eBay Reviews

Pros

work life balance
great and smart people

Cons

hard to get stuff done

Pros

eBay offers plenty of onsite classes and tuition reimbursement for continuing education. Employees at eBay are motivated, bright and always willing to help.

Cons

Finding parking can sometimes be a challenge. Moves to other organizations within eBay are mostly lateral. Promotions between groups are rare.

Advice to Senior Management

Promotions when moving from one group to another should be allowed more frequently if the employee shows merit for the position.

Pros

It is nice to have comfortable job

Cons

no real career advancement and hard to get promotions

Advice to Senior Management

please promote people who deserve it

Pros

* There are interesting projects and challenges to work on.
* Bagel Wednesday
* Benefits and pay are competitive, though not compelling
* Sabbatical program

Cons

* There is a lack of leadership at senior levels, and this causes lots of politicking and fighting at lower levels.
* Poorly thought through and inefficient processes; some teams try to do agile development, but still have to do the waterfall process gates
* Poor technology stack, and you're forced to use it. Trust me, it's awful.
* Even features that nobody will ever use are URGENT and you are expected to give up your life to work on them.
* Managers are rewarded for taking on more projects, even if their team cannot absorb it.
* Creativity is discouraged.
* The net of this is that even though there are interesting things to work on, actually working on them is a very frustrating experience.

Advice to Senior Management

Please show some leadership at sr. levels and don't worry about angering managers. Prioritize and assign resources to key projects. Understand the weaknesses in the technology stack and address them; make eBay a place where software development is enjoyable.

Pros

Good compensation
Brand name and recognition

Cons

Management business goals are not consistent and well focused.
Lack of leadership at all levels.
Too many VP's, Directors and middle managers each with their own agenda leads to lack of clear direction. Also a lot of politics which gets in the way of really achieving. Slideware matters more than concrete delivery.
Work life balance sucks. People who work around the clock, give up their lives and neglect their families get rewarded.
Too many reorganizations. Too much turnover.
A lot of focus on outsourcing and developing contractors / consultants.

Advice to Senior Management

Have a clear set of business goals and stick to them.
Focus on inspiring and growing your people. They want to achieve for you and make eBay succeed.

Pros

Pay is OK. The way it works generates quite a few short term contract positions, however it might not worth it.

Cons

Employee have all the benefits and take all the good opportunities. Contractors got to do all the dirty work. Work place is crowded and noisy.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to encourage innovations. Also need to promote fairness to treating contractors. There are quite some bad seeds in the employees that tends to "abuse" contractors (treat them very badly and take all the credits)

Pros

Growth opportunities plenty if you want to grow in management

Cons

Limited technical growth opportunities in ebay.

Advice to Senior Management

Please dont compare a software engineer 2 with a staff engineer while "grading on the curve"

Pros

eBay's large scale infrastructure provide enough opportunity for a database engineer to learn and use cutting edge technologies; eBay is very active to adopt new technologies available.

Cons

Total compensation package is not as good as few leading companies. Lack the attraction of the potential IPO of startups

Advice to Senior Management

eBay required there must be some percentage of the workforce to be in the low performance bucket, this is really not a good idea.

Pros

The company is constantly looking for strategies to grow which allows you to work with cutting edge technologies. The atmosphere is laid back and the work challenging.

Cons

Like most larger companies, the policies and actions can be slow to implement. You have to learn to get along with a few personalities that aren't that pleasant to be around.

Advice to Senior Management

Make money, give good benefits. Listen to the ideas of the employees. Give space to do side projects that are of interest and are related to the work

Pros

The compensation is quite good compared to other companies

Cons

work and life balance, fairness