Good people and compensation, but a sinking ship
Pros
- Exceptionally friendly and amicable people in European divisions. - Pay way above what market pays. (Especially when you take bonuses and RSUs into account.) - Good work-life balance. Everyone respects it. - The company is accommodating of your family and health constraints. I have not been in a better place when it comes to this aspect. - Many team building activities.
Cons
- The biggest con is that the mothership i.e. eBay US is an ancient organisation that controls the European division pretty much in every way. EPD doesn't have any real control over things. Many cons I discuss below stem directly from this. - There is some very good work happening in eBay, but it's all in the US, and some in Israel. UK and Germany usually get the leftover projects nobody else wanted to work on. - Legacy. The projects you inherit are simply ancient. Those who worked on those are not around. Who owned/owns what is sometimes not even documented. You will often find yourself wondering how anything works at all. - A lot of in-house and archaic technology. eBay has had a massive case of NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. They have their own libraries, build tools, web frameworks, IDEs, front-end frameworks, logging and monitoring solutions, and so on. Some of these are very poorly designed, poorly documented, and poorly supported. There is not much push to switch to open source solutions with large communities and support. It's extremely difficult to deal with this. Much more so than you might think at the outset. - Due to the above aspects, the longer you stay in the company, the more you lose relevance in the industry. Many skills you will gain here are specific to eBay's problems and tools, and are not easily transferable to anything. - Constant churn. There are exodus waves at least once a year.
