Why Stripe engineers on $940k are different to engineers in banks
If you're a senior software engineer working in an investment bank, you may have considered making the switch to fintech. Stripe is one of the obvious choices in the space, but be warned that life there is very different.
Click here to follow our new WhatsApp channel, and get instant news updates straight to your phone 📱.
In a recent appearance on Bloomberg's 'Money Stuff' podcast, Stripe co-founder John Collison said that keeping its managers hands-on is a key tenet of the fintech. He says, "if you're not close to the work... you will not be able to provide any meaningful, useful change." For engineering managers, that means writing code "to get the experience of what it's like working in their corner of the codebase."
Giving senior employees 'grunt work' is not unique to Stripe in the fintech world; some take it even further. Monzo founder Tom Blomfield said in a recent blog that, in the firm's early days every employee was mandated to "do customer service for 1 day a month" to keep people "closely connected to the issues customers cared about" He noted that the firm's pace of execution had a "sharp reduction" around the time it stopped this practice. At Stripe, employees are also expected to get involved in the interview process for new recruits, including for those outside their direct team.
Your experience as a developer in banking will be very different. Some senior engineering managers can go years or even decades without coding, to the point that they can be unemployable when they leave. Those that do code are weighed down by bureaucracy and won't do much of it.
Engineers in finance have also called it a "terminal" industry for engineers who want to remain as individual contributors (ICs). If you don't want to be a manager, you're not likely to make it any higher than VP. At Stripe, meanwhile, top ranked ICs are well rewarded, making $941.7k on average according to Levels.fyi.
There are exceptions. Many banks have titles such as 'distinguished engineer' or 'tech fellow', designed to reward their most technically proficient engineers, managerial or otherwise. It's unclear whether this promotion-in-kind correlates to any monetary reward, however.
You'll also have to be more innovative to work at Stripe. Collison says that investment banks tend to work on problems that are solved by "throwing armies of people" at them, making their size advantage count, whereas Stripe focuses on "underserved" markets. While this can be largely team dependent, bank technologists often find themselves in support roles that won't require as much wheel reinventing.
There are other cultural quirks that differentiate Stripe from banking. Collison previously said the firm is more pro-office than global consensus post-COVID, but is still far more open to remote work than banking. It has a more modern tech stack than most banks, for those who prefer Ruby to Slang, and has significantly less legacy tech to deal with.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, WhatsApp: (+1 269 237 3950). Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
