What it’s like to work for Stripe

Participating in support, as the author mentions, is an incredible learning experience. I handle all incoming emails for the manufacturing business I work at. Even though I end up filtering and passing on most emails, I get to see what customers are saying, asking, wanting, etc. If something needs to be handled by a higher-up, they often include me on the following interaction with the customer. This has taught me a lot about the philosophies and decision-making process that has made the business successful. I am now at a point where I am handling more emails than I am passing on. I can't think of any way I could have learned as much as I have and had it make sense and really sink in.

Yes, I read this sort of thing, then look back at the desk I am chained to, and want to weep.

Enjoy it while you can, it will all go downhill when you start hiring sales/marketing people ... ;-)

[Disclaimer: Stripe cofounder.]

I know you probably mean this at least in part in jest, but I've found this to be a pretty common perception in the tech industry. It's probably worth addressing directly.

We want to work with the best engineers, but it's arrogant to assume that that's all that we'll need, or that hiring non-engineering people will cause our culture to deteriorate.

That's not to say that that doesn't happen at some companies (obviously). If you view sales/marketing people as second class, and don't put the same thought into that part of the culture, it'll inevitably be worse. Without a lot of care, it's very easy to build a bad engineering culture too.

While building great software is at the very core of what we do, we won't be able to do everything that we want to accomplish by just hiring engineers. We need people who like talking to users, and people who can describe what Stripe is doing to the world at large, and people who'll help build the countless parts of Stripe that aren't purely about code.

If companies choose to ignore sales, marketing, partnerships, support, and everything else, they should be pretty explicit about the compromise: they're trading off success for narrow-minded solipsism.

We've hired people who aren't full-time engineers, and we'll hire lots more. We want people who can craft both kernel exploits and memorable prose. Those who spend their days working with people instead of code are just as important as anyone else, and their contributions are just as large.

Love the idea of a paper reading group. In case anyone missed the link in the article, they've put a bunch of the recently read papers up at https://github.com/gdb/stripe-prg/wiki/Papers