For anyone else wondering what Stripe Atlas is,
> Stripe Atlas, a seamless way to start your company in the U.S.
Apparently it's a filing-paperwork-etc-as-a-service
What Working at Stripe Has Been Like
141–150 of 189 posts
Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like
#142I 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…
If Stripe's HR department is reading this thread, I think they can pinpoint one crucial interview question that will determine culture fit in their organisation for future hiring - and that is "do you like talking about your accomplishments with the rest of your team?". Seems to be a very polarising thing to be asked to do, judging by the replies on this particular comment. EDIT: Curious about the downvotes? This is…
That's certainly a reasonable concern given the information above. For what it's worth, though, I work at Stripe and I've never felt pressured to write a shipped email; I don't think others are either.
In fact, I think the only shipped emails I've written have been on behalf of colleagues since I was so excited about something they'd built/fixed (with their permission). Many (most?) Stripes aren't the type to brag about their work. But it is nice to share, and to let others know that X product is better now.
Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like
#143Patrick, I love Stripe's offering, but I have to pull teeth within my startup to justify why we use Stripe to non-technical people. In fact, when I put on my Product person's hat, I can see everything they tell me clearly.
Stripe just does not look or function like a credit card processor. It is nearly impossible for non-engineer folk to grasp - to the point of it not being a viable platform. The almost hermit-like reporting interfaces (the best that can be done is a bunch of paginated tables??), the lack of visibility into how charges break down at an aggregate level (how much do we pay Stripe in fees has to be pulled from a shudder export of all transactions), handling of disputes, no ability to generate monthly statements (for Connect accounts), no direct line access to an account manager etc etc - the list goes on unfortunately.
I love the simplicity, but I can tell you that Stripe is lagging far behind in functionality and ease of platform use for SMB and enterprise SaaS companies (specifically, in our case, a platform/service provider that runs payments for a bunch of small businesses). We're small, but not tiny, and growing - so the noise around the problems we face just keeps amplifying by the day. The moment we crossed a dozen customers and 100-200K in monthly processing, it’s as if Stripe just stopped working for us.
Stripe's clearly an extraordinary engineering-driven company, but solving for real business use-cases is key. From the outside, it feels like Stripe is solving all the back-end problems and optimizing it, but doing nothing about the front-end, metaphorically speaking.
I'm now having to get on calls with old-school card processing providers since Stripe just doesn't "scale" for us from a business use-case perspective. It's too catered to the devs.
Hope this falls on the right ear. I'm happy to chat more and provide my 2c of feedback if someone wants to listen.
Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like
#144Definitely not my favorite credit card processor. For starters, I will not earn any money if I refer my customers to stripe. It's already a non-starter at that point.
Not gonna lie, that’s an odd reason to choose a credit card processor.
Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
If everything is your job, how can you be measured by what is your job fairly?
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…
> you embrace it, escalate or forward it to the correct people, and then go back to what else you have to do.
How would you maintain this habit in a world where:
1) Time is limited.
2) Context-switching has a high time cost (see “manager time vs maker time”).
3) Communication takes effort. Describing issues conherently takes at least 15 minutes of focused time.
4) “Noticing an issue” is an event which happens at least 4x per hour? This includes seeing an alert come in via your error-reporting infra and determining if it is or is not spurious.
Your attention would be jerked this way and that. If you are in the process of reporting one issue and see another issue, do you report that first or second? How do you find time to defrag your working memory and to focus on your original task for the day?
We live in a tremendously noisy world.
Without a commitment to focus for 2 hours and ignore things other than your current task, How do you accomplish anything?
Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like
#146Patrick, I love Stripe's offering, but I have to pull teeth within my startup to justify why we use Stripe to non-technical people. In fact, when I put on my Product person's hat, I can see everything they tell me clearly. Stripe just does not look or function like a credit card processor. It is nearly impossible for non-engineer folk to grasp - to the point of it not being a viable platform. The almost hermit-like r…
I 100% agree with this. Stripe is fun for startups with <100'000 / year revenue, but then it gets ugly. The reporting can't be configured at all and is highly cumbersome, especially if you need something slightly different than they offer for comparability (e.g. last 7 days, last 28 vs last 30 days), and Stripe is not transparent about their fees at all in the back-end.
Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like
#147@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 am not patio11, but I do work at Stripe. Both are true; we use a lot of email, typically with lists, and a lot of Slack.
Other tools, like a wiki, an issue tracker, Home[0], and a culture of "run" rotations (like on-call but for helping folks on other teams) help keep chaos manageable.
It might be interesting for us to write up another update on this, since many folks are curious...
Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like
#148I was in a small company working on payments team as fullstack engineer. Given the big volume, stripe would be too expensive for us. So we built our own credit card processing service. We integrated with FirstData directly. While I was working on payments, I kept following news about stripe. I love their design and appreciate the deep care they put in their product, even the documentation. I like Patrick and John's inspiring stories and love watching their interviews. After 3 years, I was looking for a new opportunity. Stripe is my dream company. I was lucky to get a phone interview. The conversation went fine. The coding problem was easy. But I could tell the interviewer was not impressed. I couldn't figure out what and why. I was depressed when I got the rejection email. I'll definitely want to try again. Anyone advice or suggestions Stripe folks could offer would be greatly appreciated!
Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like
#149Patrick, I love Stripe's offering, but I have to pull teeth within my startup to justify why we use Stripe to non-technical people. In fact, when I put on my Product person's hat, I can see everything they tell me clearly. Stripe just does not look or function like a credit card processor. It is nearly impossible for non-engineer folk to grasp - to the point of it not being a viable platform. The almost hermit-like r…
I 100% agree with this. Stripe is fun for startups with <100'000 / year revenue, but then it gets ugly. The reporting can't be configured at all and is highly cumbersome, especially if you need something slightly different than they offer for comparability (e.g. last 7 days, last 28 vs last 30 days), and Stripe is not transparent about their fees at all in the back-end.
I'll add my 2c and say I disagree entirely. We ship mid-seven figures through Stripe yearly and I enjoy the back-end still to this day - have been using it right after it was /dev/payments and still kicking all these years on my main small business and small projects alike.
I don't see the need for "reporting" from the Stripe website as I think most businesses should be doing it on their own in their own tooling, but in the cases I want to quickly look things up, Stripe's back-end has been just fine as well.
Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like
#150Patrick, I love Stripe's offering, but I have to pull teeth within my startup to justify why we use Stripe to non-technical people. In fact, when I put on my Product person's hat, I can see everything they tell me clearly. Stripe just does not look or function like a credit card processor. It is nearly impossible for non-engineer folk to grasp - to the point of it not being a viable platform. The almost hermit-like r…
> The moment we crossed a dozen customers and 100-200K in monthly processing, it’s as if Stripe just stopped working for us.
This is odd. We have hundreds of monthly customers and ship physical + digital products, handle returns, disputes, and so forth fairly well.
Support has been good for us as well, if unconventional, so I'll agree with the lack of a direct line access to an AM/AE being annoying... but ultimately it hasn't stopped us from doing anything timely.
We have a SaaS product in addition to physical retailing and Stripe works very well for us and I don't see how it won't for years to come. We use third-party systems in addition to Stripe for inventory management, fulfillment, and we do reporting from pulling raw data into our own back-end and doing the work there (which... I'm pretty sure is standard with most small tech businesses, as you have much more granular control over things), so I guess we just almost entirely disagree with each other.
I think your suggestions are good... I just don't see them as being anything more than sustainment features for me.