Mostly bad product managers - Senior Software Engineer eBay Employee Review

2.0
Oct 1, 2011
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1) Hours are somewhat flexible. You need to attend meetings and hit target dates but you can run errands and such without trouble. 2) Pay is fair. 3) Some of the managers are very good as well as some of the engineers.

Cons

1) Many of the product managers don't know what they are doing. What makes it worse is that they pretend to know. As an application developer you basically work for them. As you can imagine, this is not inspiring. 2) They built a homegrown frontend stack a few years ago for no apparent reason (why not Spring MVC or Struts2?). It's now been abandoned because it took forever to build something with it. 3) Not much respect for application engineers. You can say something will take 3 weeks and if they think it's too long, they'll ask you to review your estimate. If you don't shorten it, they'll get a contractor to do it. Then you have to maintain it. What fun. 4) No respect for contract engineers. They stick them anywhere they can prop-up a computer. 5) Some of the engineers aren't very good, but they can be avoided by moving to certain groups. The bad project managers are harder to get away from. There seems to be more of them.

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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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