What Working At Stripe Has Been Like • Hacker News Board

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#151

Post by bobwall » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 12:42 AM UTC

NateThePirate wrote: post #146

mchusma wrote: post #122

I mean this in the most constructive way possible. As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period. Stripe's core business is being a part of a "credit card sales tax" that is substantial. Much of this is the fault of Visa/Mastercard/Amex, but that is the problem-space they exist in. Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. If they want to "mak…

I worked on a project where the client wanted to switch to Authorize.net from Stripe midway through because of Stripe’s cost. From a developer perspective, it was a lot more miserable to work with than Stripe. Other projects I’ve worked on have had a similar motivation for not using Stripe. Annoyingly, the cost of implementing the replacement and getting it working with React Native (which involved creating native mo…

Yea, when companies really want to lower the cost, they implement directly with the bank, like say JP Morgan. That makes authorize.net even seem good. Stripe is really a pleasure to work with as a developer.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#152

Post by diogenescynic » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

I interviewed at Stripe a few years back and they were extremely rude in the interview. I was still early in my career and I’ve never forgotten it. Even still, I’ve applied a few times and never heard back. Definitely seems like a company that’s going places but also has a bit of an ego.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#153

Post by philfreo » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 12:56 AM UTC

mchusma wrote: post #122

I mean this in the most constructive way possible. As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period. Stripe's core business is being a part of a "credit card sales tax" that is substantial. Much of this is the fault of Visa/Mastercard/Amex, but that is the problem-space they exist in. Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. If they want to "mak…

As a customer of Stripe too, I almost[1] couldn't disagree more.

Running a global online/SaaS business is hard. So much complexity everywhere. I wish Stripe would handle MORE problems & complexity and would happily pay for it.

Just a few examples Stripe could handle:

- Checkout + Portal is a great start, but it still takes too much (expensive) design+dev brainpower to create the entire experience of a high quality trial-to-paid and existing-customer billing management in a SaaS app.

- Running a SaaS company at any scale is full of Support headaches that Stripe Dashboard simply does not handle well - stuff like tweaking a billing date, and doing combination (e.g. wire transfer + credit card) payments, "can you re-send my invoice but with my VAT ID on it this time?" and many more. At any scale, lots of effort is spend on custom billing support tickets and building internal tooling even if you use all of Stripe's features.

- Are you a SaaS company selling all over the US? Good luck being complaint with all 50 states in terms of sales tax reporting without expensive legal/accounting help. Did you hire any remote out-of-state employees? Good luck -- now your financial compliance got even more complicated.

Stripe doesn't do any of these things well today. And if they did, it would likely be much cheaper than the in-house solutions everyone is coming up with instead. I think Stripe should handle 10x as much complexity for a SaaS company than it does today, and of course they should get paid for doing so.

[1] I agree it would be amazing to see Stripe come up with smoother flows for supporting payments that bypassing the expensive card network's fees.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#154

Post by x87678r » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 12:56 AM UTC

mchusma wrote: post #122

I mean this in the most constructive way possible. As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period. Stripe's core business is being a part of a "credit card sales tax" that is substantial. Much of this is the fault of Visa/Mastercard/Amex, but that is the problem-space they exist in. Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. If they want to "mak…

The best thing I read was Australian regulator capped cc interchange fees at 0.5% and allowed merchants to charge as an extra fee over the price. I guess it'll never happen in the US but maybe Europe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#Australia_and_...

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#155

Post by borroka » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 12:57 AM UTC

Judgmentality wrote: post #85

mytailorisrich wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impoli…

It is unacceptable in theory, in practice it sounds like most of the ghosted in this thread would gladly work there, given the opportunity. Money and visibility (and beauty) make many sins forgiven.

I had terrible interview experiences (rudeness, ghosting, and making zero sense) with Lyft, Airbnb, Twitter, but if they make the right offer, I might say yes (although I have quite a strong memory).

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#156

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

biztos wrote: post #117

ping_pong wrote: post #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.

I'm sorry, but isn't "young OG" a contradiction? How can someone be "OG" (Original Gangster, i.e. really old school) in a very well-funded company founded ten years ago? Am I misunderstanding something?

[deleted]

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#157

Post by puppymaster » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:03 AM UTC

mchusma wrote: post #122

I mean this in the most constructive way possible. As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period. Stripe's core business is being a part of a "credit card sales tax" that is substantial. Much of this is the fault of Visa/Mastercard/Amex, but that is the problem-space they exist in. Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. If they want to "mak…

Could it also be you only care about transaction cost because everything else works so well? The time I spent on customer support with paypal/visa/plaid, ridiculous documentation from other payment processors and payouts snags make me appreciate Stripe even more.

EDIT: As in I haven't touch my stripe code for 2 years. They still work.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#158

Post by borroka » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:04 AM UTC

pc wrote: post #111

ss3000 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it's clearly not a lack of resources, but explicitly not prioritizating candidate experience for candidates you're not actively pursuing. Which, by the way I think is a totally valid decision to make, but let's not kid around and make it sound like your hands were tied.

There are two somewhat separate issues, I think. (1) The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people. We'll do the best we can to identify promising people but a lot of people will get something somewhat functionally equivalent to a form rejection. You could argue that this is merely a priorit…

"The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people."

It is not inevitable and there are company that do recruiting better and other worse. For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear. That is a not a sub-optimal interview experience, like being in a coma is not a sub-optimal life experience.

I understand that working with recruiters is hard (who ever said: I know a recruiter who is a genius? Or even the lesser: I know that recruiter, they are brilliant), but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#159

Post by akhilcacharya » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:30 AM UTC

cyral wrote: post #137

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 applied for the new grad position too a couple months back, having a previous FAANG internship and starting (and selling) my own startup during college. Never heard back or even got the coding challenge. I’ve used Stripe in my own projects a few times and have also heard good things so I’m bummed too.

When I was an undergrad I applied to Stripe several times with a FANG on my resume as well without any responses.

Two reasons for that are:

1) I went to a state school (NC State)

2) The FANG in question was Amazon, which I don't think they "count". I have friends that applied when they decided to leave Amazon and they didn't get interviews either.

If your FAANG was Amazon I'm guessing you're in the same boat.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#160

Post by cycrutchfield » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:36 AM UTC

arrel wrote: post #134

mchusma wrote: post #122

I mean this in the most constructive way possible. As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period. Stripe's core business is being a part of a "credit card sales tax" that is substantial. Much of this is the fault of Visa/Mastercard/Amex, but that is the problem-space they exist in. Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. If they want to "mak…

It seems like a lot of people are defending credit card pricing, but the idea that they’ve been charging the same % since before the internet and are still absorbing the same “cost” of fraud protection is absurd. I would love Stripe to start advocating for lowering credit card fees, either through regulation or providing more avenues for competition.

It’s too late. Much of that extra savings on fraud protection has already been funneled back to the card owner in the form of cash back or reward points. Not a whole lot can be done to break that unless the government comes in and legislates something as they do in Europe.