Average company which lives in 2000's - Software Engineer III eBay Employee Review

2.0
27 Apr 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

* Big company * CEO has vision (but it will take years to change the engineering team culture) * People recognize it (Although they seem to be sad that you are working there and start asking why you are not working at Amazon) * Good work life balance * Some colleagues very helpful and knowledgable * Free breakfast

Cons

* They mostly hire average people. If you are above average, you will have a hard time growing. Your ideas get shot down, you get resistance from low performers. *Most senior people wont help you learn the process and tools and there is very less documentation about them. I believe this is a way to keep your seat: Do not write documentation so you cannot be replaced easily by a better engineer. *If you are average or below average you are in paradise. You will get promoted even if you just do minimal work but stay in the company. No incentive to care about the product, the code , or whatever you are doing. * They don't keep up with the technology at all. For almost every tool, they use a custom in-house built one which is 3x worse than an open source one everybody out there is using. * After spending years here you will learn almost nothing new because everything is custom made. It is only relevant if you stay at eBay. If you leave, that knowledge is not valid anywhere else. That is why senior engineers are trying to save their seats by politics and not allowing new engineers to learn. * To write one line of product code, you need to learn about 10 custom build frameworks which do not have API documentation. You just keep asking around, creating help tickets.

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eBay Response
9y
We appreciate your feedback. As a company that strives for a great work experience for all employees, we are sorry to hear of some of your experiences. We would like you to know that your feedback has been heard.

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