What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

Kind of crazy how all these articles come out about what it's like working at Stripe and how to apply. Everyone I've talked to who has applied has not received a response from their application.

Even in my most recent experience I wrote a cover letter, reached out to multiple Stripe recruiters. Most of them either ignored me, or said that they were not working on that role and said my status is still "pending".

I imagine that Stripe's recruiting team is overwhelmed but it was unfortunate that they weren't able to get back to me. I ended up accepting an engineering manager position over payments at another company.

I don't doubt this is true. However, given that the author put his name on it, it's impossible that this blog post could be anything but glowingly positive (unless he wanted to complain on his way out).

This is one of the few blogs where I'll always read the entire article, consistently great writing and thought-provoking ideas.

I agree with the other commenter regarding the Stripe application process. I've applied 2-3 times starting in 2015 and as recently as early 2020 and have never heard back, it's been the only company that never gets back to me!

Everything worked out, since I've landed some great positions at promising startups in the meantime, but I would have loved to experience the growth from ~500 to ~3000 employees like Patrick has.

Small improvement in this paragraph:

> “If you sell to doctors you prefer futures in which more money goes to doctors. Those are much better futures for you than futures with less money going to...

Since the article was just talking about call options, my first thought went to futures contracts instead of possible timelines. I think using "timelines" instead of futures would make this a bit more readable.

At almost every large, successful company there is a huge disconnect between what hiring is screening for and what corporate blog posts might suggest, to the point of engineers themselves being unaware of how the experience is for most applicants (after all, they are self-selected…) Usually this boils down to "you don't seem to have enough experience" or "you don't know anyone on the team who can vouch for you to get through the initial resume screen". A real shame, since it leaves a number of qualified applicants in a poor position, but presumably Stripe has enough people applying that they can afford passing up people.

If you follow Patrick on Twitter you get used to this - even to the point where I didn’t realize this was from his blog but intuited it was a quote from him just by the style of writing.

I believe what he’s getting at here is close to the following: Stripe isn’t just providing payment (Reliable capture on success, aka Stripe gets money on revenue generation), but is also trying to provide tools to make the B2B model easier to deploy, based on their experience with these business models. Stripe Atlas or Sigma are probably a good example of those types of services - they’re trying to use their payments play to also push for selling you Business Intelligence or Legal.

Indexing is just taking knowledge and deploying it to make something faster, like a database index (I know I want to join on this column, so I index it).