PayPal reviews

PayPal has a tradition of documenting code poorly, and of performing reorgs every 3 years. This combination makes it almost impossible to change any code: you probably cannot find anybody who knows what the code does. If you find that person -- or if you are a person who knows what the code does -- then the process of getting approval to make a change is tedious, and again, frustrated by occasional reorgs. People working in Austin or Scottsdale are often more frustrated than those in San Jose.

Fractured technical leadership. Management is a mess. Massive technical debt and encumbering weight of a system that was has been continually bolted onto with duck tape solutions. The system is almost impossible to actually test and verify. The vast majority of the technical staff had no idea how the entire system worked. Proprietary SOAP protocol for services. Around 2000 internal services that are almost untraceably dependent on each other and often have duplicated/triplicated functionality. Little actual will or ability to reign in the system bloat. Basically a lot of senior people that had many others running in circles just so they could justify their positions. At one point we were told that if we weren't making every possible purchase with PayPal we shouldn't work there. So there was quite a bit of pressure to drink the Kool-Aid. Internal and incestuous politics with ebay. Very poor on-boarding of new acquisitions and newer ideas. From what I could tell it was a mostly a brain drain and then toss mentality of newer more agile tech and companies.