Stripe Reviews

Pros

Stripe is a workplace teeming with brilliant people across all functions, and especially so in technical roles. Thanks to its highly collaborative nature, all of these people are happy and willing to take the time to help teach you and grow. Transparency and clear direction from are also very obviously valued by leadership which makes it easy to understand why and when big things will happen.

Cons

The main downside is that while there are a bevy of bright people and resources available to learn, the fast paced nature of the company can easily leave you behind growth and learning unless you take the time to seize it yourself. Managers are willing to fund and guide towards useful growth opportunities but the time commitment and initiative need to be self-driven.

Pros

* Stripe hires great people and you will love your co-workers * Benefits are great, even with pay and stock options not being what they used to be. Especially good for parents or expectant parents. * Great food in their really swanky office(s) * Flexibility for working from home regularly * Lots of self-taught learning opportunities, you'll definitely take on new skill sets

Cons

* No recourse for outright toxic management, to say nothing about mediocre or bad management * No feedback culture, very low scores on employee surveys each year. Umbrella reminders for employees to give each other feedback regularly but no enforcement for management to provide feedback to their reports. * Job expectations are extremely vague and seem to be left that way on purpose * Appear to be doing broad layoffs in preparation for IPO and likely to be able to hire in lower-pay employees, so make sure compensation seems worth it if you are given an offer * Removed unlimited vacation * Expectation that you self-teach skills not listed in your hiring responsibilities in order to "level up," minimal to no training offerings in those areas. Exceptions for technical/programming skills - skills like project management etc. are expected to be self-taught with absolutely zero guidance. * Basically no upward mobility, though parallel mobility is accessible to some. * Work/Life balance is only achievable if you are okay with mediocre performance reviews and the consequences thereof. Unspoken requirement to run yourself ragged if you want to get good performance reviews, though also apparently no actual way/route to ever meet standards for highest "levels" of performance. Top performers seem to burn out and need to take medical leave after a couple of years, for which they're often penalized, yet never meet highest performance levels according to performance reviews.

Pros

- Employees are top tier intellectually - Office is beautiful and offers modest amenities and benefits

Cons

There are two primary problems with this company: 1) It is an engineering-first organization. 2) Leadership lacks the experience to understand what a scaled and mature organization should be modeled after. There is a significant amount of pretentiousness throughout the organization, primarily driven by the promotion of the engineering-first culture. If you are an engineer at Stripe, you may as well call it a day and never find another job because you've made it! Congrats - now everyone can kiss your feet for the rest of your career. Senior leadership is mostly in their late 20s and early 30s. Plenty of years of experience to understand how to scale a business from 10-2500 right? Wrong. Sad to say that leadership is falling to the same trappings as those at Uber and WeWork. Perhaps there's something about being in "control" of your own business that it blinds founders to their own immaturity and Napoleonic tendencies. Stripe has a great story, absolutely - but that superficiality permutes the organization. It's got a great shiny coat on top of everything in the organization, but the underlying character is sadly missing. They have done a fantastic job of hiring the most intelligent and soulless individuals I've ever met.

Pros

Amazing leaders/mentorship, flexibility, perks (the food...so ridiculously good & healthy), career advancement, compensation/benefits, and ability to make impact.

Cons

Like all growing companies, it's sometimes tough to balance work/life. After a 3-6 month or so ramp up, you will learn how to set expectations with stakeholders and balance things a bit better.

Pros

I've been extremely impressed by Stripe since day 1 -- in how it composes itself facing difficult decisions, runs on the day-to-day, and goes above and beyond expectations on a consistent basis. Leadership is inspirational (listen to a podcast with Patrick) yet very grounded when the going gets tough. Our company values ("operating principles") are lived by the leaders and it does really trickle down through the reporting chain. I seldom find myself disagreeing with decisions leadership makes, and they are quite transparent about their reasoning why. Your peers are friendly, sometimes to a fault, and I don't notice much/any unhealthy competition in the engineering org. You can assume your peers are well-intentioned and are willing to hear you out fully, in the end doing what's best for the business (or, customer). A slight downside to this -- knowing the right people to talk to is an invaluable skill that isn't scaling so well as the company grows. The mission of the company -- grow the GDP of the internet -- is arguably pure and apolitical. There is a sense we are building core infrastructure for the world. It's nice not to feel conflicted about your work. I've been happy that our planning process is often long-term. You can successfully argue for ideas that might not result in immediate benefits, but will pay dividends in, say, a year. This applies to paying down tech debt to new products or features. Your argument has to be well articulated, though. Finally, as a medium sized company, there is so much work to be done and opportunity for those who are willing to go out and grab it (even if it's not always obvious). Ambition and foresight are recognized and rewarded, even if you don't necessarily have seniority or tenure.

Cons

Work-life balance can suffer depending on your ambition. Working a 9-5 is OK, but in practice a 9-6 is more common. (management generally seems to not care about hours worked, but actual productivity, which is a plus) Internal tooling, testing, and development speed (especially outside the "happy path") has been a drain on productivity as the company has grown. It's invested in, but sometimes can be rough. Stripe grew as a developers-first company, so some scaffolding and support from others orgs is missing. Engineers often have to take on extra responsibility that may seem tedious or unrelated at another company. Growth / education / mentorship is well supported, but you sort of have to seek it out yourself.