Feels Communist - Account Executive Stripe Employee Review

2.0
8 Apr 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-Great product diversity -Interesting users working on important challenges -Lots of things to work on and build when a company is growing this fast -Good benefits

Cons

-Almost everyone is rated equally regardless of performance. Top performers are not rewarded. Under the new AVG equity system, the recruiters say that top performers get more equity during your interview. But the truth is, almost nobody is recognized as a top performer. Even when you go above and beyond to excel at your job and do way more than what is asked in your official role, you get an average rating and are told you can't get an above average rating during your first performance review at Stripe. What? -The company values are user first, Stripe second, team third. Employees are last and Stripe makes it clear and known that everyone is replaceable and everyone is the same. If you don't like it, leave and we will find someone else to take your spot. Except the hiring bar has lowered given the overhiring going on right now. I worry about how many people are being hired and not given enough training or support. They are being set up to fail. -Never question the party line. If you dare to have an opinion that differs with leadership, you will be chastised for speaking your mind. There is a culture where you are only allowed to talk about how great Stripe is all the time. Which is ironic given one of our values is "we haven't won yet" but our middle managers act like we have won all the time -When you question why a decision is made, senior leaders will tell you you should be "grateful you work at Stripe". But when a third of your team quits in a 3 month period, they don't seem all that grateful do they? -Sales comp is broken. They lure you in with the high OTE, except they don't tell you about a 2 year ramp curve where it is impossible to meaningfully earn above OTE. By the time you exit ramp, your targets are not achievable by anyone (even top sellers) so you won't even be making your OTE at that point -We have a lack of leadership in the sales org. Managers are in over their head and it shows by the overwhelmingly negative Stripe Sats every quarter (which are ignored) and the significant talent exodus we have seen over the last 6 months. We could copy and paste our internal reviews every 3 months because problems remain unaddressed for years. At a certain point when you don't listen to your people, top performers will leave rather than wait years for you to fix major issues -We are "user first", but aside from sales, most of the company does not talk to users. When the sales team provides user feedback to cross-functional teams, it is either ignored or dismissed. Even when users provide feedback directly to Stripe, they are tossed between 8 different teams and the issues remain unsolved so users churn

Explore other reviews about Stripe

5.0
8 Jul 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

great work, great people, great culture:)

Cons

not all intern projects were all that interesting

4.0
4 Jun 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The work is very high impact and there are lots of opportunities to learn if you're not already familiar with the fintech space. Most of the big projects I've been on so far have been fun to work on. There are also a lot of talented, kind, and helpful engineers at Stripe who are really nice to learn from. I really enjoy my manager and the folks on my team. The money + bonuses are ~ok~. Pretty standard for a pre-IPO unicorn, but the goal is that there will be a big pay off later (fingers crossed).

Cons

- The work life balance is *bad*. For how many products Stripe has, we are a very lean company. Too lean. There's just a lot of work, and very very tight deadlines, very fast paced, and not enough engineers and product managers to do all of it. If you want WLB as an engineer, join an infrastructure team, not a product team. - There is little to no investment in making the engineering org more diverse. This was surprising to me because of a lot of public facing company statements, but don't be fooled like I was. People (at least in the eng org) do not care about diversity. - HR sucks. And of course they would, I guess. But I had a really negative experience with HR where I walked away feeling completely devalued and gaslit. - Dev environments kinda suck and make the work a lot slower than it should be.

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