestimates weren't real?
Lmao
🤣🤣🤣
How can they be this idiot. I read news reports of a guy saying he listed very high 490 something and had no offers and zillow came with 534. This like a basic check which any of their buyer agent can tell.
Basically he tanked Zillow in some revenge
I hope he came back 8 months later to buy it back for 475
They thought they were bigger than the market and could completely manipulate it The strategy was buy 10 homes at market or even above.. then buy another 1-2 above that and they'll all reprice higher .. except we're already at a top Would have worked if they bought in 2020 instead of 2021
I don’t think that was the strat or they would have been doing this years ago. I’ve seen them sell at a LOSS consistently despite the year.
If that’s the case, no reason to feel bad for anyone working their. Don’t apologize OP
Lol, AI went wrong..oops, actually the engineers were wrong. Your models are only as good as your underlying assumptions.
Or as the saying goes, your model is only as good as the worst engineer that contributed to it.
I like that.
I refuse to believe that someone somewhere said “let’s buy hundreds and hundreds of homes based on an algorithm, and never pause to make sure that we aren’t getting screwed”. Their logic probably prioritized lowest cost over throughput, too. So imagine offering X% below your actual estimate by default AND still ending up over 50% above market. Absolutely unbelievable. I never used the facepalm emoji before and I find the temptation hard to resist right now.
"X% below your actual estimate", so their actual estimates were 5-10 X the original price?
You don’t know Zillow leadership. They absolutely have enough hubris to trust their algo enough to destroy their company.
We should wait for Opendoor’s earnings to see if it is industry tank or single company’s bad operation.
i was thinking of buying puts yesterday
Fuck yeah I’m in. When is this going down