Contact-to-Hire - I started at Zillow as a contract-to-hire employee. The contract-to-hire process was the worst. Despite being identical in function to every other Zillow employee, I felt like I was treated as a 2nd class citizen while a contractor. Contractors get terrible benefits, are excluded from certain events/activities, and when you are finally converted you lose your hire date - so all the time you spent as a contractor doesn't count. One thing that really made me feel excluded as a contractor was the fact I didn't get a z-Pal, which is a program they have for new hires that pairs them with someone from outside their team to bond with and introduce them to the company in a more informal way. The only reason people have to go through this unfortunate process is because management wants to make easier to let employees go if they don't live up to their expectations (my manager admitted this), which is a pretty bleak way of looking at it.
Growing Pains - As things scale up, Zillow has experienced growing pains in a few areas. I feel like leadership really needs to step it up on transparency and communication. As an individual contributor I feel like I'm in the dark on what's going on. Sometimes changes happen and I find out weeks later that something had changed. So not only do I not have the chance to provide feedback and be involved in the process, I don't even get looped in on the change. Lower and middle-management could work on communicating out the direction and vision for our org.
