Pros: Stripe runs its teams very lean, which means each engineer has a lot of impact on their product and its users. Teammates are almost universally great: kind, empathetic, and always competent.

Cons: As the company grows, the process is growing too, along with bureaucracy. The appetite for risk is decreasing. This is making it harder to ship features, but I think we'll figure things out in the next year.

Pros: High pay, good benefits, and smart coworkers.

Cons: Hectic organization, senior-level ICs and managers who joined recently usually can't last long.

Pros: I've made some of my best friends here. Everyone is capable and comes from different backgrounds, and there's a culture of people helping each other. I've always found it easy to ask others for help; almost everyone was ready to make time to answer questions or give advice about something at work.

Cons: The usual problems with fast-growing startups: there are some organizational growing pains as the company scales. I feel Stripe handles this very conscientiously, though. There are concerted efforts to make sure teams are working well together and reduce the friction that occurs when it's harder to know the entire company. There's slight imposter syndrome here. Because everyone else is so talented and helpful, it's possible to feel that everyone else is way more capable than you. But hires are made very carefully, so a bit of self-confidence will be useful here. There's also a lot going on, and most roles here have to serve as an interface to many different parts of the company, so at times it can feel like there's a lot to juggle.