eBay Reviews

Pros

Very less work; enjoy your day throughout;
Good care of its employee; in terms of food; indoor games etc.

Cons

The company takes ostrich approach. They boasts vaguely of their sales although its going down steeply. There is no new ideas within the firm.
70% employee are contract based. Not much to learn. No career growth.
Salary is grossly less. Campus hires are promised more and paid less.
Chennai is worst; stay away from there.

Advice to Senior Management

Look outside and see how your competitors are growing.. dont boast of your sales blindly

Pros

Excellent Benefits
Free Drinks and Bagels (bagel day)
Casual Dress code
Cool coworkers/good place to make friends
2 gyms
very clean building
decent pay for a call center job
cool appearance visually and cool colors all around
fun eBay swag giveaways/raffles to get stuff

Ebay as a company in general is good financially. i support any changes business wise for them to make money on the site.

Cons

1. the metrics for the TCC program are unreal and too high. they keep getting more and more strict. This causes the stress level to increase drastically. As long as you get good stats you can do whatever you want, and management will leave you alone and give you all the praise in the world. if you don't meet the stats then you go on performance review and could potential get fired. This means you gotta get people off the phone as fast possible and make sure you get good surveys. So a lot of people have to balance between doing the right thing (resolving customers concerns, even if its past 12 minutes) or just telling people what they want to hear in order to get them off the phone faster (aka lie and say i will follow up with you and never do, just to make your time look good). People do it all the time but a lot of it goes under the radar if members aren't leaving you bad surveys.

2. Most of our leaders/supervisors are never around to help, and a good chuck of them know less than the agents lol. Mainly because they were external hires.

3. High stress levels and there are a lot catch 22 situations agents are put in. a lot gray areas that management expect us to follow but its a lose, lose situation.

4. tech issues are very unorganized and there aren't any good follow ups to agents when things get fixed. so we have lie to the customers that call in about it.

5. our computers need to be updated and our tools are kinda slow or buggy.

6. tons of disorganization internally for trust and safety issue, policies, random exceptions that just make you want to jump out the window.

7. if you get sick, call out of work and have a doctors note it still counts as occurrence against you

8. we should have access to available PTO from our house

Your pretty much thrown to the wolves and gotta do things on your own or ask the people near you for help until you find your own 'techniques' to get by. make sure you get to meet as many people as you can and network from other departments! only way to truly get work done in a quick manner.

Advice to Senior Management

There really aren't advancement positions even when they said they made some. Make some more! Make the leaders do the crappy phone support jobs a few hours a week so they can really understand what we do. the metrics need to be re-evaluated because at this rate you will burn out a lot the agents and they will quit. then you have hire a bunch new people all over again. give us time to go to the bathroom without it counting against our stats!

business wise, eBay keeps bringing in the dough! you can do whatever you want to the site until another online site threatens you with competition (which won't be for a long time). so milk it while it lasts, you can't get mad at that. :-) I will continue to buy and sell personally because at the end of the day it is a good platform online.

Pros

I greatly enjoyed my time at eBay. It's a challenging environment, and extremely intense. If you're an ambitious, hard working, and self motivated person - this is the right place for you.

Working 50hrs-60hrs is normal, which can be a con to some. But if you view your career an investment, then that time is put to good use as that time fuels your growth.

o Those willing to own and lead in their areas are rewarded
o You don't need formal authority to pitch and push initiatives
o Lots of training/education
o Great people
o In Operations at least, everyone knew what the corporate goals were and how they were linked all the way down to your specific teams goals.
o Performance appraisals were fair and objective
o Salary was competitive
o Amazing conference rooms, almost all of them have overhead projectors, all the buildings are wireless, etc...
o Challenging and interesting work
o Company stresses their values & beliefs, and really lives up to it
o They have this incubator/innovation program where you can pitch ideas, and the best ideas get funding
o They have a leadership mentoring program to help grow management skills within the organization
o I felt very appreciated by the management team
o Many opportunities to grow into other areas of the business
o On a geek level, it is quite fascinating how a site of that magnitude works
o ESPP

Cons

o It is intense, so if you're looking for a 40hr/week, this isn't the place for you.
o The stock was a big motivator for many, but now that that's flatlined - you can't expect "the big pay day" anymore. Though the vesting schedule was quite reasonable.
o At the time, technical people were very nervous to talk about anything or even mention they worked at eBay on technical discussion forums, blogs, twitter, contributing on open source projects, etc... out of fear of violating strict NDA. And techies tend to enjoy contributing to the community, sharing knowledge, etc... Though I think they've relaxed those rules.
o Bias towards preferred vendors tends to inhibit objective analysis of competitive offerings.
o Development teams of the core platform felt they didn't have enough insight into the bigger picture of what they were working on.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to do what you're doing - invest in your people, live your philosophy, and maintain the vision, nested objectives, and goals.

Do make sure that the development teams don't feel like widget factory makers, and provide them with a sense of ownership.

Pros

- relatively nice campus; good, convenient location
- good overall compensation and benefits
- hard work somewhat recognized and even rewarded
- work-life balance seems to be getting better; flexible working hours
- overall friendly environment, with good collaboration among the teams
  and not much politics at the level of individual contributors
- some very smart people and sometimes quite interesting things to work on
  (scalability, data mining, search, ...)
- experience with the entire dev. cycle - from requirements to code release (see cons, though)
- empowered to address directly most of the project-related issues (see cons, though)
- some helpful processes in place (see cons, though)

Cons

- upper management does not have good understanding of technology and
  software development in particular - thus not really able/willing to fully commit
  to the related long-term investments

- too formalized performance evaluation process - probably in attempt to make
  it accurate and unbiased, even at the cost of depriving it of the real substance

- being a large and not-so-attractive company anymore, the quality of employees
  can sometimes make a collaboration more challenging and inefficient

- project planning and task scheduling can make one feel just as a relatively expensive piece
  of equipment that needs to be "optimally" deployed, and immediate managers don't pay
  enough attention to the individual needs and strengths; further on, the excessive movement
  from one software task/module to another sometimes leaves no one directly in charge of
  the software quality and its conceptual/architectural integrity, and can make developers feel
  too distanced from the results of their work, and consequently less passionate and responsible
  for the future of that software

- actual software development process is too much controlled by project managers,
  with a tendency to micromanage and put a premium on hitting sometimes
  arbitrary and/or inconsequential deadlines over the engineering concerns

- very feature-centric and fragmented software development, with insufficient attention to
   the inherent software development issues, and lacking the adequate processes and resources
   for the general software improvements - from simple refactoring to infrastructure upgrades

 - being empowered as an individual contributor is a mixed blessing - sometimes there is too much of
   "distractions" from getting the most important things done, and lack of support from a software manager
   with enough clout, will and attention to step in and argue for your side when really needed

- some of the cons mentioned contribute to the insufficient software quality, making the software hard to fix,
   maintain and evolve, with too much time spent on dealing with production issues - and that often leads to
   a vicious cycle of not having enough time to spend on vital improvements and technology upgrades

- lower management, although technically competent, mostly lacks a clout and/or backbone
  to make significant changes to the prevailing software development culture

- in spite of opportunities to work on some interesting things, the cons mentioned make
  the job of software developer less satisfying and impede the professional growth as well

Advice to Senior Management

- most of the old guard should leave, starting from the top
- have a vision, courage and integrity to do what is right in the long-term
- give more influence to the people who really understand technology
  and particularly software development
- allow or even encourage lower management to challenge the existing practices
  and make exceptions to the rules and procedures when it makes sense
- although individual contributors are generally replaceable, make sure your assessment
  of the demand and supply is right, and keep in mind that outsourcing them out of the sight
  does not automatically resolve the related issues

Pros

Career development, strong work ethic, strong support for women in the workplace, telecommuting

Cons

There are very few. Long hours, but they come with the job.

Advice to Senior Management

Remain as transparent as you are, and it will continue to be motivating and well received.

Pros

innovation, change, excitement, passion, did I mention change. If you enjoy a fast paced environment, it is a great place to work.

Cons

You will spend more time doing power points for Sr. Management than actually doing your job. Do what is right for the customer - both internal (your associates) and external customers. eBay was once a great customer focused company, they have lost that focus. Too many decisions are made based upon costs. In a CS environment, that is tough.

Advice to Senior Management

Get focused back on the customer. In CS it should be all about the customer.

Listen to your leaders - you have lost a lot of great CS leaders in the past 12-18 months, and it will continue if you don't listen to your front line managers.

Pros

* Benefits are good, facilities are nice
* Competitive compensation

Cons

* Long product cycles
* Decision making is sometimes stifled

Pros

If you are a driven individual, you will be successful at eBay.
Good perks
Flexible Scheduling
Smart People
Pay is above average

Cons

You have to get on the right team to really excel at eBay. A lot of people complain about unfair promotions and the like, but those are the people who are complacent and think time is a qualification for a promotion.

Advice to Senior Management

I honestly think that senior management is doing a great job. The only thing I would say is that they need to reward innovation more.

Pros

The pay is good.
Great benefits .
Great people to work with.
Paid 30 day sabbatical after 5 years of service

Cons

Management is clueless
Slow to address staffing shortages

Advice to Senior Management

Instead of being concerned about your next promotion, pay more attention to your employees. Otherwise you will won’t have any core people left to run the business.

Pros

Its the best places to work at United states of america. Nice people, nice projects, nice design, nice development environment.

Cons

I dont see any downsides at ebay at high level. so one thing which i would like to say is it has to look out for more open source technologies rather building their own frameworks.

Advice to Senior Management

look out for more open source technologies rather building their own frameworks. work culture is perfect, and hope to continue to see for next decade or so.