Stripe reviews

Upper management seems pretty good at managing the business side of things, but horrible at managing employees/talent * As an engineer, literally the only thing that counts for perf evaluation is "technical impact". Things like mentoring, interviewing, code cleanup, long term strategic design, etc, are all given lip service but are ultimately irrelevant. This extraordinarily naive evaluation mechanism, combined with stack ranking and what now appear to be annual layoffs, leads to all the negative consequences you'd immediately imagine - backstabbing, laser focus on immediate results no matter the long-term consequences, teams building things on their platforms that don't make sense (but yay, more technical impact for us!). * Many things that would be documented company-wide policies at other places I've worked seem to be guided more by rumor than anything else * Teams aren't well coordinated. You'll have one team building a puppet replacement, and several other teams that require their configs to be defined using puppet, with no apparent plans for migration. * Seemingly nonsensical reorgs happen several times a year, with often significantly negative consequences for ICs/managers. E.g. you come in Monday morning to discover your team no longer exists, and you're now working on team X. Nobody ever asked if you want to do X. Your management chain for the next 3 levels has also been shuffled, and team X now has a bunch of new semi-random sister teams. * Since everyone is supposed to be "Exothermic" and "Macro-optimistic", pointing out these problems can land you in hot water unless you try very hard to put a positive spin on things. Even being grouchier than average can have official negative consequences. It sometimes feels like being in a horror movie where everyone's compelled to be outwardly cheerful no matter what (e.g. "Get Out", "Black Mirror S3E1"). * Despite several rounds of layoffs they've had over the years, they're still terrible at it (though at least severance is good). Google "stripe layoff duck"

Hyper-performance focus over focusing a creating a healthy environment for people to perform at their best. High earning ICs get managed out.