StubHub

Decent location in downtown San Francisco. There is a small employee discount for tickets. The office has free tea.

Unlike most companies in Silicon Valley, engineers are treated as second class citizens. Many of the technology staff are poorly treated H1Bs who management knows that they can force to work poor hours and treat disrespectfully. Outside of engineering, it is a very political environment. It was not rare to be drawn into meetings between two mid-level or senior level staff duking it out for political clout and favor. One high-level senior leader appears to be more concerned with self-promotion through gender politics than creating a great engineering organization. When well-respected engineers leave, they are replaced by contractors from countries in opposing time zones.

After a year of high attrition, we had a manager tell us not to think that the company cares and said we were "all replaceable." I think that statement sums up how StubHub views its employees. Based on the feedback of friends, the only large ecommerce company with perhaps worse treatment of employees is Amazon.

I tried to hold out thinking that StubHub would be a learning experience, and in the end I walked away emotionally scarred. Friends who interacted with me on vacation said it was like interacting with a different person. Co-workers who left compared leaving StubHub to leaving an emotionally abusive relationship.

Fire C-level senior leadership. Look critically at tech leadership. Many poor decisions that go against the grain of successful tech organizations have been made in the past few years, including vast outsourcing and ignoring technical debt for feature glut overload.