Stripe

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 payoff later (fingers crossed).

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 kind of suck and make the work a lot slower than it should be.

Invest in diverse talent and an actual DEI organization. Educate HR so they will stop traumatizing your employees.