Pros
-The post-IPO payoff. This is why people are desperately trying to join or hang in, despite remaining at this company will often feel like self-flagellation. -Very smart people at this company. -If you are lucky to join a team that is not comprised of job hoppers, you will probably be trauma bonded and become great friends after you are either managed out or quit out of misery.
Cons
If you are a prospective candidate, I do urge you to look at the tenure of people writing these glowing reviews. I notice that a majority of them are people who have been at Stripe less than 1-2 years. What inspires someone to leave a review in less than a year? Are managers encouraging them? I don’t quite know. There are bad reviews warning you of burn out and toxic managers from people— mostly people with longer tenures. You can believe those people. A lot of people that started years ago started when it WAS a great place to work. And then they saw it go downhill. I was there >7 years, and can assure you that it indeed went downhill since I first spun up. Cons: -BURN. OUT. You will burn out, be sure of that. -You will be asked to essentially perform the work of multiple people. -When a higher stakes project takes precedence and you must focus on it and step back from a smaller project to do so, you will be penalized for not doing enough on the smaller project. -Goalposts are often moved by management. -You will probably be told one thing in a meeting and another thing in writing by you manager— they are taking screenshots to refer to at perf review. -Perf review and ladders and levels are purposefully ambiguous and seem to be designed to prevent people from leveling up or being successful. -Managing people out seems to be de rigueur. -Teams are very understaffed; I could not tell you the reason but seeing it echoed across other reviews here I suppose it is indeed by design. -At this point do I even need to tell you there’s no work life balance? Well, there is none.