Stripe engineers on $940k lament losing their jobs after receiving duck photos
Laying off staff is never easy, but fintech firm Stripe appears to have made things particularly difficult. Stripe's layoffs this week, dubbed 'The Quackening' by one of its employees, involved some pretty huge blunders.
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On Monday, the fintech payments giant cut 300 staff members, or roughly 3.5% of the workforce. In emails notifying employees of their termination, Business Insider reported that some laid off staff accidentally received a PDF image of a duck, and an incorrect date for the termination of their contract. Stripe confirmed that this was an error. Apologies and corrections had been sent out to those affected.
The duck and the date may not have been the only blunders. One of the affected employees said on forum website Blind that Stripe was "meant to do [the layoffs] on Wednesday, but [they] bungled it and sent it early." US based employees therefore received the notice on a national holiday.
Stripe said in a memo to employees that the layoffs were predominantly in engineering, product and operations, but the focus wasn't necessarily on low-performers like Meta's recent cuts. The unwanted Stripe engineer said on Blind that "people on old pay-bands, regardless of performance" were impacted. Stripe employees have frequently said that the pay on offer to new hires is much less than that of its earlier employees.
Pay is trending down at Stripe. For principal engineers on levels.fyi, pay fell from $940.7k in 2023 to less than $728k in 2024. Average pay across all seniorities on Levels has fallen ~14% over the last two years. Stripe developed a reputation of high pay even though its revenue per employee was far less than other major contemporaries like Robinhood. The layoffs appear to be addressing that.
It's not just long-serving employees that are affected, however. Data analyst Gregory Winter wrote on social media that he was impacted by the layoffs after just ten months working at Stripe. He was rescued by Stripe after being laid off at CashApp earlier this year, and called it a "very difficult time and reminiscent of last January."
The drama hasn't quite hit Stripe's sales-focused teams, which escaped the layoffs. One Stripe employee told eFinancialCareers he "had no idea" about the duck image, and that "nothing has really been mentioned in the office" about the layoffs. He also said that Stripe is "mass hiring currently," and expects many of those affected to transition roles internally, but this would also mean transitioning to the new pay bands.
Stripe declined to comment.
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Photo by Wu Zhongyi on Unsplash
