Pros
Employees are treated pretty well. Lots of opportunity to learn new skills. The company is trying to move in a more agile direction and the upper management does acknowledge problems that do exist rather than engage in denial. Work-life balance can be what you want it to be. Every project depends on at least one or two heroes to rise up and make the personal life sacrifice to get things done while the other 80% of the team shows up to the office between 10AM-10:30AM each day to bounce around meetings, have some coffee, and maybe do a couple hours of actual work before heading home at 6PM. The good side, at least, is that management does seem to recognize who the heroes are and reward them. Whether you want to be part of the 20% or 80% is pretty much all up to you.
Cons
I very much like working for the company but there are a few reasons why it is only "very good" versus "great". In order to enter the Technical Staff circle, Managers expect engineers to accumulate PayPal Tribal Knowledge and become an expert on PayPal Products. You may be a great engineer - but if you cannot carve out authority on a PayPal Product then you are going to face an uphill climb. The problem for the company is that the people with the technical excellence may tend to tread water ( and leave ) while the mediocre engineers who invest less time in being better engineers and more time into learning more about how a PayPal product works are the ones who move up in rank. Many engineers do things just because they saw someone else do it the same way in a previous project while never really bothering to understand why. As you ask around you soon discover that most people have no idea why things work the way they do - "just because". From a technical standpoint, I feel this is why the company is merely "very good" versus "great" but it seems to work ( at least for now ) as far as the company is concerned. The place is meeting-happy. Meetings to prepare for meetings. And then meetings to discuss meetings. It is next to impossible to jump into a room and brainstorm on the board for 10 minutes because all of the rooms are constantly occupied by folks sitting around in the dark staring at laptops. This is a middle management problem. Upper management is well aware of the issue and does try to curtail the silliness but it has proven to be a tough habit to break. We just love to sit in circle formation with our laptops whipped out and collectively catch up on email while a speaker presents something. Lots and lots and lots of internal tools that just plain suck (sorry, but we all know it). Management is aware and has pushed a lot to improve things and it has gotten better but we still have a way to go. The Software Developers are expected to do everything. From filing a dozen tickets to managing projects to scheduling meetings to writing software to monitoring software once it is live - you can bet your bottom Dollar that a Developer somewhere is doing the heavy lifting. We do have Project Managers but they function more as monitors. Every company has its problems. PayPal is overall a good company to work for but we can definitely improve some things.
