Strong Product / Company, but needs to be wary of warning signs as the company grows - Anonymous employee Stripe Employee Review

3.0
16 July 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Overall a really strong, smart team that really strive with their work - strong product / vision - Good leadership team at exec level.

Cons

- poor middle managers. Many of them have little to no experience and no training so they're left trying to work things out and generally fail - as the company grows there's an increasing lack of autonomy, and middle tier management are seemingly making all of the decisions without looping in the people on the ground - there's two very different sides to the culture; for those that genuinely buy into it, it's a strong culture of sharing and trust. Others use it as a facade and decide it doesn't apply to them other than in extremely general terms. Again, those people are often in management positions, so this is starting to spread and is ending up with people climbing the ladder by slightly more nefarious means, and the 'nice' culture means that this often doesn't get called out. This is fortunately rare, but it's likely to get worse as the company grows.

Explore other reviews about Stripe

5.0
16 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-Excellent Benefits -Breakfast and lunch everyday -Supportive Management -Great Pay

Cons

-Complex Product Suite -Quick ramp up

4.0
4 June 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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