Messy and Unorganized for such a Well Known Brand
Pros
Well known brand Job flexibility in some groups Standard benefits
Cons
Generally, a mess of a company. It felt like a startup in some ways and was slow to move, like a behemoth corporation in other ways. (Think of it as the worst of both worlds.) Teams are global, and spread across many time zones and regions. This caused great difficulty in task sharing. Also, the differences in work culture and employment regulations has a general negative impact on the U.S. employees. PTO and sick time rules are not consistent across the globe, so this results in the U.S. employees getting leaned on harder than others. (Yes, I know pay scales are different.) My point is, it felt unbalanced a lot of the time. Project management and oversight was a mess, leaving it to project management software, people managers, and the contributing project team members to manage things on their own. Their knowledge systems were generally out of date, overly complex, and rarely updated. This was a well-known fact, but was never addressed. Finding the right answer to anything was just left to knowing the right people to ask and an exercise in frustration. Lastly, the most recent round of layoffs (10% of the company in total) seemed harsh, flippant, and overly reactive, especially considering what they did shortly after with a HUGE technology purchase that never paid off while I was there. My biggest reason for leaving though? The layoffs. Once a company does it, it becomes easier for them to do it again, and it destroys most teams in the long run. I saw no future at eBay.
