Stripe

Compensation and equity growth is top-tier.

Excellent external brand.

• Don't listen to anything management tells you about values like being a team player. You'll be penalized for delaying your low-priority project to help the team hit its overall goals.

• Don't listen to anything management promises you about the future. Even if you somehow lucked out to have an honest manager, the company reorganizes so frequently that your manager is unlikely to have the agency to deliver. I've already had 5+ manager changes in the past year. Absolutely ridiculous.

• Learn to excel at the blame game. If a project is not going to plan (which is almost a given because managers new and unfamiliar with the project are setting arbitrary timelines), learn how to either escape the project or pin the blame on someone else. Refusal to play the blame game out of morals just means that you'll be the one penalized.

• Work smart by finding projects that sound infinitely harder than they actually are and sell, sell, sell, aka promotion-driven development. You might feel dirty about it, but one look at the codebase will make it so clear how the rest of the company is playing the same game.

• Technical excellence is not valued at the company. Every project I've ever had has included fixing bugs in code owned by other teams. The only success metric is whether you completed on time, so of course, corners get cut left and right when push comes to shove. I'm absolutely floored that our users haven't noticed the data inconsistencies rampant in our designs.

• Engineer performance is tied to the throughput of one-pagers, so engineers spend roughly 95% of their time writing in Dropbox Paper and maybe 5% actually coding. A side effect of this one-pager throughput incentive is that it's pretty much an open secret at Stripe that quantity is far more important than quality, so everybody writes papers that they expect no one to read just to look like a thought leader. I've learned the hard way that documentation left behind by others is mostly useless for this reason.

• The company is ramping up hiring and penalizes you for not doing interviews, so get ready to do interviews 3x a week where you dread "questions for me" that make you feel like a liar.

• Be ready to pick up unreasonable workloads because every team is understaffed. For example, the number of people on my team is so low that two unlucky people had to take multiple OnCall shifts during the winter break because we already went through everybody once.

• Be ready to work an insane amount to meet expectations. I've had to cancel vacations and work while really, really sick to hit deadlines.

• Be very good at teaching yourself everything you need on the job because a huge chunk of the tribal knowledge has left the company for all the above reasons and then some. I've never seen a company with such a hot equity trajectory burn out employees this quickly. Almost everyone I work with has been at the company for less than two years, and all of the departures I worked with left before their initial equity grants fully vested, which is insane because they gave up millions.

Your performance process forces people to choose between sacrificing their morals, getting thrown under the bus, or sacrificing their lives outside of work to make impossible timelines happen. How about trying a perf process focused on how to grow your employees instead of holding them accountable for decisions they don't own?