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Not as innovating as I thought it would be

Data Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at PayPal for 4 years
June 21, 2018
San Jose, California
3.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros
  • Good people, hungry for more knowledge and innovation.
  • Good company mission.
  • Work-life balance is pretty good, but it varies per team.
  • Good benefits.
  • Diverse, global team.
  • A large suite of classes and trainings for engineers to take to better themselves.
Cons

Ho boy, where do I begin?

  • Pay is below market rate and is being squirreled away in favor of stock options which vest over many years. For example, an employee will receive their annual bonus only 3 years after the fact.
  • Heavy micromanaging via Agile. Tasks are reprioritized almost daily, making the previous day's work a waste of time.
  • Stack-based managing style. The last customer that the manager or prioritizer talks to has the first priority task, no matter the actual importance of the task.
  • Rewards/recognitions are purely political. I have seen people get promoted for the sole reason that they need a higher-level person in that location.
  • Bad engineering practices in non-customer-facing teams. I have seen horrors like shell scripts that write to a file to pass variables to subroutines. This is enterprise-level production code.
Advice to Management

Management is trending towards the business perspective, where engineering is considered "manufacturing" and is therefore expendable/outsourceable.

Furthermore, if a request comes in for a meaty tech project for our engineers to participate in, it is immediately outsourced.

As a tech company, this is unacceptable. We have trained software engineers writing either shell scripts or SQL queries all day.

This makes our company values of "Innovation" and "One Team" ring hollow.

But hey, the stock price is going up, I guess.

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