eBay

• Big company
• CEO has vision, but it will take years to change the engineering team culture.
• People recognize it, although they seem to be sad that you are working there and start asking why you are not working at Amazon.
• Good work-life balance.
• Some colleagues are very helpful and knowledgeable.
• Free breakfast.

They mostly hire average people. If you are above average, you will have a hard time growing. Your ideas get shot down; you get resistance from low performers.

Most senior people won't help you learn the process and tools, and there is very little documentation about them. I believe this is a way to keep your seat: do not write documentation so you cannot be replaced easily by a better engineer.

If you are average or below average, you are in paradise. You will get promoted even if you just do minimal work but stay in the company. There is no incentive to care about the product, the code, or whatever you are doing.

They don't keep up with technology at all. For almost every tool, they use a custom in-house built one which is three times worse than an open-source one everybody out there is using.

After spending years here, you will learn almost nothing new because everything is custom-made. It is only relevant if you stay at eBay. If you leave, that knowledge is not valid anywhere else. That is why senior engineers are trying to save their seats by politics and not allowing new engineers to learn.

To write one line of product code, you need to learn about ten custom-built frameworks which do not have API documentation. You just keep asking around, creating help tickets.

Fire half the engineering staff and keep the agile, open-source-minded people who care about code reviews, coaching new members, owning the product, and writing good documentation.