How is it like to work at PayPal
By: King In The North.
Tags: Corporate Culture, PayPal

I joined PayPal India as a SDE, just after my graduation and worked there for almost 2 years . These years not only taught me about the corporate culture but also gave me a quite a good insight of my life after few years. I have learnt a lot many things , not just related to technical, but moral and ethical as well.

Although it is hard to summarize 2 years in a single article but still I would like to.

BOOTCAMP :-

I join PayPal just after my graduation as a recent college graduate ( RCG, as it is called here). I had a really great bootcamp for around 40 days in Chennai, India. The purpose of this camp was to make us comfortable with working environment and also provide us some technical training.

The training was one of its kind. Although most of the new joiner were from top colleges of country who don’t require any kind of training but still that training was quite helpful in long run.

A proper plan was provided for this camp, which also contained some social work and fun activity.

Hotel room

JOINING THE TEAM

Each RCG was provided the team and location, randomly. Some people have already done internship here so they got there previous location and team.

We were provided a mentors and buddy, who helped us to understand the domain and also getting all the required access of tools.

Technical Work

Now in this company the quality of work completely depends on your team domain and ability of your manager to pull great work. There are few core team like Payment, Risk and others are non-core team like consumer , billing, Merchant etc.

Service size , code quality, new technologies , work and salary hike each things sucks in core team. You can assume the quality of code/service architecture by just knowing that, to release a code change, in core team one needs almost 3–4 days while it is in few hours for non-core.

A lot of stack is still in old c++ code which is quite hard to maintain due to its limitation in debugging also they are not having proper documentation of legacy code.

I worked for one of the core team which was more like a support team for their Singapore team , so whatever work their Singapore site rejected to do , used to come India. Whole work was just about troubleshooting.

As I already mentioned about time required to release a code change which made developer experience worse. There were around 6k Functional test , were required to pass a testing phase. And it used to take almost around 80–90 man hours to run them. The code release was allowed only in 2 days window in a week and if you fail for any window, you are supposed to re-do the testing again for next window.

Apart for this you are required to take approval from “n” numbers of other senior persons. All these administration tasks use to increase the time-span for code release by weeks.

Desk

Culture ( other than work)

A many learning opportunity are available out side your team. Many hackathons, technical talks and learning sessions used to be happen almost every week. One of the great thing in PayPal is the helping attitude of its employee. You can message any member of any team for any relevant info and he would be ready to help you.

Politics : You can fight for parliamentary election after coming out of this company.

Other facility like medical insurance, transport facilities etc. are similar to other MNCs.

Team outing at Play Arena

AWFs : Alternate working force

These people are not permanent employee of PayPal and are not beneficiary of any policy of company and a really large number of employee are AWF, who works there day and night in the hope of getting permanent.

Who should join it

If you are a fresher and going to start your career then it would be one of the great choice as starting salary is good, but don’t stay here for too long. A family person , who wants to work less (I mean smart work).

Who shouldn’t