Stripe reviews

I'm writing this not as a bitter employee but as someone who wishes I read a review like this before joining Stripe. I did my homework before joining but turns out I didn't dig enough because if you dig, it is there. I believe Stripe may have had a good culture and was a great company to work for in the past but in 2021, they hired half the company remote. The company still functions like a start-up but is now a mid-large size company so it is an operational nightmare. Everyone's calendar must be 100% visible, Slack is email and everything deletes after two weeks for no good reason but you still have email to maintain (which disappears after 100 days) etc. Someone mentioned that this company needs someone like Sheryl Sandberg to scale, I absolutely agree. I spoke with many people across different functions and everyone has imposter syndrome and admitted it. It is a very cut-throat environment, lots of ex Amazon & Googlers and the company's intense performance review process makes it even more competitive and not in a good way. I left because I didn't feel like I could trust anyone, nice to your face but would throw you under the bus kind of culture, was told it was a boys club as well. I think some people may like it at Stripe but many people stay on, miserable and wait for their stocks to vest at 1 year and then quit. The WLB is non-existent, constant fire-drills, not a company to work for if you have a family. The performance review process is so intense that even if you work crazy hours, unless you put Stripe over everything, the majority of people just "meet expectations" I wish I knew what I was walking into, Stripe pays well but no amount of money could make me stay.

-The politics people mentioned here are real; you'd likely have a better chance of getting into a management role if you left Stripe for a role at Google and came back on what some employees refer to as the "Google Gravy Train" versus developing in-house. - In that vein, you have to be willing to put in face time outside of work to advance anywhere, and the review process means a lot of your work might never be noticed, even in performance reviews. -Management team is busy patting themselves on the back to address key employment concerns, leading to tech debt as technical talent becomes disenchanted with the company. -Despite the company's almost-suspect emphasis on transparency, a lot of major changes in the company take place behind closed doors, and often the rank-and-file employees find out far later than would be sensible from a productivity standpoint. - C-level executives either woefully unaware of many of the troubles or playing deaf; sometimes it seems as more time is spent promoting Stripe's image to tech companies than is spent identifying core issues in hiring practices, HR practices, and a much-needed overhaul of the way in-company communication is handled.