Great product market fit, poor executive leadership - Anonymous employee Stripe Employee Review

2.0
Sep 11, 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great product market fit and demand from customers. Strong name brand recognition and progress in gaining enterprise customers.

Cons

The closer you get to the exec leadership team, the closer it feels like a middle school popularity contest. Highly political game of who is the favorite of the founders - favorites get significant power. They showing up on all-team calls driving strategy and taking over others’ teams where they have no experience; until they fall out of favor and new favorites are bolstered up. Lots of untrue backstabbing, the higher you engage, the more toxic it gets. Poor product discipline is slowing down enterprise adoption.

Explore other reviews about Stripe

5.0
Jul 8, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

great work, great people, great culture:)

Cons

not all intern projects were all that interesting

4.0
Jun 4, 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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