eBay

eBay is a good place to learn about running a high-scale website, both operations and software-wise.

The work environment became much less stressful in the last two years after Lynn left (no more 2 AM calls!).

There is always some level of satisfaction from fixing the site used by so many users. If you're lucky, you can get to a team with many great engineers. Moving between teams and advancing your career are reasonably easy. The company also generates tons of profit, which makes employees feel more secure.

Bureaucracy in software engineering is depressing. There's less and less room for engineering experiment, as many attempts would get overwhelmed (or slowed down to a halt) by politics or requirements to prove profitability of ideas.

A lot of great engineers left in 2005-2007, and new hires are not of that great quality. Political games and pretending that everything works just great affected the morale of many engineers.

And as you all know, more and more sellers hate changes being done by eBay. It is now difficult to find positive posts about eBay on any blogs... How sad.

eBay used to be a wonderful company for customers and employees. I really enjoyed working there.

Use your human understanding to work with the community, not just stats and analytics.

Make yourself passionate about "live people" who use eBay, not about stats.

And force all managers to use that approach.

Find a way to throttle politic games and stop those who made "making career" their full-time job.