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Guide to scaling engineering organizations

stripe.com

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Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#81

Post by sheepmullet »

wlll wrote: post #26
beagle3 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most definitely. A false positive often has negative contribution to the overall training (at the very least taking time from current members without giving back, but often also creating new problems). A false negative has zero cost (and zero benefit). I think it's a no-brainer that false negatives are much preferred to false positives in the overall tradeoff (and ... there is always a tradeoff between false positive…

While I agree with the sentiment, this isn't entirely true: > A false negative has zero cost (and zero benefit). False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave. It may well be that avoiding false positives in general is better for the business, but it's not as clear cut as you make out I believe, it's a ba…

> False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave.

Exactly! If a couple of people on my team of six leave and they can’t be replaced for 6-12 months then I’m going to quit as well.

There will be more pressure on the remaining team to produce and most of the interesting long term work will be put on hold.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#82

Post by djg321 »

devonkim wrote: post #19
avip wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the logical tradeoff for any company. Bad hires create an incredible amount of damage that can sink a whole team. It is x10 better to have no hire than a bad one.

I wouldn’t say ANY company necessarily. A lot of companies even in IT are body farms and low wage, expendable (but still necessary) labor is their lifeblood where they trade off quality for more volume. Employee turnover doesn’t matter much besides in the highest ranks in that case either. A “bad” hire in such companies is one that causes such irreparable harm that it costs the company more in reputation / brand than…

Just out of curiosity, what is an example of a tech firm that would be considered a "body farm"?

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#83

Post by shaunpersad »

ainiriand wrote: post #38

Some time ago I went to the Dublin open house because they were opening news teams here and one of the positions was backed api engineer. Considering that I've been doing the same for almost 10 years and that I got personally invited to the event I decided to apply to the role. They rejected me even before having a personal interview. I wonder what is happening behind the scenes but it was very demoralizing. Was anyt…

Another anecdote: about a month ago I applied to Stripe and was rejected within a few hours. I had some truly mixed feelings about that! On one hand I was deeply appreciative of their prompt response, but on the other, it was a super quick rejection!

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#84

Post by philwelch »

gadders wrote: post #3

>> In addition to building clear rubrics, we began unconscious bias training to maintain consistency and objectivity. Is that still valid? I thought the tests to support this concept had failed to be replicated? http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem.... https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...

Having attended an unconscious bias training, I'd say it achieves two objectives:

1. It convinces people to use objective, methodical criteria to evaluate candidates. (Whether or not the "unconscious bias" rationale is valid, the actual remedies boil down to, "have a process instead of winging it", and in today's political climate, "unconscious bias training" is an easier sell than "not winging it training".)

2. It makes it harder to sue the company for bias, because they can turn around and say, hey, look, we made everyone do unconscious bias training.

Similarly, anti-harassment training mostly boils down to, "these are the legal categories of harassment that you and the company may be held liable for; consider yourself forewarned".

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#85

Post by QuercusMax »

jmcomets wrote: post #54
scarejunba wrote: post #43

Nice post, guys. Would you mind saying what you mean by 'lurking'? In all my life on the Internet, it's a positive thing when joining a community. You're invisible to everyone and just read. Why should people not do this? It seems harmless to be in read-only mode.

I understood the use of "lurking" as "commenting unproductively in a channel". Although I may be mistaken, it makes a lot of sense to avoid such toxic behavior.

Isn't that more along the lines of trolling or shitposting?

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#86

Post by elgenie »

scarejunba wrote: post #43

Nice post, guys. Would you mind saying what you mean by 'lurking'? In all my life on the Internet, it's a positive thing when joining a community. You're invisible to everyone and just read. Why should people not do this? It seems harmless to be in read-only mode.

The "lurking into" in the blog post should probably be read as "jumping into". That is, reading is fine, but transitioning from lurker to active participant should be minimized.

Stripe has a very specific culture of email transparency that they've posted about before, and they've likely developed company-specific jargon around it: https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#88

Post by sytelus »

TLDR; An article by high level exec at stripe. Its long low-information VP-style article with mostly things you already know like you need to define a recruiting plan, you should survey candidates for experience, your onboarding plan should provide overview of your products etc.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#90

Post by munchbunny »

I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this.

Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers.

I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of how to evaluate and grow leadership and people management skills. Ironically, I see a lot of that from MBA programs.

Actually getting good management in place is extremely hard to do and does more for talent retention than almost everything else. For every company blog post I've read that talks about scaling the organization, including Stripe, I also hear corresponding horror stories from friends and acquaintances who are leaving because they hate their manager and because their company isn't doing anything about it.

Sure, it's relative, on the grand scale of managerial quality I'd wager that Stripe is on the right side of average, but I'd really like to see more focus on scaling leadership.

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