PayPal

The benefits are okay, probably the only real positive when comparing a big company like this to a sweet little startup where you'll be given fun and interesting challenges, and where people speak in human languages and not in acronyms and corp-speak.

The salary is fair* (it was good but now it's stagnant; they suspended salary increases and bonuses).

It's changing a lot with all the off-shoring and the ever-worsening work conditions, which have triggered an exodus of the best and brightest, but still there are some genuinely decent co-workers (mixed in with some genuinely not-so-decent butt-kissers).

Managers, their sycophants, and those outside of the technology organizations look like they have a pretty good time. When reading other reviews, pay attention to job titles, and you'll see how most engineers skew towards the unhappy side of the scale, and those in other organizations seem to be far more content with PayPal employment. Also, if you're considering this place for your next employer, read the eBay reviews as well; they are the company that owns us, and their culture is fast encroaching on ours.

*You can look up the salaries, and those not in California will probably consider them very high. But the cost of living here is pretty brutal, so those of you scoping this place out for a possible move would be well advised to look into how expensive this area is.

• Being owned (anchored) by eBay.
• Being a financial institution and not a software company in how we are run. Scott Thompson, a former Visa guy, has pretty much destroyed the Silicon Valley vibe the company had and driven off the more creative and brilliant rank-and-file developers.
• Our customers generally resent our draconian policies and fees. Read articles with comment sections, anything related to PayPal or eBay (PayPal's parent), and you will see how much venom people spew at us. If they weren't so right, I think it wouldn't weigh so heavily on my sense of job satisfaction.
• Salary freeze. Even though we at PayPal delivered double-digit growth, being part of eBay meant the company as a whole didn't do well, so we all get punished.
• Getting eBay options. We recently fell into the single digits, while Amazon, eBay's closest competitor, has been soaring up into the 70s, nullifying the excuses our executives keep blabbing about the economy being the cause. Everyone in and out of the company knows it's the direct result of our incompetent management.
• Having a board of directors that doesn't fire the head of eBay. Read the eBay reviews to see how much he's reviled by our co-workers over on the eBay side of the company.
• With billions in the bank, we had a layoff which was totally unnecessary. Yet, just because other companies are doing it, the clown-show-exec-staff decided to shrink the teams, then go on a shopping spree to buy Paylater for more than a billion. This is what I hate. Times are tough, and they figure they can do anything they want, and people aren't in a position to quit. Well, sadly, they might be able to do so now, but they're paying a high cost in terms of morale and retaining the best of the best, who can find work in any economy.
• Having processes and procedures piled on all the time. Doing ANYTHING is an exercise in frustration at PayPal.
• The corporate network is slow, really slow. We're a high-tech company, really?
• Most of our tools are subpar and sluggish.
• Getting any suggestions to percolate up through the lower management filter to higher levels is impossible.
• Bonuses (back when we actually had them) were tied to shared goals that are never fully met. Many of my co-workers look at the most prominent of the goals, known as A.T.B. (average time to business), as a simple scam to limit bonus payouts. It's nice to know that we grunts, who work like crazy, get chiseled out of our bonuses by the multi-million-dollar bonus-earning clowns up top.
• Metrics collection and "meeting the numbers" frequently interfere with getting the real work done.
• There are ever-increasing demands that we do more in less time. Unless you brown-nose your way into a cozy relationship with your boss, you get no concessions for the extra time and efforts.
• To summarize, PayPal is a very frustrating place to work. I've decided I'll hold this job a while longer (while the economy is so crazy), but as soon as things calm down some, I'm going to fire this company and find a place that isn't so infested with incompetent management and which isn't so completely obsessed with keeping everyone buried in processes and pointless side tasks.

• Fire each other. Seriously, it's absolutely sad how much management we have, and how completely ineffectual a vast majority of our "leadership" actually is. Ask ANY current employee how often they see managers doing anything other than meeting with other managers, then coming back with further ways to over-complicate the work flows and frustrate the individual contributors.

• Upgrade the playgrounds, stages, feature pools, and network.

• Upgrade the tools we use, making functionality, speed, and ease of use primary considerations, not metric gathering as is the current rule.

• Simplify the release process.

• Stop changing the release process every release.

• Size projects better. We push too much with too many bugs, not because we code or QA badly, but because there's not enough time for people to do a craftsman-like job. We have a "rush everything" strategy, which results in too many live site bugs, too many emergency bug fixes, and too many emergency feature requests. Changing the live site shouldn't be such a casual activity.

• Take a look at the scheduling that's being done, and re-done, then modified, then re-modified, and ask yourself why we plan like this. We spend inordinate amounts of time doing crazy stuff, which takes away from our primary duties, which suffer like crazy because we play games like this.

• Consider not off-shoring so many of our jobs.

• Get over the obsession with automation. I know you fantasize about having scripts that don't draw salaries instead of engineers who do. But look at the reality of what you're pouring into this ineffectual tactic. Automation is a nice supplemental strategy, on a limited scale.