Stripe has already existed for a while, and has gone through ups and downs. There was a period where customer experience was first, and the systems inside were built fast and in rather cavalier ways (See Greg Brockman famously telling everyone in a MongoDB convention about using Mongo's oplog as a queue). There were times where internal tools teams could spend all the time they needed to get about as much shine internally as the external facing websites were. Huge investments in everything. But there's just so much churn, as some staff burns out, and others realize that they have so much vested stock that continuing in such a high intensity environment is pointless, that whatever Stripe might have been during your tenure might be very different from other people's, and you can both be right.
I worked at stripe too. Sail design system at time was exemplary. A ton of effort got invested in little details. They spent an insane effort in making ruby fast with their own jit, formatter and type checker they built.
I think it has more to do with the fact that Stripe has already 'won' in a lot of ways, and the company has now basically transitioned from the innovative tech startup phase to the MBA/marketing/bureaucracy phase. Quality, efficiency as priorities are replaced with marketing and 'strategy'...
As someone who has worked there as well, this is just funny to me.
Stripe has already existed for a while, and has gone through ups and downs. There was a period where customer experience was first, and the systems inside were built fast and in rather cavalier ways (See Greg Brockman famously telling everyone in a MongoDB convention about using Mongo's oplog as a queue). There were times where internal tools teams could spend all the time they needed to get about as much shine internally as the external facing websites were. Huge investments in everything. But there's just so much churn, as some staff burns out, and others realize that they have so much vested stock that continuing in such a high intensity environment is pointless, that whatever Stripe might have been during your tenure might be very different from other people's, and you can both be right.
I worked at stripe too. Sail design system at time was exemplary. A ton of effort got invested in little details. They spent an insane effort in making ruby fast with their own jit, formatter and type checker they built.
Post AI, I think the bar hasn’t been the same.
I think it has more to do with the fact that Stripe has already 'won' in a lot of ways, and the company has now basically transitioned from the innovative tech startup phase to the MBA/marketing/bureaucracy phase. Quality, efficiency as priorities are replaced with marketing and 'strategy'...