First month at Stripe
I’m approaching the end of my first month at Stripe. I didn’t announce where I was landing in my earlier post out of a sense of counting my chickens, so I’m glad to change that!
It is a strange and amusing shift to go from working at a bookshop with a climate pledge to working at a publisher with a carbon sequestration arm.
After more than three years at AWS I was quite settled on my team, surrounded by people I knew well, and aware of the patterns swirling at various levels. I was also aware of my pace of learning having slowed, and I was tired of managing my cognitive dissonance. While I miss the people, the Principal Engineering community, and some unique aspects of my role, and I’m grateful for how much I had the opportunity to learn, I feel good about my decision to leave.
I also feel good so far about my decision to join Stripe: even as a relatively large startup, there is still a coherence of vision and some agility, and it really feels like we are all pulling in roughly the same direction. The people are kind, and that’s even expressed in the benefits decisions that management makes, like explicitly giving emergency medical and caring leave this year — too many of my friends at Amazon burned through PTO due to surprise COVID or caring responsibilities. No place is perfect, but so far I can live with the imperfections.
My first weeks at Stripe have been a firehose, as one might imagine: simultaneously learning a new domain (finance and payments), how Stripe’s businesses fit in to that, the technologies we use, the work that’s beginning, and the people. Stripe has a very thorough “101” onboarding program, but I quite quickly (too quickly?) ramped up on some real work, and I feel like I accidentally struck a good balance: after 19 working days I already have a web of relationships with my onboarding cohort, my new teams, and other staff engineers in my area, and I’m starting to develop the intuitions and questioning/routing behaviors that staff engineers use to do our jobs.
More importantly, I have managed to strike a good balance of time. Meetings happen 9–3 Pacific to avoid impacting east coasters, and Wednesdays are meeting-free for makers. I stop at 4 or 5, depending on when I started my day. Working at Amazon was always described to me as “intense”. So far Stripe is also intense, but bounded and mindfully so: everyone has given me advice to make sure that I don’t take on too much.
We have ambitious goals for the next twelve months, so it’s a relief to find that people view that as a long hike, not as a deathmarch. Onwards!