eBay reviews

Declining culture, promotions from within are hard to come by due to constant re-organization of upper management

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.