You will almost certainly be doing more optics management for yourself and your leadership here than building a product for your customers. On the surface, everything seems fine, but if you have a good manager, you will understand the truth of this place - everything runs on political capital. The difference between a good manager and a bad manager here is honesty - good ones will warn you when something you're about to do will lose you political points, the bad/cowardly ones just put you on PIP or add you to a silent layoff list and pray you won't go to HR (or press) about it. Neither will stand up for you, even when they know you are doing the right thing by your customers and your company.
In all this chaos, the handful of talented people will repeatedly be railroaded with shameless credit-stealing, refusing sign-offs on product launches of people they don't like, chaotic leadership that ignores their core product (and Wall st. expectations), while chasing after their own tail about AI. Product managers churn out vibe-coded apps over vibe-coded apps instead of talking with customers or writing well-defined requirements. Designers whine for attention, but spare no time building relationships or understanding the problem - they just wake up every other day with a change of direction on everything in progress. Engineers pretend that they are interested in working on AI projects while fixing AI slop, for their job security while they rip the company apart on Blind. Compliance and risk teams just spend wait cycles to show that they are doing serious work, while under enormous leadership pressure to greenlight product launches they don't even understand.
Every idea at PayPal comes from leadership blowing smoke about AI, blabbering incomprehensible word salads at all-hands about PayPal's future, while the real business crumbles under their feet. I know this all sounds aggressive, but talk to any PayPal IC in confidence who has no vested interest in hiring you and you can independently validate any of these claims.
