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What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

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Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#181

Post by mistidoi »

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…

Just curious... What does engineering management look like at Stripe? Do they do the standard goal-setting stuff that's common in the valley?

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#182

Post by bernatfp »

agf wrote: post #133
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 (…

Can you expand on level obfuscation?

I think he means role titles don't include seniority level

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#183

Post by aboutruby »

patio11 wrote: post #180
aboutruby wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what open recs means in this context: - open requirements - open recommendations - open requisites - open offers I'm not really expecting an answer so I asked on stackexchange: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/490404/what-does...

It's industry jargon for "each allocation for a single person which appears on a planned set of hires."

Thanks a lot!

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#184

Post by jodrellblank »

hawkice wrote: post #132
myhf wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be an effective way to commit illegal discrimination.

I mean, discussing your work with your coworkers is a pretty reasonable workplace responsibility. What's illegal about asking if someone was comfortable doing it?

I was wondering this, I thought the discrimination was about disability, particularly, and "depression and social anxiety" are casually considered illnesses rather than disabilities.

https://www.gov.uk/reasonable-adjustments-for-disabled-worke... says "Employers must make reasonable adjustments to make sure workers with disabilities, or physical or mental health conditions, aren’t substantially disadvantaged when doing their jobs."

and the examples given on the gov.uk site include a specific mention of an anxiety disorder "doing things another way, such as allowing someone with social anxiety disorder to have their own desk instead of hot-desking"

But I don't know where "reasonable adjustments" comes in with this. "I have social anxiety and don't want to present in front of a group, may I send an email instead" sounds reasonable to me. "I don't want to send an email, someone else will have to do this part of the job" doesn't sound reasonable. You don't reasonably hire one person to do a job, then hire another person to the parts the first person cannot do, right? But I'm no lawyer.

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#185

Post by hawkice »

jodrellblank wrote: post #184
hawkice wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, discussing your work with your coworkers is a pretty reasonable workplace responsibility. What's illegal about asking if someone was comfortable doing it?

I was wondering this, I thought the discrimination was about disability, particularly, and "depression and social anxiety" are casually considered illnesses rather than disabilities. https://www.gov.uk/reasonable-adjustments-for-disabled-worke... says " Employers must make reasonable adjustments to make sure workers with disabilities, or physical or mental health conditions, aren’t substantially disadvantaged when do…

Considering it is an email in the case of Stripe, I think you're analysis is correct.

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#186

Post by pololee »

yitchelle wrote: post #167
pololee wrote: post #148

I 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 i…

Did they give a plausible reason for their rejection? I am just interested if the trend for job rejection reasons is moving towards a more transparent model. In the past and present, it is extremely difficult/frustrating to get the real answers for being rejected.

They didn't give me any specific reasons. The recruiter called me one day after my video interview. She only told me they didn't think I was a good fit. In the interview, I finished the coding questions in 30 mins. Then I just had a chat with the interviewer. The conversation went fine. He told me he was full-stack eng and worked on frontend. I asked him whether he worked with Benjamin De Cock, a stripe designer I admire and if he could share some stories. He said yes but didn't want to share stories.

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#187

Post by afarrell »

rarecoil wrote: post #58
chapium wrote: post #37

Earlier 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…

How do you actually execute this in a world where time and attention are finite?

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#188

Post by kevan »

jodrellblank wrote: post #129
kevan wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very similar sentiment at Amazon. >Leaders are owners...They never say “that’s not my job". You own your entire problem space, not just your solution. If something unexpected comes up, you're still ultimately responsible for dealing with it with the goal of solving your actual problem In a large company it's tempting for people or teams to put up walls around what they think their job description should be. Invariabl…

It's still surprisingly common for comments from ex-Amazon people to say how shoddy their infrastructure is, and for real-world outages to happen. From the outside, that doesn't seem like the result of an environment "everyone takes responsibility, and fixes the root cause of every problem" working well, does it?

I feel that in the past (present is TBD) Amazon under-indexed on developer experience, tooling, and infrastructure but I think it was caused by lack of investment, not lack of ownership. There's nuance between "Oh no, broke, not my problem", and " broke, I want to fix it but can't because ". In my experience it's usually closer to the latter here.
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