Taro Logo

Laid back with no standards

Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at PayPal for 2 years
July 10, 2019
San Jose, California
3.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros
  • Good work/life balance.
  • Ability to work with new technologies (i.e., React and GraphQL).
  • San Jose campus is beautiful, a very pleasant place to walk around and show up to on a daily basis.
  • Expectations are reasonable (although almost too reasonable to the point of being lax).
Cons
  • Depending on the team, people aren’t always the friendliest.

  • Lots and lots of bureaucracy and layers of middle management make it extremely tough to navigate.

  • Code and engineering standards are essentially non-existent. No one cares about the quality of code you write as long as you ship the feature. Yearly reviews have nothing to do with your engineering ability; promotions are often given out to those who have stuck around long enough to make it their “turn”.

  • Internal tools often break and don’t work. Staging and development environments are incredibly unstable, and a lot of productivity is lost just waiting for things to work properly.

Advice to Management

Expect more out of your engineers and enforce higher standards. Understand what it takes for an engineer to be effective. (Hint: developing in a stable environment is kind of the minimum, and you haven't even reached that.)

Rather than throwing more bodies at a problem when productivity is lower, work to understand the root of the problem. Throwing money at engineers to appease them into working in frustrating and demoralizing environments will only take you so far and won't foster a culture of good engineering.

Was this helpful?

PayPal Interview Experiences