eBay reviews

Tech stack is atrocious Politics of a large company Lack of credibility of higher management Legacy Java stack with domain specific reinventions of open source libraries that are worse in every way. Attempts to improve the stack get lip service but no competent infrastructure support. There is no serious movement to update the stack and fix things. New libraries and wrappers are written to interface with broken and disfunctional legacy systems so even using the new stack doesn't actually increase code productivity. Almost all of the smart engineers have left or are leaving so you won't get significant mentorship. As a junior engineer I am actually reverse mentoring senior engineers, architecting the entire project, and implementing a supermajority of everything on my project! Also promotions and wages aren't matching what startups are offering to pay now. Due to constant reorgs promotions are hard to come by while less qualified individuals get hired at higher ranks due to age. Something which would take you 2 days to complete takes 2+months at ebay due to the stack and process.

Good for people who can build trendy stuff for demos just so that their managers can attract attention of others and senior execs and get promoted during the performance evaluation period. It's sad to see that managers are considered higher in ranks over software engineers so in the end even when software engineers know the right thing, they are forced to do what their managers want. Some managers even micro manage your day, like asking your status 2-3 times in a day, checking on your code commits on a daily basis, and sometimes even being rude by asking what did you do today at the end of the day. There's too much technical debt and none of the managers are interested in working towards clearing that mess, meaning it will keep getting bigger and bigger. I have also seen some managers reviewing code of the architects and giving feedback as if like peer reviews even though they are not the other person whom the architect had worked with directly at code level. Thus the process of getting the code through all the way to production takes several weeks to 2-3 months