What Working at Stripe Has Been Like • Hacker News Board

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#91

Post by Operyl » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #87

spudlyo wrote: post #32

I left Stripe a little over 6 months ago to join an exciting startup with a number of my friends. What I miss most about working there is the culture of shipping. There are a number of 'shipped' email lists at Stripe where people can tout their accomplishments large and small. These lists are widely read and commented on, and folks put in a fair amount of effort making their "shipped" emails informative and entertain…

I'm honestly at a loss about what innovation Stripe really needs to do or what would make working there rewarding. They are a credit card payment processor, hasn't all the kinks been worked out of that by now? I guess the fraud prevention aspect would be mildly entertaining, but I can see how the company would need these "shipped" emails and the middle management masturbation/social ladder performance review/Strategy…

Far from it, as the article points out. There’s a lot of weird, unknown failure points. And there’s always room for innovation in all industries.

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#92

Post by insomniacity » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #88

devmunchies wrote: post #85

Are there a lot of remote workers at Stripe or is Patrick an exception to the rule?

There are many (tens of percent of engineering, etc); we are taking steps to materially increase the number.

I was surprised to see most (all?) remote roles are US-only. Are you working to change that, at least for countries where you otherwise have a legal+employment presence?

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#93

Post by bgentry » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

@patio11 could you elaborate on the internal communications structure at Stripe? I’m curious how employees these days balance the use of different communication tools, especially as Stripe has grown and begun embracing distributed work.

I heard [0] for a long time it was all about long form posts to a massive number of Google Groups mailing lists with custom tooling to manage subscriptions (bc the Groups UI is poor). I understand these lists range from general to hyper specific.

But then I’ve also heard much of the communication has shifted to Slack or other tools. Slack tends to degrade into chaos at a certain size, and at Stripe’s scale I’m curious if this is a big pain point or how you mitigate it.

https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#94

Post by perfmode » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

ztratar wrote: post #75

gringoDan wrote: post #27

Reading this post made me think that while many companies advertise an entrepreneurial environment and the ability to do impactful work, the true test of this culture is 1) the ability to hire former founders and 2) those former founders loving their work. Plenty of blue-chip startups have future founders working for them...yet it seems to me that having past founders is much more rare. An incredibly strong company e…

As a former founder who now works at Stripe... I am glad to see we are now explicitly mentioning the aspects of Stripe culture that make it founder friendly. - Huge transparency - Management optimizes for autonomy & distributed decision-making - Upwards review processes > downwards decision-making - Level obfuscation - Shipping culture - People who are of the quality you'd normally only find by hiring them yourself (…

solo plane rides?

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#95

Post by penagwin » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #56

epa wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bank declines are 10-20% of total card volume, depending on industry.

Most of those are going to be straightforward insufficient funds or fraud though, I'd assume?

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with these specific numbers.

Anecdotally I've had my own cards denied because I've reported my card missing and had to get new numbers. This is fairly common from what I've seen, many people I know have had issues because of this (late fees, etc.). Just another case I thought I'd add, as we sufficient funds and it wasn't fraud.

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#96

Post by cyberferret » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

> The parts of the job which I enjoyed the most were not my actual job (writing and selling software, filing taxes in a timely fashion, etc) but helping other software entrepreneurs optimize their businesses or engineers navigate career challenges.

This bit in the post about the author having previously been a founder of a business intrigued me.

As a founder myself, I know that there are bits of the business that don't fit into my natural skillset but have to be done. That is accepted as part and parcel of running a business.

The second point intrigues me though. In my decades of running my own software business, I have had a lot of staff come through as employees, get skilled up, then leave to start their own businesses using the skills they learned while at my company.

This actually gives me a great deal of pleasure and pride. I LOVE seeing people's career pathways take off, and I love it more if I had contributed in some way.

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#97

Post by retromario » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #88

devmunchies wrote: post #85

Are there a lot of remote workers at Stripe or is Patrick an exception to the rule?

There are many (tens of percent of engineering, etc); we are taking steps to materially increase the number.

I checked out the list of remote engineering jobs after reading your (fascinating) article but unfortunately they all seem to be restricted to North America. Is this a time zone issue or a legal issue? Are there plans to expand remote jobs to other regions (like Europe)?

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#98

Post by ikeboy » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

penagwin wrote: post #95

ikeboy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those are going to be straightforward insufficient funds or fraud though, I'd assume?

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with these specific numbers. Anecdotally I've had my own cards denied because I've reported my card missing and had to get new numbers. This is fairly common from what I've seen, many people I know have had issues because of this (late fees, etc.). Just another case I thought I'd add, as we sufficient funds and it wasn't fraud.

If you report your card missing then it's no longer a valid number.

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#99

Post by 2arrs2ells » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

perfmode wrote: post #94

ztratar wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former founder who now works at Stripe... I am glad to see we are now explicitly mentioning the aspects of Stripe culture that make it founder friendly. - Huge transparency - Management optimizes for autonomy & distributed decision-making - Upwards review processes > downwards decision-making - Level obfuscation - Shipping culture - People who are of the quality you'd normally only find by hiring them yourself (…

solo plane rides?

The Stripe founders are pilots (and maybe some of their execs as well?).

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#100

Post by afarrell » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

jklinger410 wrote: post #70

rarecoil wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the point of the statement. Facebook culture makes a similar statement: "Nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem." I don't take it to mean that you are supposed to be the Atlas of the organization, but rather that when you see problems and issues that might arise, you don't ignore them because it's "not my job" or "not my problem" - you embrace it, escalate or forward it to the correct peop…

>I don't take it to mean that you are supposed to be the Atlas of the organization, but rather that when you see problems and issues that might arise, you don't ignore them because it's "not my job" or "not my problem" - you embrace it, escalate or forward it to the correct people, and then go back to what else you have to do. Trying to really educate around this at my workplace. I call it "throwing your hands up." I…

> on my shit list

What would you tell a junior engineer who feels so overwhelmed with the tasks he is supposed to be focused on that he decides not to switch task to solving this other thing that may-or-may-not be a real problem?

Also, are the phrases “Extreme Ownership” and “Question Behind the Question” from a US Navy SEAL book by Willink and Babin? Would you generally recommend that book?