eBay reviews

A super political work environment - I've worked at banks with less political BS. Very top heavy. There is lots of talk about "innovation" and "work life balance", it is all lip service. Innovation does not happen here (not even in the labs or search), work life balance is a joke - I have to tell a story re: WLB - at one of the (very very frequent) organizational all hands meetings, management decided to talk about the "work life balance" initiative, it was a 9am meeting and, shock, I was there - because I was up all night working around a severe bug in the ridiculous V3 code base; so I started nodding off in the meeting - that's irony for you. in the nominal 40 hour work week, I would spend a minimum of 15 hours in meetings. Every week. Every. Single. Week. And for about 3 weeks every quarter, I would spend over 25 hours a week in meetings. If for some reason you have to work with the CS teams in SLC, god help you. The single most back-biting group of vermin I've ever seen. Just horrendous.

Three words: politics, politics & politics. The working environment reflects Meg Whitman's own political style ... which is to say ruthless and passive-aggressive. Meg and her leadership team managed to transform Pierre's utopian vision and great business idea into a sharp-edged organization feeding the Street quarter to quarter. What a shame. Meg's gone now but the die is cast ... I'm still in touch with lots of friends at eBay and nothing's really changed -- except they renamed eBay Park "Whitman Campus" and now there's a Hooters across the street. I'll bet Meg's blueblooded sensibilities are deeply offended by that ... hilarious. Anyway, I ultimately left eBay because I couldn't square the incredible opportunity there with how they've sucked all the life out of Pierre's original vision. That, and because it's a sweatshop that inevitably burns people out and then tells them they seem less engaged. Wha??