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Interesting problems, despite unaware, non-technical senior management

Staff Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at PayPal for less than 1 year
June 13, 2015
San Jose, California
3.0
Positive Outlook
Pros

Growing network load. Growing staff. Amazingly effed up technologies that you'll never guess could work. Easy to make 10x difference to random processes. Extreme troubleshooting culture, good for true full-stack troubleshooters. Very good people to work with. Great work-life balance (lots of kids on site during spring vacation; no eyebrows raised; working remotely post-school hours is common).

Cons

High management is non-technical and doesn't stay too long, so lots of money/human lives are poured into "projects" that never could succeed, while the essential work of paying off technical debt and scaling the system for each year's new internet customers is done in the shadows by grumpy people that get poor reviews.

Advice to Management

Realize that despite the organic growth from the transition to a fully digital economy, our particular organization is cost-dominated by legacy code. Finishing projects to delete components/code, fixing bugs, and making code and systems more readable and transparent will have an ROI that grows exponentially year over year.

Also, try to listen a bit more to the people that say "no" than to the eager beavers that only say yes and then completely screw up working systems in the pursuit of some shiny new technology, which they will abandon after it becomes legacy whilst only taking 5% of traffic.

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