Senior Management Has Little/No Clue! - Anonymous employee eBay Employee Review

2.0
May 18, 2009
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

No matter what it's become, eBay is still the place the pioneered ecommerce. There's something to be said for that - and to the extent that you can squeeze some learning out of the heritage of the place it's a good place to be.

Cons

Senior Management (and I mean the TOP senior management) has no clue what they're doing. They don't actually use the site, and spend all of their time looking at data about OTHER PEOPLE who use the site. They then try to draw conclusions based on their review of that data, but since they have no visceral experience with the site their conclusions are often incorrect in subtle ways that doom whatever initiative they're proposing. They then try to remedy this situation by looking at even more data, and the cycle continues. John Donahoe has never RUN a real company (consulting doesn't count), and it all starts with him.

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5.0
Jul 14, 2026
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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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