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Mostly bad product managers

Senior Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at eBay for less than 1 year
October 1, 2011
San Jose, California
2.0
Doesn't RecommendNo CEO Opinion
Pros
  1. Hours are somewhat flexible. You need to attend meetings and hit target dates, but you can run errands and such without trouble.

  2. Pay is fair.

  3. Some of the managers are very good, as well as some of the engineers.

Cons
  1. Many of the product managers don't know what they are doing. What makes it worse is that they pretend to know. As an application developer, you basically work for them. As you can imagine, this is not inspiring.

  2. They built a homegrown frontend stack a few years ago for no apparent reason (why not Spring MVC or Struts2?). It's now been abandoned because it took forever to build something with it.

  3. Not much respect for application engineers. You can say something will take 3 weeks, and if they think it's too long, they'll ask you to review your estimate. If you don't shorten it, they'll get a contractor to do it. Then you have to maintain it. What fun.

  4. No respect for contract engineers. They stick them anywhere they can prop-up a computer.

  5. Some of the engineers aren't very good, but they can be avoided by moving to certain groups. The bad project managers are harder to get away from. There seem to be more of them.

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