eBay

I greatly enjoyed my time at eBay. It's a challenging environment and extremely intense. If you're an ambitious, hardworking, and self-motivated person, this is the right place for you.

Working 50-60 hours is normal, which can be a con to some. But if you view your career as an investment, then that time is put to good use, as that time fuels your growth.

• Those willing to own and lead in their areas are rewarded.
• You don't need formal authority to pitch and push initiatives.
• Lots of training and education.
• Great people.
• In Operations, at least, everyone knew what the corporate goals were and how they were linked all the way down to your specific team's goals.
• Performance appraisals were fair and objective.
• Salary was competitive.
• Amazing conference rooms, almost all of them have overhead projectors; all the buildings are wireless, etc.
• Challenging and interesting work.
• The company stresses its values and beliefs and really lives up to them.
• They have this incubator/innovation program where you can pitch ideas, and the best ideas get funding.
• They have a leadership mentoring program to help grow management skills within the organization.
• I felt very appreciated by the management team.
• Many opportunities to grow into other areas of the business.
• On a geek level, it is quite fascinating how a site of that magnitude works.
• ESPP.

It is intense, so if you're looking for 40hr/week, this isn't the place for you. The stock was a big motivator for many, but now that that's flatlined, you can't expect "the big pay day" anymore. Though the vesting schedule was quite reasonable. At the time, technical people were very nervous to talk about anything or even mention they worked at eBay on technical discussion forums, blogs, Twitter, or contributing on open-source projects, etc., out of fear of violating strict NDAs. Techies tend to enjoy contributing to the community and sharing knowledge, etc. Though I think they've relaxed those rules. Bias towards preferred vendors tends to inhibit objective analysis of competitive offerings. Development teams of the core platform felt they didn't have enough insight into the bigger picture of what they were working on.

Continue to do what you're doing: invest in your people, live your philosophy, and maintain the vision, nested objectives, and goals.

Do make sure that the development teams don't feel like widget factory makers, and provide them with a sense of ownership.