Reorg and internal bureaucracy and just people managers - Software Engineer III, Quality eBay Employee Review

3.0
Jan 1, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good benefit, which includes decent salary, ESPP and onsite facility. Still a highly reputable company for your resume. Depends on which team you are working with, you may get chance to working on very interesting and innovated project. Majority of people working with you are friendly and decent, of course there are aggressive and self-fish people which you will run into in any company. Company revenue and profit are very good in comparison to the number of employees and other companies in the industry.

Cons

1. Heavy internal politics and bureaucracy which get engineers involved in daily life. Things are getting done slowly or sideways , some efforts are totally waste. Every half year there will be reorg on the Director or VP level in almost every department. How could you expect them to improve the product as none of them is being hold responsible for long run for new/old product quality. 2. Quite a few managers on QE side play just people manager and non technical. Yes there are some mangers are very hands-on and technical knowing the real problems, but they are mainly on the developer side. Quite a few first or second level engineering managers on QE side have absolutely NO coding or design or not even decent level of general industry or software development knowledge. They have been in the company for 10 + years and were prompted from manual testers. Some of them do not have any outside eBay experience and some even only work for the same product line for 10+ years. So don't expect them be very supportive on innovation or really understand engineering difficulty and solve the real problems. They are more there acting like project managers but only care you finish it not how you finish it or it is done in the right way. Because of their knowledge limitation, they also not be able to fairly judge team-members work load , contributions and ability. 3. This may differ by team. But most senior QE engineers are self-sustained expect to do lots of manager level job for project & people management (but without given actual power). Manager is almost non-existence and don't care as they are working on "more important" project or some "process improvement" or "planning". Working on day-to-day work won't get them prompted so they pushed the "less important" work to their employees. Manager is only there to send a thank you letter when project is finished. 4. Many projects were done by taking short cut to meet deadline, making the product is hard to maintain and improve later on . Many projects don't even have code review or ERD.

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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.

3.0
Jun 20, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Relaxing culture. family first. Stock performance is generally good for the recent two years and huge benefit if you're eligible for ESPP. Stable product with large customer base means you get opportunity to work on project with real impact.

Cons

1. Blind push for AI and leadership expect unrealistic efficiency improvement 2. Layoff every year in Feb (2024, 2025, 2026) and sometimes can feel the tension in team 3. Legacy tech stack with isolated and fragile infrastructure. Developer friction is a real pain. You get random infra down every once a while and internal support becomes even worse since they started offshoring to LCOL area in 2025. 4. Hiring freeze in San Jose... just expect more layoff coming up + frequent meetings at night / early morning across regions

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