eBay

There are a lot of really smart and highly motivated people doing the actual work. Pay is pretty darn good, and management is pretty flexible about taking time off or working from home. It's also pretty cool working at a company that is known all over the world.

• Too many meetings.
• Far, far too much time spent generating reports for middle management.
• The annual review process is more like a high school popularity contest and is mapped to a bell curve (just like high school), so actual performance counts for much less than it should.
• The frequency of updates to the site means quality comes second, and there is never, ever, ever a "slow period" where you can catch up on anything.
• Too many middle managers.
• Too many people adding new processes and tools without following through to make them integrated with the rest of the systems.

Stop trying to be Amazon! You continue to drive small and hobby sellers off the site by seeking an ever-larger percentage of their profits from an ever-shrinking pool of sellers. At the same time, you're discarding revenue from listing upgrades and bribing users via coupons.

Re-level the playing field. Even though most of you weren't around when eBay was founded, you should remember that it was hobby sellers that made eBay. Tailoring the site to benefit a few giant users at the expense of everyone else won't make us the biggest again. The big sellers might be moving a lot of GMV, but they aren't making up for the loss of everything else.

Try actually lowering total fees for a change. Totally contrary to the notion of economics of scale, never once have I seen us actually lower the total cost of anything to attract more users. When we need money, we raise fees and suffer the loss of users and feature adoption, rather than slightly lower the prices and attract new users and increase feature adoption.

Stop bribing buyers and turning them into unprofitable coupon-clippers. Since we're not actually buying and selling the merchandise on the site, paying buyers to use the site is money we have to take from the sellers... just like high credit card rates so everyone can have their "reward points". Give me lower costs and let me decide where to spend the extra money.