eBay Reviews

Pros

good work culture; good benefits

Cons

timings might be odd at times; apart from this there are no major "cons".. its a good place to work

Advice to Senior Management

increase focus on mobile social and local; make x-commerce offer a great value proposition for vcustomers; continue focusing on the ebay brand;

Pros

Good work-life balance
Good benefits package
Stable company performance
Employee Stock Purchase Plan
Great place to work if you don't want a lot of stress or think you are good at slowly climbing the corporate ladder

Cons

Low salary and bonus
Too many restrictions imposed on workflow
Poor communication within and among different business units
Bloated hierarchy makes career growth very difficult

Advice to Senior Management

Stop rewarding poor managers and start putting the right people in the right places. Allow people some room for creativity and innovation.

Pros

N/A ... Oh wait, "bagel days" haha. You get free bagels every Wed.
free soda

well , I guess that's about it

Cons

Clueless management. I worked there for a year and moved desks/supervisors 7 times. They hire over 200 ppl August through October every year and fire them all for no reason May through July. They look for a little tiny reason to fire you. You can't even go offline to use bathroom .."that's what breaks are for"
This company is a joke. I'm happy not to be associated with this company longer.

Advice to Senior Management

Get at least SOME college degree. If you have a question your supervisor will be the last person you want to ask for an advise. They have no idea what's going on whatsoever. They don't even know company policy and can't answer a simple question.
One of the supervisors was running around the department with birthday balloons and cards all the time. If you have an escalation call- she would never take it and would ask you to ask someone else as she was busy signing a birthday card. Upper management should be monitoring supervisors and not agents that go out of their way to do the best they can while their supervisors are watching youtube videos...

Pros

Engineering salaries are competitive with the industry

Cons

eBay is a Java heavy company that has decided to build all its own infrastructure and development frameworks. What they have produced is a second rate assortment of big sounding ideas. A lot of their tools ended up being 80% finished. It really not a pleasurable experience working with second rate internal tools that are 80% done. It's time consuming and it is not knowledge development effort that is transferable.
Peer wise eBay, I, unfortunately, have not had the opportunity to wok with top flight engineers, comparable to my experiences at other companies. The closest I have come are a few engineers here and there who have lived their whole careers at eBay. They tend to know a lot about the narrow technology of eBay and how eBay does things. They tend not to know what's happening in the big world of software development outside their little worlds. In that sense they are experienced engineers with a narrow background. That said, my more common experience at eBay is that the engineers I have had the opportunity to work with are able to do their work. Not well. Not efficiently. They seem to be able to produce minimum level of accomplishment results. They pass along the work not realising that it isn't up to standards that would be expected elsewhere.
Process wise, eBay seems to be pushing towards having their teams adopt scrum as their development process. I have no strong feelings about it one way or another. Good teams produce good results no matter what process they use. Mediocre teams produce mediocre results no matter what process they use and eBay is mediocre all the way through.
The only other thing to mention is that on the surface there are a lot of interesting initiatives happening at eBay. On the other hand, its hard to separate the truth from the reality of those initiatives. Management competes very vigorously to join the latest cool projects and to promote the latest coolness of their projects. In their efforts at self promotion, people proclaim more than what they and their contributors are capable of.

Pros

Good workplace resources. Several facilities available (gym, basketball court etc)
Some very good projects to work on, multiple environments and technologies to explore.

Cons

Management (not really top execs but more pertaining to my org from Director level downwards) is not really adept at making important decisions quickly at crucial moments. Evaluation are not really performance based, and often get bumped up based on the level of experience to support promotion. Does not really matter if you are performing great, if you are not experienced enough within the company you will have to wait for a good rating.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide timely feedback to employees and explain reasons behind decisions they make. Transparency is crucial and trust needs to be maintained both ways. Have reasons better than "Employee X worked 4 months more than you in this company, hence we cannot promote you". If your team is doing well, and is growing it probably has something to do with the hardwork your employees put in. Recognize the efforts, and reward them accordingly.

Pros

Diverse opportunities. Growing company, on its way to being a technology leader.

Cons

Large company with typical large-company cons.

Pros

Brand Name,
The Domain Knowledge and Technical Knowledge that one would gain with any large scale e-commerce company

Cons

eBay's home grown technologies, processes and testing methodologies are very outdated
Since eBay uses it's own technologies many developers lose track of what's going on in the software technology world and as a result find harder to sell themselves outside of eBay and get stuck there for almost ever.
You can find a lot of technically incompetent people at responsible top positions making bad decisions all the time. These are the people who don't recognize and motivate the really few skilled people within.
Innovations invite only jealousy than encouragement or appreciation.
Treatment to contractors is especially very bad. Ideas from them are not encouraged.They never get to know how they have been evaluated. Managers hardly even speak to them.

Pros

1) excellent opportunity to learn new technologies
2) smart engineers.

Cons

1) Lot of poltics at upper level.
2) Promotions are driven by how well you know the upper management

Pros

Good business model, strategic direction or intent thereof

Cons

Everything about team and people management, bad place to work unless you do not have an option

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on employees

Pros

Good pay, good benefits, good location, good culture.

Cons

No potential to move up, work life balance is lacking.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide paths for advancement and be more considerate of the employees personal lives.