Pros
Two things kept me at eBay - the compensation and benefits (above average) and the fantastic people that I worked with every day. Everyone on each team I worked with was bright, technically saavy, and customer oriented. It's a great place to experience cutting edge software and see how e-commerce works (the good and the very, very bad). Work there if you want to get some experience and make some money for say, six months. Then move on. Career - not so much.
Cons
Where to start? Even when Meg was CEO management was too far removed from the day to day problems CSRs encountered, and seemed to focus on making the job harder every year. Lower level employees were treated as disposable units despite lip service promoting eBay as a good place to work. Hard to have "work-life balance" when you are kept on a night shift with no chance of going to days, or when you needed to schedule a sick day ahead of time (or be penalized), or when a bathroom break of over 3 minutes is a cause of concern. Yes, all activities were logged by the minute.... And that brings me to metrics. Don't work at eBay if you like to work at your own pace or if you like to show creativity in corresponding with your customers. There are numbers you have to hit every day, and a proscribed way to do it, and it doesn't matter if it is fair or unhelpful to your customers. If your Satisfaction rating sucks because of some new policy that has people upset, sorry, your fault! and you get dinged for it. The company is run by technocrats who show very little concern for anything but the bottom line, and it has been that way for years. The appointment of John Donahoe is the logical endpoint for a management that sees customer support as a money drain and buyers and sellers as a necessary nuisance. They just aren't pretending any more that the eBay community is some shining experiment in democratic capitalism. Reality bites - welcome to North American business in the 21st century.
