Meg was before my time. I got to see the aftermath and I heard many of the stories. eBay's success was in spite of Meg Whitman. It was a money printing machine. The first employee was hired to be the full time check casher. In the early days managers and engineers got along - then management gave themselves a ton of options and cut out the engineers. She then hired in a bunch of professional management (Harvard people) and outsourced the engineers to India. That was a disaster so they insourced the Indians to the US. This continued to be a disaster. The Indians are very tribal so not only is there office politics there is also tribal politics. Certain casts will refuse to work with each other. So yeah, pretty toxic.
I was there during and after Whitman. When Ebay was power diving into the ground. The story above about Ebay engineering is right on the money. So much politics, and jockeying to get to Sr Director or VP to get more stock grants. Ebay brought in a lot of ex Anderson consulting and outsourcing like there was no tomorrow. Trained Cognizant on the ecommerce business on their own dime, by paying outrageous fees for people with zero background in ecommerce or internet scale or data center ops. When times got tough they fired most contractors and insourced as described above. Very Game of thrones there. Toxic.
I was a very early eBay employee in one of their non-US locations.
The company culture definitely changed between 1999-2002. By 2003 I was gone, mostly due to friction with management, somewhat to do with my immaturity in dealing with it.
In those early years, powersellers were already being actively courted, but there was still a strong recognition of the small collectable buyers and sellers.
This attitude changed as more MBA holders were brought in to run the show. Fees were constantly creeping upwards and largely irrelevant advertising was introduced. There was always a real focus on the quarterly earnings announcement and trying to hit the numbers no matter what. This introduces friction between shareholders and customers, with shareholders almost always winning because the employees all held options and obviously wanted the share price to continue to rise.
Having said all that, I had a mostly very fun three years working there. Just the last 12 months were not such a happy time.
Subsequently, I bought and sold a lot on the platform, including reasonably high value motor vehicles. I haven't bought or sold in over 12 months now.
