PayPal reviews

Development environment is archaic. Infrastructure is fragile. Code base is immense, poorly documented, and poorly understood. Too much emphasis is given to new features over consolidating and solidifying existing features. Middle and upper management are focused too much on marketing requests at the expense of development needs. Emphasis is placed on development days rather than productivity. Development tools are outdated. Available information is disorganized and not maintained. Developer productivity suffers greatly due to poor code organization, old tools, enormous code base, unstable development environment, and questionable management decisions. Stock price has been flat for the last four years.

Paypal's priorities are determined largely by its parent company eBay, which is struggling. eBay's core auction business is flat and will probably shrink, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of revenue, in years to come. Its efforts to become an online mall with merchandise sold at slight discounts and fixed prices don't seem to me to give it a distinctive edge in the market, particularly in comparison with the premier mall, Amazon.com. A significant number of business columnists openly wonder what eBay's compelling value proposition will be, given the company's trajectory. In fact, in a recent effort to make eBay a safer place to shop, it is likely to run afoul of anti-trust laws in Australia. Thus far, in my business unit, PayPal doesn't believe in creating thorough business requirements, and it doesn't have dedicated requirements analysts, which means that quality isn't designed into the products it produces or the business development processes. As a result, the company alternates between cycles of putting out new products and fixing them. Efforts to modernize the company's technology infrastructure are taking a long time. As a result, many innovative and creative projects can't be undertaken. For instance, the new, semi-annual "lab rats"/skunkworks competition shows off the creativity of staff, but even winning projects are not usually turned into development projects because of techological constraints (or higher-level corporate priorities). Turnover is high, as many talented people leave to improve their professional skills at more technically modern companies. Average tenure is 2-3 years. Until recently, Sr. mgt. didn't have experience in running a big company, and they still make decisions without realizing the downstream ramifications and without communication channels to get the feedback to know those effects quickly. The new sr. staff brought in to grow the company in certain areas (marketing, creative, sales) seem to be authoritarian and hierarchical in their management style. While work-life balance is generally respected, I have seen some software development groups work 10+ hours/day, 6-7 days a week for a month to meet deadlines, and management has not stepped in to re-evaluate schedules. In addition, there is a curious reluctance to establish a campus near San Francisco, where a large number of employees live. This contributes to the high turnover and the problems that causes. I have heard from colleagues, that people in some specialties, like visual design, are not paid competitively with the market.