I formerly worked at Stripe -- last day was less than a month ago.
In summary, culture is downstream of hiring decisions. If a company is doubling headcount each year, then after two years 75% of the population will be new. If the newcomers' culture is different from what old-timers prefer, then attrition increases, which further skews the demographics.
This effect is strengthened when the hiring pipeline is focused on alumni from specific companies. For example, if you hire three layers of management from Amazon, and they replace tenured engineering leadership with newly hired ICs from Amazon, your team's culture will become that of Amazon.
Some blog posts I've found to be relevant to current circumstances:
I’m also quite interested in hearing about this. I used to only hear good things about Stripe, but over the last year, there’s been quite a few negative posts. I’d be interested in more details.
