eBay Interview Questions &amp; Reviews

Negotiation Details

Offer was what I was expecting

Other Details

I got the interview through a Staffing Agency and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Group/Panel Interview, a Skills Test and a Background Check.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2011 in San Jose, CA (took 2 months)

Got a referral interview from a friend. Had a phone interview. Phone interview was very tough and a lot of java questions. there wasnt any response after that. I waited for almost 10 days and then mailed the person who interviewed me about response. In few minutes i got a response from hr to schedule a onsite interview. There was 5 people whom i met with in ebay office. Interview went positive and the team was excellent. Even before i reached home i got a email from hr that interview was positive and would give me a call on the following week day. There wasnt any call at all. Then a third party company mailed me to fill out application for background check. I did fill in application and they asked me some documents which i sent them. They told me my report will be sent in another 3-4 business days. I waited for almost 2 weeks and mailed hr if there is any updates. He told there is some kind of internal issues going on and he will get back to me on the following week. This has happened 3 weeks before and i haven't got any updates. I also mailed him last week to get updates but no response. So i am gonna accept offer from another company. good bye eBay!

Interview Questions

weak hash map, finally, finalize, final

thread local, java debugger

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Background Check.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed May 2010 in Draper, UT (took 2 weeks)

I attended an open house and waited 45-60 minutes for my turn to meet with a recruiter. The recruiter basically wanted to know what my experience was with working with customers, what type of customer service experience and for how long. They were looking for at least two years of customer service experience, whether it's face to face or telephone experience, it didn't seem to matter. After they determined that I had the two years of customer service experience, they scheduled a time for me to come back for an interview. Two-five days later I came back and they had me take their skills test which consisted of clearing cache and cookies and being able to make different search engines the main page and then a typing/accuracy test. If you pass that you get a 1:1 interview. They are looking for employees that regularly buy and sell on eBay. The people that work there are a bit like hippies with lots of tatoos. Its a great place to work if you don't mind working weekends, holidays and night shifts. It's difficult to alway have Monday-Friday day shifts. Typically they lure you in with a great shift then once you've been there a year they give you a crappy shift. Their management has favorites and if your a favorite you've got it made.

Interview Questions

Tell me why you should get this job?

Have you ever bought or sold an item on eBay?

Negotiation Details

There was no negotiation, this is what they paid. As far as the preferred shift, they did promise a day shift with the disclosure that it could change.

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview, a Skills Test and a Background Check.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Received and Declined Offer

Interviewed Dec 2011 in San Jose, CA (took 4+ weeks)

I applied for a JavaScript Engineer position via a generic eBay "we're hiring!" ad on Monster.com.

I got an e-mail and a call quickly from an "outside recruiter" who bubbled about how eBay would do anything to recruit me. But, I've been around so I knew that this was just her job and a sales pitch. eBay hiring is an assembly line: an "outside recruiter" fills the interview funnel by convincing as many people to apply, "internal recruiters" get the resumes from the funnel and decide who to submit to their managers, "phone coordinators" spend all day arranging phone interviews between interviewers and candidates and "in person coordinators" spend all day arranging in-person interviews. So, you have 4 people whose sole job is to organize one portion of the interview. (At least, for the group that I ended up interviewing with.)

I had a 45-minute phone interview with a guy who asked technical questions but didn't make me write code. 20 minutes later, I had another 45-minute phone interview with a girl who asked me technical questions and had me write snippets of code in Google Docs. I did OK (not great) on the first and seemed to say "I don't know" a bunch of times on the second. I figured that I'd blown it and wouldn't hear back and moved on. A few days later, I got a weird call from the (internal) recruiter. They were eager to do an in-person interview but wanted to confirm that I'm interested in the position and that it wasn't too easy.

At the in-person interview, I walked past a big room. It had long desks with keyboards and LCD screens every 4 feet. Each "station" was separated by a separator mounted on the top of the desk. They explained that they are moving away from cubicles to this style which makes it look like a call center or like a study desk at a library with less privacy. But, no, it's not a call center; software developers work here.

Since the engineers have no privacy, I could look across the entire room and see something like 90% of the people were Indian or Pakastani or similar. Here and there, I saw a white or an Asian face but the vast majority were Indian and, during lunch, I saw a big group eating around the large break room table and every single one was Indian.

I had 6 interviews over 5 hours, 45-minutes each. The first guy was likeable; we discussed XSL (from my resume) and he asked me to write reverse a linked list. The second guy was odd, had a thick accent, and would pause for long periods, even though he hadn't finished the question; he asked me to describe (but not code) the maximum sum subsequence algorithm, how I could do the categories tab for eBay and how I would design a stock ticker. The third guy had me describe an algorithm to find the total number of matching pairs in an array. The fourth guy had a thick accent and asked me to write code to implement a queue. The fifth guy was the manager: we got lunch at the eBay cafeteria, came back to the room, talked about my background, then he asked me to work through the ABCDE x 4 = EDCBA. The sixth guy asked me about closure.

When the last guy walked me out, I asked how many interview he does. He says that he does about 3 interviews a week and, if I understood correctly, pretty much every week of his entire career at eBay. He's just a regular software developer so hiring isn't his main job. It shows that they do tons of interviews and it's pretty much an assembly line.

I felt that I did OK (but not great) at the interview but I strongly felt that I stuck out because I wasn't Indian. Everything about my interview felt like I was in India, not only the people but the culture, the way of doing business, the preferences, the interests, everything. Don't they realize that the perfect candidate would be Indian? Why not yield to the obvious and just focus on Indian candidates exclusively?

It seemed like a bad fit so I moved on. A few days later, I got a message on my voicemail and, when I called, they said that they wanted to make an offer. Uh, ok. They said that my relevant experience was not long enough so they'd like to bring me in at lower grade but, as the recruiter said, who cares as long as they can meet my salary demands, right? Uh, I suppose. We discussed my current salary and my salary goals then the recruiter said that she'd get me my offer by the end of the day or by the next morning.

No offer came and I moved on.

A few weeks later (after the holidays), a different eBay recruiter called me out of the blue and said that the same group wanted to offer me the job. He gave a pretty hard sell about all the intangible benefits of the job, like the cafeteria and job security and the eBay brand, so I figured that they were setting me up for a lowball offer. And I was right. They made me an offer and I told them the next morning, "Thank you for your offer but I've decided to decline." I did discuss the offer with my family but they were like, no way, no how.

Interview Questions

How would you write the code to reverse a linked list?

View Answers (2)

What complexity (big O notation) is reversing a linked list?

How would you write the code find the subsequence with the maximum sum of n integers?

How would you build a stock ticker service?

Find all the pairs in array that add up to a certain number?

Reason for Declining

The offer was about what I was making now but better benefits and a small amount of stock (maybe worth $5K a year) so I would have been a little better off. They also added a good signing bonus but, of course, that's just for one year. If they had given me a better offer, I'd probably have taken the job. But I actually want to work some place where I'm wanted; I felt that the lowball offer was because they didn't care if I joined or not. I also felt that I didn't fit in because there were so many Indians.

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2011 (took 4 weeks)

Interview process took long time first a phone interview and then face 2 face.They made a verbal offer but later no offer was made no reason was given. It was a time and energy waste from both end.I wish they could be more organized with their interview process.

Interview Questions

Java coding , datastructures, web based questions

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Received and Declined Offer

Interviewed Nov 2011 (took 4 weeks)

Called about 1 month after applying. Asked basic questions like describing an instance when you had to provide excellent customer service in a stressful environment and to describe strengths and weaknesses.

Interview Questions

What are your strengths and weaknesses

Describe a situation in which you provided excellent customer service

More eBay Customer Service Representative Interviews

Reason for Declining

Interfered with my school schedule

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2011 (took 2 weeks)

Contacted by HR and got first phone interview scheduled. Had 2 phone interviews. One programming and problem solving. Second one specifically Java as the position was for a Java Developer.

Interview Questions

Immutable classes in Java

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed May 2009 in San Jose, CA (took 2 weeks)

Standard initial communications through external recruiter, good organization and planning for interview, met with in-house recruiter number for a brief sit-down interview followed by 2 follow-up sessions (each with 3-4 interviewers). Impressed with collegiality and candor of most interviewers. Bit tough to get an accurate picture of what the workload and areas of responsibility were going to be.

Interview Questions

Tell us how you would re-organize the department or go about deciding who to let go.

Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Group/Panel Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jul 2011 (took a day)

there was a written test followed by two interviews.around 20 students were shortlisted from 250 students.the written test contained around 30 questions in which 20 were technical and 10 aptitude.In the first round they asked about skill set and asked to write a program on scheduling a cricket tournament.A second question was on permutation of strings.
In the second round the interviewer asked about OS,network programming and basic HR questions

Interview Questions

Progranm to schedule a cricket tournament

The operations of an operating system

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.