Great 'story', far different reality. - Anonymous employee Stripe Employee Review

1.0
Jun 2, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Honestly, nothing. If I had to really give a positive, it was the variety of the interviews which proved challenging but in a good way.

Cons

TOXIC environment. My manager didn't even know they were my manager when I first returned from SF to Dublin from onboarding. They snapped at me for asking questions and demanded I reach out to who they thought was my manager. Cue awkward moment when they then discovered that they were indeed my manager. Manager was then replaced by one of the most cruel and vicious, manipulative people I have ever met. He only wanted sycophants in his team. This was the same across all of teams with managers who initially started in the US and relocated to Dublin. If you saw an issue / inefficiency, raised it and attempted to suggest improvements, you were punished. Less about what you can do or increasing the GDP of the internet and more about how hard you can fake it and pretend not to see serious issues both within the workplace itself and processes that caused genuine real-harm to users. HR operates with pure malice - it was like Mean Girls meets The Hunger Games meets Lord of the Flies. The fact anyone with morals that ended up in HR jumped ship between 1 - 2 years says a lot. Golden-handcuffs were real and it was telling to see how many mid-senior people fled the moment they hit the 4 year mark vis retaining shares. Psychologically abusive environment and at times you feel like you're living in a nightmare Jonestown meets The Circle environment. You are expected to drink the kool-aid, you are expected to obey Donut, you are expected to be available any and all times and you are expected to put Stripe ahead of your personal life, There is no work-life balance. Managers only like you if you make them look good. We had an issue that impacted 11k EU customers, SF were asleep and so a Dublin employee came up with a solution. Resolved the issue and managed to maintain operations for all impacted EU customers. Result? A bit of kudos and shout out to the team. Manager loved it until the employee under them got recognition, suddenly that employee was placed on Xmas and NYE and NY day skeleton crew and assigned unrealistic metrics and then placed on PIP and isolated from the rest of our team. Monstrous. Popularity contests galore, and age discrimination was rampant, a wonderful US employee in his 50s was flown over to assist an EU team, trained them up and was kicked to the curb (he discovered he was 'leaving' Stripe after accidentally being included on an email advising his team and another about his replacement). Employees are conditioned to treat ex-employees who burnt out or were let go like lepers, avoid 'the sickness lest you become sick by association'. This was especially cruel given the hours we worked where people spent more time with their peers than their own families or friends. Employees who relocated to Dublin from other countries and then were let go found themselves in a place with no income and no one prepared to 'risk' maintaining contact with them. Pay honestly isn't that great when you factor in long hours, working in constant ambiguity under managers with 0 managerial experience, constant 'strategic changes' decided by senior leadership, toxic work-place culture and operating in a state of fear. During my time there, the manager for my team was replaced 3 times. One fled back to US for a better role, one jumped ship, one was fired. After I left, I was persona non grata. If you're like being mistreated, worked to the bone, operate under threats and back-handed comments, and easily buy into bare-faced lies, Stripe is absolutely the place to work

Explore other reviews about Stripe

5.0
Jun 3, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Very fast moving env , colleges are good

Cons

nothing to say here , i am good

4.0
Jun 4, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

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 pay off later (fingers crossed).

Cons

- 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 kinda suck and make the work a lot slower than it should be.

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