Milk the cow while you can, because that's all that management is doing. - Senior Product Manager eBay Employee Review

2.0
Oct 4, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

eBay is a good, established brand, providing a valuable service to many people. It is seen in a positive light by many people over many years' of use. The junior and mid level employees are hard-working and committed, who really want to do a good job and make something great happen. They will work hard for a year or two, while their motivation holds out. The company also does very good customer research, and has good insights into users. Better than any other place I've known. This information is distributed and well absorbed, even if hard to convince management to act uppon.

Cons

Clueless management; very political decision making and promotions. Not at all objective or bottom-line oriented. No investment in the future of the company. The eBay "Behaviours" are used to beat down employees, and the people that get promoted are typically the ones that exhibit those behaviours the least. No one at the senior management level has any idea of what technology or internet products should look like. Complete lack of technical competency - management has forgotten that they are primarily an internet company, and only secondary a "retail" company. Thusly, the world has lost interest in eBay, because it's simply boring. For the website that pioneered the concept of Community, its absence from the field of Social Networking is mind-boggling.

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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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