The company is incredibly slow and bureaucratic. Learning DOES NOT come easy here, especially with the massive amounts of poorly written legacy infrastructure bogging everybody down. Most of the time, you're learning how to deal with frustrating company-specific internal tools and processes rather than learning overall development skills that are applicable to other jobs. It's also far from a meritocracy. It's very hard to move up, and the levels are based more on your age and amount of experience rather than your actual skill. My biggest problem though is the outdated culture. The company is still struggling to adjust to a truly agile system, and a lot of the engineering base is unwilling to move from old technologies. There's a large focus on specialization here with very little emphasis on learning and growing. The company is still reeling from the old organizational structure of all of the engineers being split into QA and development, leaving it with many QA engineers who can barely write code and are unwilling to learn. There are also random company policies like internal code and hiring freezes that keep it from moving forward. The technical infrastructure is quite poor. Internal tools go down literally every day, making it very hard for developers to get work done. The code contribution process is weak overall. Version control isn't properly leveraged, a lot of "hacks" are pushed to production, code review isn't adequate a lot of the time; in short, a lot of the people here are frankly lazy and perfectly okay adding to the technical debt. There's also a lot of work that has been outsourced, which is unfortunate because outsourced code is usually completely awful and sometimes you have to stay up late to interface with the engineers overseas. Lastly, PayPal can be VERY political. There are a lot of people who would rather "play the game" instead of actually working. The word on the street is definitely true about the main San Jose campus.
In short, if you're someone who's "got the fire", PayPal is NOT the place for you. The learning opportunities are sparse, and it's hard to move up (get promoted) or sideways (join a different team and/or learn something new).
