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A slow, misadvertised place to work

Senior Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at eBay for 2 years
January 22, 2018
London, England
1.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros

Very relaxing atmosphere.

Long lunch breaks. Ping pong table. Low stress environment.

Nice people.

Excellent location.

Good holidays, pay, and benefits.

Cons

The job was advertised as a startup job at a cool company with exposure to modern technologies (Clojure, Ruby on Rails, React).

The overwhelming bulk of the work was maintaining an incredibly poorly architected codebase in Java 7, written by the acquirer (eBay), exactly as instructed by the US office.

Decisions take almost forever to make. Feedback is loudly welcomed and then promptly discarded.

The state of the codebase is awful. Static initialization is practiced as a matter of course (for instance), and the configuration is tracked through an in-house built and maintained system. Agile practices are spoken of and ignored. No real attempts at resolving the issues are taken.

Any open discourse about the situation is suppressed by management. No new technologies or progress is attempted.

Advice to Management

Fix your system and your process. Accept that sometimes codebases either need to be rewritten from the ground up, or significant, concerted effort needs to be invested in their improvement.

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