Hiring and leadership need significant changes - GTM Stripe Employee Review

Going to just give a smattering in no particular order: - There's a culture of quasi-toxic positivity: What I mean is that "everyone's idea is important and no one shouldn't follow through with their ideas" tends to be the prevailing sentiment. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good ideas out there and because Stripe tends to hire very bright people its even more the case, but that doesn't mean there's time, resources, or the ability to prioritize, those ideas. It translates into a bunch of people doing what they think is important, or multiple people doing the same thing they both think is important. - Thinking big to a fault: instead of addressing and resolving the baseline systems, processes, policies, etc. the business overall seems keep going after huge "sexy" and shiny things. As a result the business blunders along and everyone's basically building a house of cards because we've yet to address the aforementioned fundamentals. - Hiring: I personally found (and I say this having probably benefited from it) that they hire people largely based on where they went to school (you see a lot of harvard, yale, columbia, cornell, etc.) or if they worked at a FAANG. Sure these schools and companies have great people but that doesn't inherently translate into a good fit for the role or company. In addition I found they tend to favor external hires over internal, prioritizing the same thing I just mentioned. The hiring process is also wildly protracted; they make people jump through so many hoops and in the end are not very rigorous on decision making e.g. I was on one interview loop where despite interviewing 2 candidates I was never involved in the discussion on whether to hire or not. The issues with hiring are a real problem as they'll quickly balloon into bigger issues e.g. your top existing talent getting becoming resentful, apathetic of jaded, or a bunch of smart people that think they're above or aren't willing to do the grunt work. Last point is semi related where I found that they hired WAY overqualified people for pretty unsophisticated roles, e.g. a role that would've been a good fit for a 3-4 years experience biz analyst type background they hire someone with 10+ years of experience in sr. analyst experience. Those hires end up either feeling like they were sold a false bill of goods or just get bored and leave - saw it many times. - Ownership: tends to be a lack of ownership, which I myself was guilty of. There's no strong sense of ownership so you'll go to teams for help on something and everyone will point to someone else or say its not their responsibility. I was guilty of doing the same thing, primarily because I was able to and everyone else was, so why not. This lead to it being really hard to get anything productive done and eventually to me just giving up trying. - Compensation: Personally I found the compensation to be subpar (I won't lie, I was willing to accept it in the hopes, like I suspect many others were, of equity growth). This was evidenced in the fact that I took a pay cut to join, and got a huge (>30%) pay increase when I left. Equity comp was lack luster at best, as was getting worse when I left. Salary and bonus okay. The compensation change communications were opaque, if communicated at all. Separately it took me 5 months of back/forth with the compensation team to have them correct an error (they admitted it was an error in the end) in my compensation. - Leadership: I found a general vibe of a lot of mid to sr. leaders having this vibe or air of superiority and entitlement. I felt like many had this idea of when they came into the job they'd get big ol' teams that they could boss around and then just be a talking head rather than actually getting their hands dirty. That just translated into a lot of the stuff I mentioned above happening, e.g. people just doing whatever they wanted and nothing critical getting done unless sh*t was hitting the fan. Beyond this I think exec and C level leadership are also part of the problem. Its easy to pin things on the people at the middle or the bottom, but ultimately the buck stops with the top. If its happening down below its because the top enables and allows it. - No career opportunity: may have been because I wasn't based in the US but I found zero opportunity for career growth. I did get promoted (though I think I accepted a lower starting level than I should've), but aside from that I had a mgr hired above me, and found no other opportunities.