PayPal

First of all, PayPal is a very successful business, so you are pretty much guaranteed stable employment.

Benefits are pretty good:

• Nice matching 401k
• Employee stock purchase plan
• Stock grant (!) instead of stupid stock options
• Pre-tax flex spending account
• Bonus program
• School reimbursement
• Vacation/holidays, etc.

But medical could be better; for family coverage, you'll have a pretty sizeable paycheck deduction.

The campus on North 1st is great. It has a free Club One gym, ping-pong, billiard, basketball, tennis, and a great soccer field.

Work-related: It's a planned, process-driven, structured environment where things progress slowly but surely. As soon as you are involved in projects, you start going to many meetings (for some people, too many). You will communicate and coordinate across many different teams. You will learn a lot (or at least something) about online payments and electronic payment types.

More reasons to work for PayPal: a great company name on your resume, being a part of something so big is likely to make you feel good, and meeting new, talented people.

Overall, PayPal is a great place to get away from the startup rush, settle down, start a family, have kids, remodel your house, etc. Things do intensify a little around the pre-release bug-fixing stage.

If you are an engineer (coder), you'll probably use about 20% of your skill set, and your learning will be limited mostly to things that are very specific to PayPal.

If you want to continue to innovate and learn new technologies, you'll have to do it mostly on your free time.

You can also take some classes offered by PayPal that are useless for the most part, but you'll need them so that you can write about it in your self-evaluation.

As far as career advancement goes, you'll have to talk a lot, with or without reason or purpose, and stick your nose everywhere.

In every meeting, propose things that nobody will ever do, ask meaningless questions, give meaningless answers, and build castles in the air – and you are golden!

To be fair, I must say that if you actually bust your ass doing YOUR job, you may also get noticed, but it's a much harder way and will take longer.

As I mentioned, PayPal has been very successful financially so far.

Two main sources of growth are international expansion and off-eBay expansion (signing up online businesses to use PayPal).

If one of those two "legs" is cut off, things will turn downhill.

And it's the international expansion that is most likely to dry out because in the remaining non-PayPal countries, the process will be legally and technically very challenging.

When that starts to happen, PayPal has to be ready to make a smooth priority shift to find new sources of consistent revenue growth.

Maybe new user retention strategies, promotions, usage incentives?

Or finally getting into the remittances business?