A Microcosm of SF Startup Culture - User Operations Stripe Employee Review

3.0
Aug 26, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- An industry leader in FinTech with the benefits to match; as far as resume toppers go, it's not that bad. - Some pretty great people, though this frankly varies department-by-department. - Building and growing a product used by more and more people everyday, even if they don't know.

Cons

-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.

Explore other reviews about Stripe

5.0
Jun 16, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-Excellent Benefits -Breakfast and lunch everyday -Supportive Management -Great Pay

Cons

-Complex Product Suite -Quick ramp up

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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