eBay

Good benefit, which includes decent salary, ESPP, and onsite facilities.

Still a highly reputable company for your resume.

Depending on which team you are working with, you may get a chance to work on very interesting and innovative projects.

Majority of people working with you are friendly and decent. Of course, there are aggressive and selfish people, which you will run into in any company.

Company revenue and profit are very good in comparison to the number of employees and other companies in the industry.

1. Heavy internal politics and bureaucracy involve engineers in daily life. Things get done slowly or sideways; some efforts are a total waste. Every half-year, there's a reorg on the Director or VP level in almost every department. How can you expect them to improve the product when none of them are held responsible long-term for new/old product quality?

2. Quite a few managers on the QE side are just people managers and non-technical. Yes, there are some managers who are very hands-on and technical, knowing the real problems, but they are mainly on the developer side. Quite a few first or second-level engineering managers on the QE side have absolutely no coding or design knowledge, or not even a decent level of general industry or software development knowledge. They have been in the company for 10+ years and were promoted from manual testers. Some of them do not have any outside eBay experience, and some have only worked for the same product line for 10+ years. So, don't expect them to be very supportive of innovation or really understand engineering difficulties and solve the real problems. They are more there acting like project managers but only care that you finish it, not how you finish it or if it is done the right way. Because of their knowledge limitations, they are also unable to fairly judge team members' workloads, contributions, and abilities.

3. This may differ by team. But most senior QE engineers are self-sustained, expecting to do lots of manager-level work for project & people management (but without being given actual power). Managers are almost non-existent and don't care, as they are working on "more important" projects or some "process improvement" or "planning." Working on day-to-day work won't get them promoted, so they push the "less important" work to their employees. Managers are only there to send a thank-you letter when a project is finished.

4. Many projects were done by taking shortcuts to meet deadlines, making the product hard to maintain and improve later on. Many projects don't even have code reviews or ERDs.

Change the "Step Up" profile of the QE side, which is absolutely unfair in comparison to other disciplines, as it has taken on more managerial responsibilities, especially project management, than a developer counterpart. It has also been used by managers as a "tool" to push their tasks to engineers.