PayPal Work/Life Balance FAQ

Pros

PTO, PSL, diversity, work from home, stock options, good benefits

Cons

Rigid, low paying, extremely large company, heavy focus on quantity over quality

Pros

benefits, compensation, culture, flexible working hours, opportunities to grow, changes means more development opportunities, steady consistent work, see myself long term while having work life balance.

Cons

constant changes, organizational changes, organization moves slowly or making decisions, silos amongst the broader organization and within product, changes in priorities from leadership having a ripple effect downstream causing delays or putting projects on hold (stopping and starting).

Pros

Work life balance, sabbatical, good benefits , opportunity to make more money through overtime and monthly bonus

Cons

Bonus not always attainable, metrics based environment forced to have shorter calls to meet per hour goals

Pros

Looks like the leadership is trying to pay more attention to innovation, although there are some growing pains of transition from traditional banking culture to tech culture. Before COVID-19 period, the work life balance was decent, like an old school place good for retirement/family oriented employee. If you are in a team don’t need to support business clients/operations directly, but just do research/develop products or model in production, you could experience more flexibilities and less politics than in my team. The new hire orientation was considerate and warm, I enjoyed a short honeymoon period after I joined.

Cons

My department has very high turn over rate, to guarantee their own positions, senior director/director/manager level were in a hurry to cover up issues to higher level leadership: (1) Due to lack of necessary technical skills to handle tech team appropriately, insecure junior manager with banking background assigned challenging tasks to incompetent candidates and assign low-profile/labor tasks to competent candidates as a way to balance the power and keep control. (2) Due to frequent re-org, senior director/director/manager were afraid of themselves putting on the chopping board, they all secretly allocated some resources on seemingly fancy but not so practical prototype research/machine learning project to showcase to their leaders, and shifted low profile, repetitive job such as data cleaning to people under them. (3) It’s like on a wobbling crashing plane while managers preparing parachutes for themselves because they have access to upper management’s vision change but try to keep you in the dark with nice words. (4) Everyone was trying to avoid the hard work of diving deep into data. Many built their models by taking shortcut borrowing the data extracted & put in production by some poor superman(usually new hires who is in dark). Some senior staff told me, business clients and senior management only care about “you tell a good story(of model) in front of them”. Rewarding system was broken so people took advantage of it. (5) Senior director treat engineers just as ”numbers” without enough respect, this mentality made the situation worse during COVID-19 period because most my teammates with engineering background belong to one ethnic group (6) Play mind games with gas-lighting ability, skills, personality…or create an event/circle and leave you out to subtly hint you don’t belong, or spreading rumours among teammates or business clients to shift blames to scapegoat. (7) Some manager was both pretentious and insecure, putting on the mask of innocent hard working, outgoing, knowledgeable in front of leaders/clients but turned into a type-A tyranny manner in front of subordinates. If you dare to voice opposition, she would assert authority by - play mind games in (6) to intimidate & shut you down - block your model from passing legal review and enter production - throw a bus of new unnecessary tasks at you all of a sudden - let other teammate take over your project ownership (8) Preventively give written performance warnings to employees who they suspect would leave, so that if the employee does resign it wouldn’t contribute to team turnover rate.

Advice to Management

(1) Focus on facts and details instead of story/opinion/stereotype, otherwise to cover up problems and please their leaders, junior management could play lots of politics for their own survival. (2) Identify the managers who hire too many people but don’t have a big enough cake, which results in unnecessary fierce competition/politics among team, the politics further slow down delivery, which justify why the manager need to hire more people.

Pros

benefits, compensation, culture, flexible working hours, opportunities to grow, changes means more development opportunities, steady consistent work, see myself long term while having work life balance.

Cons

constant changes, organizational changes, organization moves slowly or making decisions, silos amongst the broader organization and within product, changes in priorities from leadership having a ripple effect downstream causing delays or putting projects on hold (stopping and starting).