Stuck in the past, lack of innovation and forward thinking, cliquish exec team - Senior Leadership eBay Employee Review

1.0
Mar 17, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The salary is decent The company and its purpose have a lot of potential It pretends to have a great culture on the surface, so people are generally quite happy clappy, while they observe the decline of their business The CEO means well and has a customer-focused mindset, it unfortunately doesn't trickle down into the organisation and he's letting himself get distracted by his clueless exec team with big egos.

Cons

Exec leadership team are almost all either ex- eBay employees who went to Walmart and returned or have worked for Walmart or Sam's Club. They all sit in their ivory tower and superficially reorg the company every 1.5 years and cause chaos. The talented people end up leaving the company and the none talented ones, who've been working there for 10-20 years, stay because they either can't find a job anywhere else or because they're just very comfortable getting a decent salary by just doing the same things over and over again. The product is a disaster, no innovation and it doesn't get better. The marketing team doesn't understand marketing (some more talented people came in who made progress and cleaned things up, but they were scared away by the clueless, feisty and out of touch exec leader). The exec team are all American/American-based with very little international experience, they decided they didn't need regional business leaders, because they know best. Everyone rolls up to the US now and it's pure chaos. On the bright side, they keep the McKinseys and Bains of the world happy by bringing them in on every decision. Unfortunately, nothing good comes out of it in reality, the company is a slowly sinking ship. If they need to make a decision themselves about e.g. team/org setup, it takes 6 months of back and forth to come to a less than ideal outcome. They try to keep volume up by just doing a lot of senseless price promotions and focusing on short-term performance marketing with diminishing returns, because even long-time eBay customers are turning their back on the company and go for competitors.

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5.0
Jul 13, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Very nice employee friendly company ..

Cons

sometimes bureaucracy slows you down but things have improved in last few years

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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