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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

>Google > Stripe is not because Stripe is not prestigious (it obviously is, and plenty of super talented students go there).

I think Google is a pretty clear step above Stripe. They have legitimately changed the world and billions of people use their products. Stripe is a payment processing firm. A very successful one, but ultimately a pretty boring b2b business. Im not sure anyone would really miss it if it were gone.

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It's hard to argue against what Google has accomplished in the last 20 years. But in my Bay Area social circle, working at Stripe is considered more prestigious. These days Google is big, boring, bureaucratic, and maybe a little evil. Stripe is successful, growing, pays at least comparably well and has way more potential financial upside. They're also known to have a high hiring bar and a great dev culture. I've heard nothing but good things about the company or the people who work there.

- an ex-Googler with friends at Stripe

I've always perceived working in finance/payment infrastructure as more "evil" than ad-tech. Is that not the general perception?

What's evil about helping consenting adults transmit money?

Stripe isn't a monopoly like Visa.

Finance infrastructure isn't evil, trading infrastructure is evil.

I seriously think many people view their bank's software team as evil! Incompetent maybe, but not evil.

Edit: I seriously don't think many people...

Google has changed the world, and it likely will change it in the future, but will you get the job that does the changing, or will you just end up working on a project that's going to be cancelled in 3 years because it only attracted hundreds of millions of people instead of billions?

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