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What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

kalzumeus.com

81–90 of 280 posts

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#81
post #47

Does anyone know if Patrick has talked somewhere about why he decided to take a job at Stripe instead of continuing his consulting business or starting a new venture? Patrick didn't strike me as someone interested in working at a "regular" job.

He talks about it here: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-wo...

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#82
post #57
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.

Well the answer is that they get lots of applications from really good developers who also have top colleges on their resumes and top companies they've worked at. So they interview them first and can't get to the rest. This is obvious but can't be said publicly.

This is also why people fight so hard to get prestigious companies and universities on their resume.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#83
post #21
post #12

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 ima…

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.

Crazy suggestion: figure out a way to dogfood your hiring process. Have an engineer with a few years experience at Stripe try to get through the application process and see what kind of feedback they bring back. Kind of like secret shoppers but for hiring.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#84

"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…

Those sound like perfectly legal words.

A stripe customer is free to tell Stripe "Your fees are too high, and I'd prefer switching processors than raising prices".

I could be wrong. Is there an example of an illegal cartel, trying to persuade customers from whom it makes transaction fees, to raise prices? Surely this isn't a new thing under the sun.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Going back to nsenifty:

> 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).

Saying you'll get back to a candidate, especially when that candidate has already been told to expect an offer, and then ghosting is not polite. Any framing of this as acceptable behavior, be it polite or impolite, is unacceptable. You can say "oh that's just the way it is" and there's some truth to that, but that doesn't mean it isn't pure fucking bullshit and deserving of condemnation.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#86
post #73
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> Even if that's what every business owner thinks, you can't tell it because you will sounds like an arrogant person.

It's not, in fact, what every business owner thinks.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#87
One of my friends worked at Stripe but left because she said that management is made up of young OGs that don't know how to manage but they've been at Stripe for so long they are rich and think they know what they're doing. It's hard to get real work done because of this from what I've heard.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#88

"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…

Those sound like perfectly legal words. A stripe customer is free to tell Stripe "Your fees are too high, and I'd prefer switching processors than raising prices". I could be wrong. Is there an example of an illegal cartel, trying to persuade customers from whom it makes transaction fees, to raise prices? Surely this isn't a new thing under the sun.

Ultimately consumers foot the bill. It's why antitrust legislation gets pursued in the first place.

It's the raising of prices in the absence of market forces that gives room for the payment processor to increase fees. Theoretically all payment processors benefit from advocating that their clients raise prices. If some companies raise their prices, no issue, but the coordinated effort to do it is where you "smell a rat".

It's then up to the litigating party to try to find collusion between companies to do this. This is like how the anti-competitive hiring practices of Google/Apple/Facebook/etc were surfaced. They all had a set of practices that stood out as anomalous and during the subsequent investigation it was found that they colluded with each other to set the market (rate for hiring talent).

It's probably not the case here...and also patio11 has little risk saying so while living in Japan where industries are highly vertically-integrated/monopolistic.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#89
post #12

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 ima…

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…

Lol the worst job application turn down I ever received was from Spotify.

They said “ we don’t want you in our band “

It was oddly personal and upsetting. Lol

How tone deaf is hr sometimes

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#90
post #73
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I don't have a horse in this race, but I always get surprised when people critique responses from high-profile members of organizations.

Have you ever seen a businessperson make a public statement on behalf of a company that espoused or accepted negative/neutral sentiment?

I dunno why people even bother responding or reacting internally to these statements. There's not a human being behind them -- there's a corporate entity who has to answer to stakeholders with a spotlight being shined on them.

It's purely politics and statesmanship, the human being is long gone, or only shows up in private settings after everyone's had several drinks.

Except Elon Musk. That's a man you can, probably, take at his word.

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