All fluff but no love for dedicated workers...
Pros
(This is a review for PayPal after acquiring Hyperwallet) Pros (a few of which are partially thanks to Hyperwallet pre-acquisition): - An existent workplace social life with various events happening throughout the year, for those who are into that. - Stocked kitchen with snacks and beverages, occasionally getting treated to catered meals for special events or meetings. - Happy Hour on Fridays (free beer and wine). - Nice, modern office space. - Lots of great people to work with, learn from, and socialize with, locally and abroad. - Lots of fantastic management that do whatever they can to help you develop, but unfortunately don’t have much power in the administrative side of things.
Cons
Cons (largely appearing after PayPal’s acquisition and somewhat pertaining to a certain department): - Certain departments had varied benefits and were structured differently upon acquisition (such as some going hourly, not receiving stocks, while others were on salary and stocks were granted). It produced a feeling of unfairness as the departments in question were very, VERY small and quite cohesive prior to the acquisition, even with salary and task differences. Understandable that PayPal had to align the positions to their own departments, but it felt like the local departments just split off and became almost foreign to each other, in a very negative way, not only compensation-wise, but even socially. - Employees in certain pay grades (not necessarily C-level but just employees in different departments) appeared to be treated quite well, while employees at lower-level pay grades were always given the short-end of the stick (less benefits, minuscule bonuses, etc.), even with years of loyalty and hard work. Never seen such a disparity in treating coworkers at any other company in terms of benefits. - Competitive culture with what felt like a lot of elitism between certain individuals and teams once the acquisition happened. The acquisition seemed to put a lot of people up on a “high horse” which was laughable to see. Lots of petty drama too. - PayPal likes fluffing themselves up on all the good they do and the record profits they make, and though they may do good, they don’t necessarily translate this to their employees in terms of wages and job security. They could do much, much more for their employees, particularly at the lower levels. - Further on the outsourcing: after acquisition, teams overseas were trained on local work and although job security was reassured, that promise was not held up... you can see where that leads to. Plenty of false promises that your job will be secure which turned out to be a lie. - Salaries and hourly wages were laughable in some departments compared to similar positions at other companies. It was easy to understand why people left one-by-one after the acquisition. - Raises were meagre and non-negotiable despite record profits and despite you working yourself to the bone... so there’s really no incentive to work hard as you’ll get compensated in peanuts anyways. - Higher-ups abroad have an eat-breathe-work attitude, with little to no work-life balance that felt like it was pushed onto lower-level employees at certain points. - Quantity over quality was key and encouraged... which led to an enormous amount of time wasted fixing stupid mistakes made when rushing the work. - Little opportunity to move around or up in Vancouver unless you move to the US or overseas. Was a lot different with Hyperwallet where there were opportunities to learn new skills and take on new positions with no prior experience. - Just another giant tech corporation. Free snacks and t-shirts are nice, but I’d rather skip that and get compensated and treated fairly. - Dan Schulman seems to have good interests at heart but it feels like it gets severely bumbled somewhere down the corporate ladder.
