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Nearly 5 years there. What was I thinking?

Senior Staff Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at eBay for less than 1 year
September 12, 2008
San Jose, California
1.0
Doesn't RecommendDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

I worked there for nearly 5 years. It was just barely acceptable when I started. It was hopeless when I left.

If you're in marketing, you will probably love it. Engineering and Product Management will hate you with a burning passion, but eBay is a marketing company that happens to (be forced to) do tech.

Cons

A super political work environment - I've worked at banks with less political BS.

Very top-heavy.

There is lots of talk about "innovation" and "work-life balance", but it is all lip service.

Innovation does not happen here (not even in the labs or search). Work-life balance is a joke.

I have to tell a story regarding WLB: at one of the (very, very frequent) organizational all-hands meetings, management decided to talk about the "work-life balance" initiative. It was a 9 AM meeting and, shock, I was there - because I was up all night working around a severe bug in the ridiculous V3 codebase. So I started nodding off in the meeting - that's irony for you.

In the nominal 40-hour work week, I would spend a minimum of 15 hours in meetings. Every week. Every. Single. Week.

And for about 3 weeks every quarter, I would spend over 25 hours a week in meetings.

If for some reason you have to work with the CS teams in SLC, God help you. The single most back-biting group of vermin I've ever seen. Just horrendous.

Advice to Management

Any time you make a decision, choose the opposite; you cannot possibly do worse.

To the BOD - fire Donahoe, bring back JJ or Rajiv.

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