> Stripe is the company I usually hold up as the exemplar of polished internal tools.
unless you work there how would you know this?
> Stripe is the company I usually hold up as the exemplar of polished internal tools.
unless you work there how would you know this?
I worked there. All the internal tools are amazingly polished. I’ve never seen anything like it.
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.
They have published a bunch of stuff about their internal tools in the past. Look up https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home and compare it to this, as an example.
It's always possible that in reality they were always a bit less polished behind the scenes though.
It's possibly a cost benefit thing. Moving quickly with AI leaves blood splatter, but if you get enough in return you decide it's worth it anyway.
Its always more likely the company pushing the PR is less polished than they present themselves.