Poor leadership - Anonymous employee Stripe Employee Review

1.0
20 July 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

High growth business Rapid product expansion

Cons

At a macro level, the main issue is that leadership is generally lacking here. My personal experience of course will be very different from others, and certainly biased. I joined Stripe last year with the allure of great compensation, flexibility on work-life balance, challenging work, and an apparently engaged and collaborative team. After a couple of weeks, I got lumped into their reduction in force. that impacted 14% of the company or over 1,100 people. It was bad, but in truth, I have no "ill will" to the company as it was a large and very difficult business decision. That said, for people considering moving to Stripe, I call out two facts for you to consider. 1. Such a large move in layoffs would have been known before people like me (and there were others) moved to Stripe. Professionally they should have notified us before we left other jobs, or even drew out the hiring process. These large of a decisions are not made on the fly and take months of review by legal, HR and management teams. Candidates like me though, joined with honest intentions and trusted the employment contract. Professionally it is just poor form to not be honest. If managers did not know, then that is a much larger problem internally on how they operate. 2. This is public information available on the web: they were hitting close to $1Trillion in processed payment volume. Their reason for the layoff and subsequent private funding round (at a much lower valuation) was a lack of profitability. Anyone in payments know that to still be losing money at that level of volume, is a massive red flag. Information that unfortunately, became available after I left.

Explore other reviews about Stripe

5.0
8 July 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 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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