Stripe

• Salary and benefits are above market.
• The codebase is unit-tested to a fault, and the CI/CD pipeline is solid.
• Bufo, the LLM doc chatbot, is a lifesaver for digging through internals.
• The customer support dashboard and observability tools are loaded with goodies.
• A big platform team handles all the scalability heavy lifting.

• Processes and tools are decided for you, hardly any space for smarts or creativity.

• Codebase is a tens-of-GB Sorbet-typed Ruby disaster. Leaders flex on 9.99999% uptime, but it means everything's in-house bespoke junk that you'll never see in your next job.

• No chill between projects. Deadlines are savage, everyone's fried and too slammed to help a teammate. Management's a fear machine. Question them and you're gone. Seen solid folks booted for nothing.

• Annual layoffs signal stack-ranking by naive metrics (lines of code?), forcing even top seniors to grind code instead of leading.

• Security's a straitjacket: No unapproved installs, even browser extensions! They raid laptops and grill frequently.

• Bug-triaging nightmare from rushed, tangled spaghetti code.

A high salary may make up for a toxic culture, but not for long.