eBay

Engineering salaries are competitive with the industry.

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 is 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, at eBay, I unfortunately have not had the opportunity to work 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 a minimum level of accomplishment results. They pass along the work, not realizing 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, it's 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.