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What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

kalzumeus.com

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Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#91

Post by ALittleLight »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #79
ryanSrich wrote: post #76

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.

How is it polite to mislead candidates? Surely it can be uncomfortable to hear that you aren't up to par for a job or didn't interview well - but if that is the truth it is better to hear that truth than to hear some platitude about headcount. If I believed the "headcount" story I might invest time waiting to see if headcount opened up, or hold out hope that I'd potentially get an offer. On the other hand, if I heard that I had gaps X, Y, and Z I'd probably start working on X, Y, and Z - or at least think through how I could demonstrate my aptitude in those areas better or mitigate my weakness there and so on.

It's like if your doctor tried to be polite to you by not mentioning some serious disease because he was afraid it would make you feel bad. It might indeed make the candidate feel bad to hear about their (perceived) deficiencies - but if they do hear about it then they can do something about it!

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#92

Post by ryanSrich »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #79
ryanSrich wrote: post #76

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.

If a recruiter or hiring manage wants to sugar coat a rejection then go for it. It's a coward move, but not a straight up lie.

Telling the candidate that you'll reach back out, and then not doing that, is complete bullshit.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#93

Post by mattmanser »

busterarm wrote: post #75
gamblor956 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He's more famous for generally being a developer blogger, he was well known here well before Starfighter. I think he always had the most karma before they got rid of 'top'. He was always very open about his bingo card creator software, and then his appointment reminder sass. His yearly round up of BCC was always a top voted post.

Afaik he originally became well known for his helpful posts and advice on Joel Spolsky's business of software forums before HN even existed. That's where I first came across him, useful info about SEO.

This is a long way of saying I thought he'd been hired as a developer advocate for their startup thing, Stripe Atlas, rather than a recruitment advisor.

Edit: It's on his blog that he was hired for Stripe Atlas https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-wo...

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#94

Post by angel_j »

neilparikh wrote: post #54
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?

These blog posts claim that they enjoy working at Stripe. The comments claim that the application/hiring process at Stripe is not great. It's entirely possible both are true, since they're mostly unrelated, so I don't understand the accusation of astroturfing.

The connection is obvious. If you hear it sucks to apply or work there, you may decide against trying. If a dude with HN blogging cred says it's cool, you reconsider.

It's a terrible read, all sugar and good-buddy fluff. One could easily question the motivation for such cheese.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#95

Post by ivalm »

ffggvv wrote: post #80
patio11 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+.

Not patio11 but you can still evaluate something like net preset value by doing discount to the eventual liquidity event. In reality this is complicated as you need to assign probabilities to (1) when liquidity event can occur (2) real value of your equity at the event (3) discount rate.

While estimating probability distributions is probably beyond what one can do without detailed inside knowledge (and even then), it's useful to think of a number of stories, eg: target_co will ipo in 3 years at 2x last raised value, target_co will ipo in 5 year at last raise, target_co will be acquired at 0.1x last raise in 8 years (what is the overhang?); let's say all at equal probabilities. For discount rate you can think of alternative places where you could work (eg. alternative_public_co will grow at -10, +20, +30% yoy with equal probability) + time value of not being able to liquidate (let's say another 10%).

This will give you some range of numbers to consider.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#96

Post by Ashanmaril »

gonehome wrote: post #44
OliverGilan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applied for a new grad position two months ago, did the coding challenge and passed all test cases with clean code and time to spare and haven't heard a peep from them since. It's a shame considering how I only hear good things about the company and the recruiting process but almost all the big companies I've applied to have at least had the decency to let me know they aren't moving forward

I think it's like most companies, really hard to get attention unless: - You have a referral - You went to MIT, Stanford, Caltech, CMU, Cal - You're coming from FAANG or similar The frontdoor is a waste of time. Even with the above odds are against you, but at least you have someone to ask about progress/move things along for you.

I don't know about "most companies." Maybe most really big tech companies, places that are constantly getting crazy amounts of applications. And if you're living in a heavily populated city.

I live in a place with a fairly small population, and I got offers at 3/3 programming jobs I've applied for since my first in 2017.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#97

Post by colejohnson66 »

varjag wrote: post #63
ignoramous wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe likely has pick of the cream for open positions. It has been public knowledge for a while that they're a rocket ship, and that attracts top talent by definition (in addition to sharks and wolves [0] I'd presume). [0] https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-story-from-s...

Overwhelmed or not, ghosting after coding challenge/technical interview is unacceptable.

Correct. Never responding after an application? Par for the course. But asking someone to complete a coding challenge or even an interview and then ghosting is downright unprofessional and should be unacceptable.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#98

Post by znull »

_corym wrote: 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 surprised to hear so many in this thread had negative experiences. My experience as an applicant at Stripe was stellar from beginning to end, probably the most professional and well-executed interview process I've seen in my career. I can say that without bias because I ended up choosing another offer, but it was really difficult to turn down Stripe's after that.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#99

Post by ihnorton »

I've heard several times about the Stripe "Library" and "written culture", both in previous patio11 posts [1] and elsewhere. I understand part of that comes from the top and screening for writers. But I'm also curious about the basic mechanics of the library; wordpress? big ol' mediawiki? git repo of markdown docs? custom software?

How has the library process (if any) itself changed over time?

I've worked at non-startup BigCo/healthcare with formalized procedural docs, (technical) writers, change management, etc., and often they were minimal, boring, impersonal, frequently outdated -- and rarely read. I'm imagining (for better or worse) this is something a little more like a shared internal blog archive?

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#100

Post by busterarm »

mattmanser wrote: post #93
busterarm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He's more famous for generally being a developer blogger, he was well known here well before Starfighter. I think he always had the most karma before they got rid of 'top'. He was always very open about his bingo card creator software, and then his appointment reminder sass. His yearly round up of BCC was always a top voted post. Afaik he originally became well known for his helpful posts and advice on Joel Spolsky's…

That's a different type of recruiting ;)

I'm well aware of who he is and what he's famous for though.

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