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Paycheck, Bureaucracy, No Progress

UI Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at eBay for less than 1 year
February 25, 2011
San Jose, California
1.0
Doesn't RecommendNo CEO Opinion
Pros

Good place if you want to get a paycheck without doing much.

Cons

A work culture struggling due to extreme internal politics and low foresight. The company is struggling to shrug off its 15 years of bureaucratic setup.

You really cannot get anything done without struggling against a myriad of management approvals which will never come. The upper management has extremely low foresight in how important it is to give developers chances to work with the technology that is encouraging and innovative.

Case in point is the lack of a "developer relations team" at a company of a size of 16,000 employees, and a good percentage of the 16,000 being developers.

Overall, in my opinion, the higher management doesn't see the company as a technology company. It is more of an e-commerce business company. This is in contrast to Amazon, which at its core remains one of the most technically advanced companies and considers itself a technology company at its heart.

Advice to Management

Start thinking of eBay as a technology company rather than a business company employing engineers, or else a fate like Yahoo is not too far.

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