eBay Reviews

Pros

There are lots of good changes in the organization in cleaning up the mess we had accumulated in terms of processes, software development practices and in general in adapting other industry best practices.

Cons

Till a couple of years ago, there was not much talent. In the recent years, the newly hired people seem to be of better talent as more and more people from companies like Yahoo, Microsoft jon.

Advice to Senior Management

None.

Pros

The culture and environment is unparalleled. Free soda. Activities. Amazing training. Great group of people there. I read the complaints before I accepted the position and determined that the complainers are probably people that would complain under the best of circumstances.

Cons

The only thing I didn't like was the requirement to be in a position for 6 months before you could apply to another- no matter how qualified. I only left because I moved out of state. The position I had was high stress (fraud department) so perhaps some adjustments could be made so those people are not on the phone non-stop during their day.

Advice to Senior Management

Reiterating the advice about giving some time off the phones to avoid burnout. And taking a look at qualified applicants regardless of how long they've been there. When a position came up that I wanted it was frustrating to know that if I was a complete outsider they would have considered me but since I had been there 4 months they wouldn't even look at my application.

Pros

Working environment is good, Working time is flexible. Salary is attractive. Compensation and benefit is competitor compared with other campaniles in bay area.

Cons

Not a lot of room for career development. Opportunity of growing is limited. Company structure is confusing, job title is highly inflated. Low efficiency.

Pros

- Flexible working hours
- Good benefits - 4 weeks sabbatical for every 5 years of service. This is on top of your regular vacation hours. So you can take off 6-7 weeks for every 5 years, if you want.
- We still receive RSU (restricted stock units) instead of stock options. In this economy, it's a real bonus that eBay still gives out stocks based on company and personal performance.
- Fun working environment. Team outings still occur once a quarter.

Cons

Sometimes, there's a lot of "hurry up and wait" mentality. Information are needed from you urgently at that time but when it's available, no one is really looking at it.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue with what you're doing and let's make eBay the market leader in commerce WORLDWIDE.

Pros

Excellent pay and benefits. Very open-minded community.

Cons

Management team is largely promoted from within, as a result suffers from group think and is incompetent. Very limited opportunity to grow unless you are willing to move to San Jose. Bonuses and review system is basically a lottery.

Pros

1) Hours are somewhat flexible. You need to attend meetings and hit target dates but you can run errands and such without trouble.

2) Pay is fair.

3) Some of the managers are very good as well as some of the engineers.

Cons

1) Many of the product managers don't know what they are doing. What makes it worse is that they pretend to know. As an application developer you basically work for them. As you can imagine, this is not inspiring.

2) They built a homegrown frontend stack a few years ago for no apparent reason (why not Spring MVC or Struts2?). It's now been abandoned because it took forever to build something with it.

3) Not much respect for application engineers. You can say something will take 3 weeks and if they think it's too long, they'll ask you to review your estimate. If you don't shorten it, they'll get a contractor to do it. Then you have to maintain it. What fun.

4) No respect for contract engineers. They stick them anywhere they can prop-up a computer.

5) Some of the engineers aren't very good, but they can be avoided by moving to certain groups. The bad project managers are harder to get away from. There seems to be more of them.

Pros

Good work/life balance for some roles. Competitive salaries. They have reasonable benefit packages. I would recommend working at eBay as a place to learn new things in a fast paced environment.

Cons

If you question management or don't make it your priority to make them look good, it will reflect poorly in your reviews.

Pros

Free Soda
Free Bagel Days
2 Gyms
The facilities are very nice. The company has hired a lot of people in the last month to help with coverage.

Cons

A lot of external new hires in upper management.

Pros

the company provides a lot of opportunities like the projects and tech talks, life-work balance, and the team is really good.

Cons

too many or maybe overlapping technologies, some of them lacks necessary documentation and wikis, learning curve is thus pretty high for new hires.

Advice to Senior Management

for engineers, it might be better to have a one-stop inventories of all the technologies that are being used in eBay.

Pros

In general, colleagues are very competent and very friendly, and they're willing to reach out to new employees. Everyone I've met so far truly wants to contribute to the company's continued success, and most are more than willing to help new-hires get up to speed.

Cons

There seem to be a lot of gaps in functional coverage in several areas. Skill sets vary, but there is absolutely no lack of effort at the lower management and IC levels! If a problem is discovered, everyone jumps in to help; but Leadership and Management skills is a bit wanting at higher levels.
That being said, over 25 years, I've seen that many times, and it all works out eventually.

Advice to Senior Management

Push holistic-view management down to lower levels. Bring responsibility and accountability for end-to-end management in their areas to lower levels (Sr. Dir., Dir., Sr. Mgr, etc...).