Good upper management, incompetent middle management - Anonymous employee eBay Employee Review

2.0
Mar 19, 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There are a lot of nice people and some really smart people here A lot of problems that could be interesting to work on Many teams really do want to do good work

Cons

If you're on the wrong team, nothing matters other than hitting an arbitrary number that does not have any impact on company performance. There is a large amount of power in overseas teams that don't understand what they're doing. This is a very serious problem and will wind up destroying the company if it isn't fixed. The most talented people are leaving because of it. eBay lives on the sunk cost fallacy. They never change course regardless of the evidence. They re-invent the wheel constantly, building tools at an expense many times higher than purchasing pre-existing tools made by third parties.

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5.0
Jul 14, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Really good company you will go out as a leader

Cons

Frequent org changes , layoffs

5.0
Jul 9, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Challenging work, great company culture. There is something genuinely motivating about building for a brand that everyone knows and uses: the scale and real-world stakes make the work feel meaningful. The AI work specifically is at the frontier of applied AI: production systems, hard problems in agentic workflows and evaluation, and real customer impact. Good work-life balance. Leadership is more engaged and technically credible than I expected from a company this size — when I built a prototype, senior stakeholders engaged substantively and supported continued investment quickly. Competitive compensation, sharp colleagues, and a well-sized Austin office with a focused, collaborative feel.

Cons

Like any tech company, there is some legacy code to deal with which can cause friction. That said, eBay has made meaningful progress on modernizing the tech stack and has genuinely embraced the latest tools: AI development here uses current frameworks and infrastructure, not decade-old patterns. Large company coordination processes (security reviews, cross-team alignment) can slow things that could move faster, and vendor partnerships add some communication overhead. But the reach of what you build makes it worth the extra overhead.

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