Worst experience of my career - Anonymous Stripe Employee Review

2.0
11 Jan 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-Excellent pay -Many other people who work there are nice and trying desperately to look out for one another

Cons

-Every decision made at Stripe is done so in a desperate, terrified bid to avoid the CEO's disapproval. That is it. That is the sole cultural center of Stripe. -Individualist, often offensive, seemingly misogynistic CEO surrounded by "yes" people with not a single soul in leadership willing to call him out. -Messy messy messy. Internal processes, internal communications, internal organization, policies, procedures, etc. either don't exist or are impossible to track down and understand. A shiny exterior, but inside the employee experience is nearly impossible to navigate. -There is one specific type of worker who can thrive at Stripe. And if you have any cares in the world outside of looking like a producer at work (read: family, hobbies, children, morals, etc.), you don't fit the bill, and you will feel bad every day.

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.

280
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All