Overworked, No Team Support or Sense of Belonging - Senior Recruiter Stripe Employee Review

1.0
1 Jul 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Stripe will probably do very well in their public offering Onboarding is well organized Good documentation (but often very overwhelming)

Cons

No true sense of culture. Most of the people they're hiring now are likely joining mainly because they want a big pay out in the first year. Yes Stripe pays very well but that's because they're losing really good people who actually care about other people and have a sense of empathy. Their new comp structure and AVG (annual value grant) means that you will only get the most of out your comp in the first year BUT also means that it's going to be very competitive when it comes to performance. You have to basically dedicate your entire life to work in order to get a good performance rating. They try to sell this as "we pay for performance and reward good work." True, but that means you will have NO work life balance. No work life balance means that teammates don't support each other at all and it's very competitive. There's a TON of processes and hoops to jump through and many layers of people to get through in order to get anything done. It was really tough to see how one could make any significant impact, unless you'd already been there for 3+ years. Managers are overworked too so you really don't get much support from them either. Be prepared to be very isolated and work a ton if you want to join Stripe... For me, no amount of money in the world was worth that. Stripe is too much of a big machine now.

Explore other reviews about Stripe

5.0
11 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

great culture and people to work with

Cons

none that I can think of

4.0
4 Jun 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.

280
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All