I'm a positive person but it was hard to be in this interview process. I usually recommend companies for interview practice but I recommend skipping Stripe if you're short on time/PTO since their layout doesn't follow other tech companies and the practice isn't fully transferable. PROS 1. They will reimburse you for office travel; most companies don't. 2. I ate a peach here; it was tasty. I'm racking my brain trying to find more pro's since I see the positive in almost anything, but not here. I will present some cons to be weary about in case you don't see yourself aligning culturally or need to maximize how you spend your time since it's a hot market out there. CONS 1. I told the 1st recruiter that I wanted to work remotely. He said that's fine. I then talk to the 2nd recruiter in my location and he/she said you can't if you live in their office's city. Everyone needs to get on the same page. 2. It was almost 2 months between the recruiter call and the onsite. Limited headcount? Either way, this is time consuming if you have other interviews. I had to reach out to the recruiter because he/she ghosted me for about a month after I passed my phone screen. 3. Scatterbrained Interviewers/Recruiters/Process Sometimes, I received feedback that I'm taking too long to code when I was just taking the 5 minutes to understand the prompt which is common practice and usually mentioned in the Stripe prep guide. Sometimes, when I asked for what was expected behavior in the code during the coding exercises, I oftentimes received, "Just Google it.", as a response. Sometimes, on the other hand, I received some help. If the interviewers are just going to tell you to google it like "lmgtfy.com", then why are they there? If that's the case, just throw your candidates alone into a room and analyze their results later. Sometimes they listened, sometimes I had to repeat myself 2-3x as they were distracted by their own laptops and weren't listening. Recruiter was hard to reach, wasn't pleasant to talk to, and wouldn't respond to any of my questions after the onsite. Maybe they are understaffed, but usually recruiters are the fun people to talk to at other companies. 4. General Culture & Vibe It's lunchtime. I look around and it feels like I've been transported to SF and my rent just rose by $2k; I look down and I'm wearing a pair of Allbirds; I don't own Allbirds. I.e., you could tell that I was surrounded by techies and that if you work here, lunch conversation will revolve around serverless computing and crypto. The average age was ~27. There is nothing wrong with any of this inherently, but if you want to diversify and work with interesting people, this isn't the place where you will do that. These are the kind of people that don't know how to shake your hand and look you in the eye, that was a summary of my experience. 5. Terrible Recruiting Laptops The industry is leaning towards providing laptops instead of whiteboarding; good because this is a more natural environment. What's not good and unnatural is providing laptops that you need to spend a chunk of every interview setting up, needing to login to Github but seeing previous candidates' profiles still open, needing to get an access code from your email and still seeing the previous candidate's inbox open, and having interviewers who are as clueless as you are with the laptop and throwing hacks at the wall to try and get it to work and wasting valuable interview time. Other onsites will simply give you a Coderpad link; no weird setup needed besides knowing the password. That doesn't really work with Stripe's process; but if they want to defer from the rest of the industry, they'll have to debug the issues themselves, which they clearly haven't. After all, I've not had to own a personal laptop since college and don't plan to, but I guess I'm SOL if I don't want buy my own or use a VM at work. 6. Lunch There was free lunch, good! Work here and it'll be yours. What's not good is that I eat healthy and supposedly they have healthy food. Yet a few hours after the onsite, it felt as if I had swallowed a bowling ball and I had serious indigestion. I think it was because the food had a lot of sodium (it was Asian takeout style, so it probably did). It shows that even if they do give free food here, I will abstain and it won't be a perk. 7. Rejection Email I appreciate that they email instead of calling since these calls are a waste of time. What I don't appreciate is they do it first thing in the morning on a Friday when I'm getting ready for the weekend. You couldn't have waited till Monday? You couldn't have made it a concise email, instead you had send me a long email with various platitudes like "We know you are talented" and "We wish you luck on your career" and "Unfortunately we will not be moving forward" blah blah blah. Actually, this email was a good microcosm for the whole experience: fluffed up nonsense.