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.