PayPal is a company that cares deeply about Work-Life balance, and personal wellness. Occasionally, there will be a project or a site issue that requires you to burn the midnight oil, but for the majority of us, those are few and far between. From what I've observed (and have caught myself doing on occasion), most cases of burnout are self-inflicted. When people bite off more than they can chew, they need to be able to recognize and correct it. Failing that, it falls to the managers to point it out, and ensure that work is spread evenly. Moreover, we're on the laid-back side, and enjoy benefits such as untracked vacation days, and the ability to work from home on occasion. It's very important to point out that our culture does not penalize you for asking for help, nor for enjoying these benefits. Sometimes burnout simply means boredom with your current role. Our culture also respects people moving laterally to new roles. We have internal tooling for job searches, and managers tend to be supportive of these moves. We'd rather have a good employee remain here, and be motivated, even if that implies moving to a new team.

Personally, I don't think that NoSQL is a fad. It's simply a tool that solves a specific set of problems. The real trick to them is recognizing when you're actually facing a problem that they solve. Sometimes, as developers, we get caught up in the excitement of a new technology, and as the saying goes... When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail :)

Hi James, See my answer to Dylan https://hashnode.com/ama/with-paypal-developers-cj793fn2q007usrwu2qcazocb#cj7cdgoyr0084nrwta2lpplb1 I would say the biggest internal "conflict" was that eBay (Who owned PayPal at the time of the transformation), was also developing it's own Node framework. We spent quite a bit of time doing pros/cons analysis of both frameworks, trying to decide which features would be more useful. Some of the early meetings felt a bit like the Thunderdome: Two Frameworks enter. One Framework Leaves

Hi Dylan, I was part of the team that started the Node @ PayPal transformation. I arrived towards the end of the prototyping stage, so I was heavily involved in the evangelism and educational aspects of the transformation. Long story short, there's nothing inherently wrong with Java (other than being verbose :) ), however, we had painted ourselves into a corner by building very cumbersome and inflexible frameworks on top of Java. The front-end development cycle was very slow because of it, so we saw Node as a way to hit the reset button, and start fresh with a framework that would incorporate all the lessons learned from the Java days. (Mostly, what not to do with a framework) This resulted in the rebirth of our open source program, starting with http://krakenjs.com , our nodeJS framework, Here's a more in-depth look at the history of our change that I presented at jQuery Conf a couple of years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJVk6KiOEBA All that said, we still do plenty of work in Java, mostly for midtier / backend services. Our newer frameworks use Spring3/Java8, and are much easier to use than those in the past.

Who?

Hi Charlie, See my answer to Kati Franz https://hashnode.com/ama/with-paypal-developers-cj793fn2q007usrwu2qcazocb#cj79dmiss008xrbwupj31ckvu

Hi Kati, I would love to answer this question! First off, I want to acknowledge that the pain our dev community faces is real. Even though our product offerings and documentation have gotten much better over the past couple of years, the way that we present it to the world is... not optimal. Compared to Stripe, we have a very broad spectrum of payment solutions. This is great, because we can solve pretty much any scenario related to moving money and collecting payments, but it can get overwhelming for somebody who is going to integrate with PayPal for the first time. Now, to the important question: What are we doing about it? As of two months ago, a new internal organization was formed at PayPal: The Merchant Integration Platform. We have a single mission: To ensure that merchants/developers are able to find the right product for their needs (with adequate documentation, tutorials and examples), can easily integrate/test against our sandbox environment, and have a smooth move to production. I've been at PayPal for nearly seven years (Fun fact: My first role was tech support!), and for the first time, a team has complete end-to-end ownership of the developer experience, as well as a single-purpose charter. As the leader of this org, my only responsibility is to make sure that your integration experience is the best in the world. We're taking multiple steps to make sure that everyone's needs are met. We'll be revising our content strategy, to make sure we deliver the right information to the right audience (As opposed to throwing the kitchen sink at you), we'll be updating our developer portal, and we'll be making our sandbox more robust. Also, I'm very excited to be restarting our developer outreach program! (Shameless plug: If you're reading this, and you think it's an interesting problem to solve, I would love to hire you! https://jobsearch.paypal-corp.com/en-US/job/developer-relations-lead/J3J1NV69F3NFBQB62DL ) For anyone who would like to learn more, please reach out to me directly @LennyMarkus