Pros: Good benefit, which includes decent salary, ESPP, and onsite facilities. Still a highly reputable company for your resume. Depending on which team you are working with, you may get a chance to work on very interesting and innovative projects. Majority of people working with you are friendly and decent. Of course, there are aggressive and selfish people, which you will run into in any company. Company revenue and profit are very good in comparison to the number of employees and other companies in the industry.

Cons: 1. Heavy internal politics and bureaucracy involve engineers in daily life. Things get done slowly or sideways; some efforts are a total waste. Every half-year, there's a reorg on the Director or VP level in almost every department. How can you expect them to improve the product when none of them are held responsible long-term for new/old product quality? 2. Quite a few managers on the QE side are just people managers and non-technical. Yes, there are some managers who are very hands-on and technical, knowing the real problems, but they are mainly on the developer side. Quite a few first or second-level engineering managers on the QE side have absolutely no coding or design knowledge, or not even a decent level of general industry or software development knowledge. They have been in the company for 10+ years and were promoted from manual testers. Some of them do not have any outside eBay experience, and some have only worked for the same product line for 10+ years. So, don't expect them to be very supportive of innovation or really understand engineering difficulties and solve the real problems. They are more there acting like project managers but only care that you finish it, not how you finish it or if it is done the right way. Because of their knowledge limitations, they are also unable to fairly judge team members' workloads, contributions, and abilities. 3. This may differ by team. But most senior QE engineers are self-sustained, expecting to do lots of manager-level work for project & people management (but without being given actual power). Managers are almost non-existent and don't care, as they are working on "more important" projects or some "process improvement" or "planning." Working on day-to-day work won't get them promoted, so they push the "less important" work to their employees. Managers are only there to send a thank-you letter when a project is finished. 4. Many projects were done by taking shortcuts to meet deadlines, making the product hard to maintain and improve later on. Many projects don't even have code reviews or ERDs.

Pros: Work-life balance for most of the engineering organization. Relatively more focused on producing results compared to other tech companies. Reasonable investment in technology, so there are interesting roles for technologists who also want to stay close to tech applications.

Cons: Like many large organizations, bureaucratic processes slow things down.

Pros: eBay is a good place to learn about running a high-scale website, both operations and software-wise. The work environment became much less stressful in the last two years after Lynn left (no more 2 AM calls!). There is always some level of satisfaction from fixing the site used by so many users. If you're lucky, you can get to a team with many great engineers. Moving between teams and advancing your career are reasonably easy. The company also generates tons of profit, which makes employees feel more secure.

Cons: Bureaucracy in software engineering is depressing. There's less and less room for engineering experiment, as many attempts would get overwhelmed (or slowed down to a halt) by politics or requirements to prove profitability of ideas. A lot of great engineers left in 2005-2007, and new hires are not of that great quality. Political games and pretending that everything works just great affected the morale of many engineers. And as you all know, more and more sellers hate changes being done by eBay. It is now difficult to find positive posts about eBay on any blogs... How sad. eBay used to be a wonderful company for customers and employees. I really enjoyed working there.