Vantaggi
* There is certainly room for improvement here, but that acknowledged, The Zebra does more to make space for diverse voices than anywhere else I've worked. * There have been an uncanny amount of qualified, emotionally mature, helpful employees who have worked at TZ. It's not where it used to be, but chances are still decent you'll find yourself on a tight-knit team that works well together, at least at the IC level. * Parental leave benefits are among the best in the city. They do a good job of allowing you to flexibly reintegrate into the company, allowing you to come back at your own speed. * Generous relocation package.
Svantaggi
Warning: This is a lot. Skip to “Vision” at the bottom if you’re looking for just one reason why you should avoid The Zebra. All right, let's go: ** Morale ** I would consider morale at rock bottom if I hadn't considered that to be the case multiple times in the past. It keeps on sinking. Even prior to the recent round of layoffs during which over 10% of the company was let go, attrition was at alarming levels, with many talented and beloved colleagues jumping the sinking ship. ** Core objectives ** Leadership chases priorities like a cat with the zoomies batting at dust motes in a sunbeam. As part of a recent all-hands meeting, leadership presented a list of projects that were allegedly not delivered, scolding layoff survivors that they were working too slowly. I know for a fact that at least two of those have been completed, signed, and delivered, which to me raises the disturbing prospect that earlier completed and delivered work wasn’t even reviewed beyond its initial presentation/implementation. Throwaway work is an unacceptably large proportion of workforce output, and I would estimate that the lion’s share of it is initiated by specific interventions from leadership. More than one on-site feature exists by diktat. ** Responsibility ** Blame flows downhill from leadership to ICs like a monsoon-triggered mudslide. After pushing through an unpopular, positively catastrophic reorganization that seemed doomed to failure on its face from the moment plans were revealed to the company, productivity cratered. Across the org, project after project was labeled throwaway work or put on hold. Employees were forced off of projects for which they were SMEs. Some teams could not even be sure of who to identify as internal stakeholders. This went on for, and I do not remotely exaggerate, months. After a couple months of this, leadership declared victory and suggested that the pace of work had picked up, only to turn around and ask us to pick up the pace during a recent all-hands meeting. This ludicrous reorg is one direct cause of these layoffs. During the pandemic, TZ made the right call in making full-time remote work an option and began hiring outside of the city. It would make sense, under these circumstances, to explore options to reduce TZ's physical office footprint (options which, to be fair, I understand to have been limited). But because the CEO (who has worked remote since *before* the pandemic) likes having an office to drop into, company *expanded* their office space footprint, an eminently avoidable decision that added to the organization's financial strain. The obvious-from-day-one disastrous financial decision finds its sole perpetrator in TZ’s CEO. Ditto the "do something!" paroxysm of a reorg. One guess, however, as to whether the CEO laid himself off for choosing to toss all that money and time away, or instead chose to axe talented people who had nothing to do with making those curious calls. ** The reorg ** Let me lay into this reorg a little bit more. Leadership cribbed the structural idea from Spotify. The plan (the “Spotify model”) involved using a mix of cross-functional squads and supporting "tribes" (TZ thankfully swapped this language for the less problematic but still painfully cringey "orbits") aligned around core company objectives. Spotify adopted this organizational structure in 2012. These objectives (around which, to reiterate, most of the company has been restructured around) have already been changed at least once. After a haphazard "self-selection" process during which employees scrambled to claim roles on squads and orbits on a Miro board like it was the “opening” of Oklahoma (I guess leadership finds mouse dexterity more important than fit when it comes to team composition), the resulting teams were a Frankensteinian mess. There was a team headed up by PMs with no engineers, an analytics team without analysts. You'd think leadership might look at the results of this mad dash to fill out Miro stickies and say, "our mistake, let's rewind this and try a more measured approach,” but it appeared that, on the balance, saving face was more important than thoughtfully structuring teams. The Black Friday-esque process of "self-selection" was paramount. Fast-twitch fingers were duly rewarded. Oh—and that Spotify model of organization? Spotify dumped it in 2015. This (a fact that can easily be verified; just google “Spotify model” and marvel) was raised to leadership well before the reorg had moved on from the planning stages. As one prominent engineering manager put it in a postmortem, "The Spotify squad model failed Spotify and it will fail your company too." But no matter! The trainwreck must continue as scheduled. One more thing. After these most recent layoffs, leadership announced a top-down reorg of their own! Self-selection is for some reason apparently out of vogue. Odd. ** What drives decision-making ** TZ is run like a public company. Hitting forecasts is paramount despite the fact that one of the most attractive features of going the VC route is the ability to chase scale at the expense of profitability. Instead, spend decisions and (again) priorities lurch around drunkenly within and between months, even weeks. No consistency, no momentum, slavish adherence to trying to hit goals above all else. This lurching—sensing a theme here? ** Vision ** All right. This is it. Even if you feel like you can stomach all of the above, if you care about working on a product that is even notionally value-add, look elsewhere. TZ is a lead-gen arbitrage site masked by soaring aspirational rhetoric. During my very first all-hands (a bit before the pandemic started), the CEO articulated a clear, bold vision centered around transforming what's possible in terms of relationship-building through the insurance product. Trust me when I say, from a product perspective, TZ is only incrementally closer to realizing that vision, and from a revenue mix and engagement perspective, they are no closer at all. At the end of the day, this is just a website buying clicks for $x and selling those clicks for $x+1. It's a joke of a company and I am legitimately ashamed for throwing away such a potentially formative part of my career by helping an entity skim rent off of shuffling traffic around.
