Old school shareholder dictatorship - Software Engineer II eBay Employee Review

3.0
Mar 7, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The culture is generally relaxed and human and wages and benefits tend to match those of other Internet stalwarts. In certain roles, attractive travel benefits tend to be offered and the right candidates in certain disciplines will also receive speedy upward oriented career paths.

Cons

Shareholders dictate the company's actions, so any negative change in stock performance or stockholder opinion will immediately have consequences for employees. These can range from travel bans and perk cuts to massive reorganizations and layoffs. As previous reviewers pointed out, eBay loves reorganizations as they provide the perfect get out of jail free card for incompetent managers. Another such device is acquisition. They prefer to spend huge sums on buying technology start-ups instead of investing internally. Note that the company sees itself as a commerce company that acts like a retailer internally, not a technology or internet company, in spite of what they may state publicly. As such, the main focus of its core business is on marketing, not on technology, and developers therefore generally fare worse than their marketing colleagues. The latter also can rely on third parties doing much of their work and thereby get promoted and receive raises much faster. For eBay management, business expediency is everything, so if your desires cannot be subordinated to any pure market based measure or you do not speak MBA, you will rarely find long term happiness here.

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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.

3.0
Jun 20, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Relaxing culture. family first. Stock performance is generally good for the recent two years and huge benefit if you're eligible for ESPP. Stable product with large customer base means you get opportunity to work on project with real impact.

Cons

1. Blind push for AI and leadership expect unrealistic efficiency improvement 2. Layoff every year in Feb (2024, 2025, 2026) and sometimes can feel the tension in team 3. Legacy tech stack with isolated and fragile infrastructure. Developer friction is a real pain. You get random infra down every once a while and internal support becomes even worse since they started offshoring to LCOL area in 2025. 4. Hiring freeze in San Jose... just expect more layoff coming up + frequent meetings at night / early morning across regions

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