I was working at eBay as a Director of Engineering (the startup I work for was unfortunately acquired by eBay a few years earlier) at this time (none of us new any of this was going on of course), and I emailed the CEO about my concerns about the performance review process causing people to keep 'donkeys' on their team so they would have someone to give the Needs-Improvement review to (due to stack ranking) and an HR Sr. Director was literally sent to my desk to find me and "discuss my concerns" and she told me "a lot of people in this industry are paid more than they could get at another company and if they lost their job they might not be able to find another job as good". Luckily due to autism I just agreed with her and didn't realize it was a threat until years later or I likely would have said something unfortunate.

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zhivota 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I worked at Milo and Wenig always seemed like an empty suit. Had much better experiences with Donahoe who helped us with the homepage revamp (I was on that team).

One thing I learned through that project was that eBay was a den of vipers when it comes to corporate backstabbing and turf protection, and since then I've come to believe every company above a certain employee count will inevitably become this due to unavoidable incentive pressure.

	▲	ltbarcly3 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I was also at Milo! Have you noticed that the current ebay homepage is very close (but still not as good) as the original Feed demo? My analysis of big companies, at least slow growth shitty ones like ebay, is that at VP and above levels there is a constant war of everyone against everyone to try to manage the largest organization and thus demand the best pay and promotion possibilities either at that company or by jumping ship. There's a zero-sum game, if everyone is B tier then everyone stays where they are and gets the same pay. Since the people at that level at companies like that tend to be imbeciles hired through nepotism or as a reward for previous crooked acquisitions or insider deals the easiest way to look better than your peers is to sabotage them. Since the next level up management is even more likely to be there due to nepotism of one kind of another they get away it. I remember some large projects I was on where within 2 weeks of the project starting people were already setting up to place the blame on other teams when the project failed. It didn't matter if anything shipped, it only mattered that you weren't the team blamed for it not shipping.

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3dedb728-3f77 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That is a threat?

	▲	ltbarcly3 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		She was saying if I kept emailing the CEO I was going to get fired, yes.