Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

kalzumeus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 280 posts

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#71

Post by titanomachy »

dmazin wrote: post #33

Every time I read about Stripe, it seems that the most interesting people work/have worked there (Julia Evans, Aditya Mukerjee, Mudge, Brandur, Greg Brockman). And it seems like a great culture. But the CEO's "progress studies" thing repels me because it reeks of the Kochs' efforts to implant conservatism into education. I don't want to enable that. It sucks. BTW, I am one of the people who had their YC app reviewed…

Can you explain what stood out to you as conservative about the "progress studies" article?

Wikipedia defines conservatism as "a political and social philosophy promoting traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization".

Patrick Collison's article [1] to me seems to be saying "we should be a lot more systematic and scientific in figuring out the drivers of societal progress, and aggressively invest in those things." That seems in direct opposition to conservatism, since it advocates a dramatic overhaul of ineffective institutions.

Collison's definition of progress does seem narrowly focused on measurable economic metrics. Is that the source of your grievance? I think that developments like women's suffrage and racial desegration should be included in discussions of "progress studies", whether or not they led to improvements in measurable metrics. Collison neglects to include examples of this type in his article, but it's not clear to me that he considers them unworthy of study.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-...

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#72

Post by exolymph »

dmazin wrote: post #33

Every time I read about Stripe, it seems that the most interesting people work/have worked there (Julia Evans, Aditya Mukerjee, Mudge, Brandur, Greg Brockman). And it seems like a great culture. But the CEO's "progress studies" thing repels me because it reeks of the Kochs' efforts to implant conservatism into education. I don't want to enable that. It sucks. BTW, I am one of the people who had their YC app reviewed…

> But the CEO's "progress studies" thing repels me because it reeks of the Kochs' efforts to implant conservatism into education. I don't want to enable that. It sucks.

If you had that amount of money (and that reputation), you'd probably try to improve the world _according to your vision of improvement_ too.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#73

Post by polote »

ditonal wrote: post #57
pc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry to hear this and apologize. We're definitely still a comparatively small team wishing we had more efficient ways to handle our inbound funnel. (We do have some ideas here.) But this is good feedback and we should absolutely have provided a better experience.

Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad candidate experience is a lack of resources.

What do you want him to say publicly ? Do you want him to say that he doesn't care about developers he doesn't hire ? Even if that's what every business owner thinks, you can't tell it because you will sounds like an arrogant person.

They don't have (and you should not expect them) to give a feedback to anyone who apply (as it is the case of the parent comment)

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#74

Post by absherwin »

"every time I convince a Stripe customer to raise their prices ... we benefit directly" sounds like the exact words of an illegal cartel. While I doubt that that is Patrick's intent, if I were an antitrust attorney, this would convince me that the notion of payment processors as clearinghouses for price-fixing merits investigation.

This is a great example of how one can do something well-meaning at small scale (Advise tiny, tiny businesses that they would be better served having more confidence in their value) that can turn into something illegal at scale (Advise price leaders that they can safely lead by less and so-on).

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#75

Post by busterarm »

gamblor956 wrote: post #60
slumpt_ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of these blog posts are just astroturfing. Well designed astroturfing, nonetheless. Edit: Astroturfing is the wrong word, perhaps. What I mean to say is vocalized better in the replies. These all should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. A rock of salt?

It's possible for both (a) people to enjoy working at a company and (b) for that company's recruitment process to be abysmally bad. The people handling the recruiting functions are usually not the people you would be working with (unless you go into HR), and generally if HR starts ghosting you during the recruiting process it's because they're putting their efforts into the candidate they are trying to hire. EDIT: Co…

patio11 quite famously on here had a recruiting startup before going to Stripe. Recruiting is likely the only reason they hired him.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#76

Post by ryanSrich »

nsenifty wrote: post #69
ryanSrich wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man. I have a juicy Stripe story from a friend, but I'd rather not share all of the details in case anyone from Stripe is here listening. The gist is that I had a friend apply, go through a few interviews, and then just get completely ghosted. After several emails and attempts to reach out, the hiring manager replied to his email with a two word reply when my friend asked about his application status. That reply w…

I went through the whole loop, "cleared" the interviews (as per the recruiter) and was told to stand by for the offer. A week later, instead of the offer, they just said they ran out of headcount. Never heard back from them again (even though they said they'll reach out when they get headcount back). This was for a pretty senior position.

Stories like this make absolutely no sense to me, and yet I hear them all the time about Stripe.

Why not just tell the candidate that they aren't getting an offer? Why make up elaborate stories about headcount? Why say you're going to follow up? It's clearly not a bandwidth issue since they took the time to respond anyway.

Even something like "We've filled all positions. Your application was strong, but not strong enough. It's unlikely we'll reach back out."

That's 1000x better than getting ghosted after being told they WOULD reach back out. Complete bullshit on their part and a total lack of integrity. There's really no excuse for it.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#77

Post by busterarm »

absherwin wrote: post #74

"every time I convince a Stripe customer to raise their prices ... we benefit directly" sounds like the exact words of an illegal cartel. While I doubt that that is Patrick's intent, if I were an antitrust attorney, this would convince me that the notion of payment processors as clearinghouses for price-fixing merits investigation. This is a great example of how one can do something well-meaning at small scale (Advis…

Most important comment of the whole thread right here.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#78

Post by xerxesaa »

nsenifty wrote: post #69
ryanSrich wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man. I have a juicy Stripe story from a friend, but I'd rather not share all of the details in case anyone from Stripe is here listening. The gist is that I had a friend apply, go through a few interviews, and then just get completely ghosted. After several emails and attempts to reach out, the hiring manager replied to his email with a two word reply when my friend asked about his application status. That reply w…

I went through the whole loop, "cleared" the interviews (as per the recruiter) and was told to stand by for the offer. A week later, instead of the offer, they just said they ran out of headcount. Never heard back from them again (even though they said they'll reach out when they get headcount back). This was for a pretty senior position.

Literally the exact same experience at the Seattle office. Horrible candidate experience.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#79

Post by mytailorisrich »

ryanSrich wrote: post #76
nsenifty wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through the whole loop, "cleared" the interviews (as per the recruiter) and was told to stand by for the offer. A week later, instead of the offer, they just said they ran out of headcount. Never heard back from them again (even though they said they'll reach out when they get headcount back). This was for a pretty senior position.

Stories like this make absolutely no sense to me, and yet I hear them all the time about Stripe. Why not just tell the candidate that they aren't getting an offer? Why make up elaborate stories about headcount? Why say you're going to follow up? It's clearly not a bandwidth issue since they took the time to respond anyway. Even something like "We've filled all positions. Your application was strong, but not strong en…

Saying that they ran out of headcount is both telling that they won't offer and offering a reason, which is exactly as your example: they filled all the positions. It's a polite and somewhat sugar-coated reason instead of bluntly saying that they thought the person was not good enough, but it's standard to be polite when rejecting candidates.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#80

Post by ffggvv »

patio11 wrote: post #32
ffggvv wrote: post #25

why would you work at a company that may never go public and even if it does, already has such an oversized valuation you’ll likely not make much from it? it seems predatory and abusive to employees to stay private this long

A quirk of Silicon Valley culture is that senior employees on the inside of it tend to be rather sophisticated about how they think about equity, and they also tend to be rather reticent about talking about that externally, because of factors such as legal and PR risk. This is immensely frustrating to me, because thinking lucidly about equity is incredibly important for career planning for engineers who are startup-a…

I don't think the equity is worthless. I just think an engineer can work at Facebook with a monthly vest and their equity is as good as cash. An engineer at stripe has illiquid shares that they hope they can convert to cash in 3+ years. Usually the hope of a large return would offset that (time value of money) but thats cancelled by the fact that stripe's private valuation is 30B+.
Post reply on HN