Stripe

• Decent compensation and benefits (including dental, eye, mental health, commuter, education, office lunch and snacks, travel insurance).

• Opportunity for remote work if not close to an office.

• Very talented coworkers, with the opportunity to learn a lot of technical skills from watching senior engineers.

• Very user-focused; it is easy to see the positive impacts of the work you are doing with Stripe's customers, and engineers have the opportunity to do user interviews.

• Lots of opportunities to travel to other offices for in-person team and broader org events.

• Generous time off policy, though people still work or are available during their vacation time.

Poor work-life balance; teammates generally work long hours, including evenings and weekends. There is a culture of always being available.

Poor culture; there is a lack of team cohesion, social/networking opportunities, and mentorship.

Poor managers; they are not supportive in helping juniors advance their careers and skills. There is a lack of feedback from managers about how you are doing.

In-office policy is about 50% of the days, but teammates are not colocated.

On-call can be heavy; 24/7 on-call means that you can get paged at any time and have to work at a moment's notice.

Stress and burnout seem to both be common.

PIP culture; PIPs and firings are common for perceived low performance.

Office politics include backstabbing and making others look bad.

Culture of very fast pace results in overload, burnout, cutting corners on projects (hence leading to more trouble down the line), and lack of attention to observability or code maintenance.

Relating to the previous point, many simple tasks at Stripe take too long to do because of the convoluted and tangled codebase, particularly the FE codebase.

Work on the cons section above. In particular, the last two points.