PayPal

The pay and benefits are good, vacation time is untracked, and you're unlikely to ever get heat for anything because there's very little accountability.

All I can say is that PayPal suffers from an intransigent culture of non-cooperation among development groups.

Every piece of vital development, deployment, and project management infrastructure is (GitHub, Jira, Jenkins, Slack, Node.js, and on and on) completely siloed. The team running within that silo is far more interested in keeping everyone else out than they are in cooperating for the common good of development teams.

If you ever have a suggestion or a request for a change to one of these infrastructure items, whether it's a direct necessity for one of your project requirements or just something you thought of that would benefit the development experience of everyone using it, the team running that silo will put a truly impressive amount of time and energy into preventing it from happening. They generally go down this ladder of stonewalling tactics:

• Make it as difficult as possible to find out what team is managing the item in question.
• Make it as difficult as possible to contact anyone on that team.
• When contacted, avoid responding to the inquiry.
• When forced to respond by upper management or public pressure, explain how team policy makes it impossible to implement the request (and hope they don't remember that your team policy is self-imposed).
• Perpetually claim to be understaffed. Luckily, it doesn't matter how many dedicated team members you actually have, because nobody will ever call you out for not really being understaffed.
• When some new VP of something or other joins the company and decides to implement a major change and it's all hands on deck, claim you are currently dedicating all resources to that VP's new pet project, regardless of whether your team actually has any connection to the project.
• If all of the above still fails to deter other teams from making requests or suggestions, then just stop responding to them. There is no escalation procedure for interteam conflicts that reaches anyone with any actual authority, so no team is ever held accountable for refusal to cooperate with other teams.

I don't even know how you begin to cure a development culture this sick. I've been a software engineer professionally for over a decade, and I've never seen a development culture so obsessed with not getting things done at any cost.

The most frustrating part is that I can't even identify where it comes from. I interact with a large number of different developers from different teams in different areas of the company, and the vast majority of them are very lively and helpful. But somehow, whenever we need to make the slightest change to anything that isn't 100% directly under our control, the new team we have to interact with is invariably completely unhelpful and intransigent. I have no idea whatsoever where the root of this problem is.