What it’s like to work for Stripe • Hacker News Board

Re: What it’s like to work for Stripe

#31

Post by unohoo » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 9:53 PM UTC

alttag wrote: post #29

unohoo wrote: post #18

A lot of these awesome things (weekly standups, together lunches, socials etc.) are feasible when the team is still small. As the team scales, this starts getting more and more difficult and ultimately, silos form among the different functions (sales/support/eng etc.). Probably this might not be felt to such an extent given that stripe is (and will be) engineering heavy (I presume). But I've witnessed this first hand…

I enjoy the occasional social as much as they next guy, but as I get older, my family becomes more important. Is it the case that the majority of employees have fewer external social attachments? Do you (OP, or anyone else here) think the idea of socials, which long term might have a tendency to become de facto mandatory, is sustainable as the workforce ages (and starts families)?

I'm married too (no kids yet) and have a long commute. Most of my colleagues are single, male in the 23-30 age demographic and live in the city. They obviously go out way much more than I do. Family is important to me, but every once in a while, I make a conscious effort to socialize outside of the work environment. I do think that socializing every once in a while is important to build camaraderie among colleagues. Of course, when booze is involved (more often so than not), people tend to loosen up a bit and chat more openly. Even if you have a family, I would suggest making time once a month to socialize (be it a social events@work or other professional meetup events).

Re: What it’s like to work for Stripe

#32

Post by danielweber » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 10:06 PM UTC

OmarIsmail wrote: post #23

I love the part about email transparency. That's been my ideal as well, so it's great to see that it actually works in practice. One big question I have though is around compensation. How transparent are you guys with compensation, and what lessons have you learned there?

I worked at one start-up where a guy insisted on being on all email lists and then proceeded to bitch up a gigantic storm on every single issue.

That was more a personnel issue that a process one, though. His boss didn't have the backbone to fire him.

Re: What it’s like to work for Stripe

#33

Post by justinmk » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 10:08 PM UTC

> every email at Stripe is CC-ed to lists that go to either the entire company or to any particular team. This includes internal person-to-person correspondence

I recently watched an 1990 Steve Jobs interview[1] in which he gushed about this very idea as being a workflow of the future. Since the "desktop revolution" was old news, he was moving on to the "business process revolution" (something like that), enabled by networked computers. Companies would love it because it removed the friction of traditional employee work roles/titles and geography, and allowed managers to observe communication and measure stuff. It's interesting to see a company actually doing pretty much exactly what Jobs described in the video.

Although obviously, open source has used that model with great success.

[1] http://video.pbs.org/video/2151510911/

Re: What it’s like to work for Stripe

#34

Post by jazzymorning » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 10:12 PM UTC

pc wrote: post #24

OmarIsmail wrote: post #23

I love the part about email transparency. That's been my ideal as well, so it's great to see that it actually works in practice. One big question I have though is around compensation. How transparent are you guys with compensation, and what lessons have you learned there?

It's a tough question. We consider compensation to be confidential to both employees and the company -- in general, it's not our information to share. Within the constraints of that, though, we try to be as open as possible. In particular, we share some information about current salaries at Stripe with new hires, and we share full details about all of Stripe's investment and the terms on which it was taken.

In considering doing something similar with my company, I'm wondering if there is an override for the auto CC that should be available to certain accounts?

Re: What it’s like to work for Stripe

#35

Post by collision » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 10:14 PM UTC

alttag wrote: post #29

unohoo wrote: post #18

A lot of these awesome things (weekly standups, together lunches, socials etc.) are feasible when the team is still small. As the team scales, this starts getting more and more difficult and ultimately, silos form among the different functions (sales/support/eng etc.). Probably this might not be felt to such an extent given that stripe is (and will be) engineering heavy (I presume). But I've witnessed this first hand…

I enjoy the occasional social as much as they next guy, but as I get older, my family becomes more important. Is it the case that the majority of employees have fewer external social attachments? Do you (OP, or anyone else here) think the idea of socials, which long term might have a tendency to become de facto mandatory, is sustainable as the workforce ages (and starts families)?

A number of people at Stripe have families or have other social attachments. We try hard to ensure we're not making lifestyle assumptions when we hold social things. Some of this involves giving good advance notice, other times it's around timing. Trivial example: recently, we moved an internal talk series from dinner time to 4pm, so that people who don't stay for dinner aren't excluded. I think explicitly keeping things like that in mind helps.

Re: What it’s like to work for Stripe

#36

Post by j2bax » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 10:36 PM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #6

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

Being an interactive producer that loves chilling with the engineers, I abhor this comment! That said, we hired a sales guy once that was old school sales, and it didn't end well...

Re: What it’s like to work for Stripe

#37

Post by cpspencer » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 10:47 PM UTC

pc wrote: post #8

lazyjones wrote: post #6

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 h…

Anthropology 101 [:\]

Re: What it’s like to work for Stripe

#38

Post by lucian303 » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 10:50 PM UTC

All emails CC'd.

IRC!

Wow, that must be a pretty shitty job. Not to mention the time wasted with Allhands meetings.

Re: What it’s like to work for Stripe

#39

Post by kanzure » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 10:54 PM UTC

pc wrote: post #13

xianshou wrote: post #5

The truly interesting challenge will be how effectively they transition these policies as they scale. For example, the flood-of-email with filters works incredibly well for transparency at 40 people, but becomes an unmanageable deluge much past 100. The Capture the Flag runs, though, look like an idea that's both awesome and sustainable.

Yeah, we're pretty sure that what we do will require extensive tweaking as we scale. We did a bunch of things at 5 people that haven't scaled to 30. I'm optimistic the properties that we care most about can scale with us, though, even if the mechanism by which we accomplish them changes.

What did you do at 5 people?

Re: What it’s like to work for Stripe

#40

Post by nostrademons » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 11:08 PM UTC

xianshou wrote: post #5

The truly interesting challenge will be how effectively they transition these policies as they scale. For example, the flood-of-email with filters works incredibly well for transparency at 40 people, but becomes an unmanageable deluge much past 100. The Capture the Flag runs, though, look like an idea that's both awesome and sustainable.

FWIW, Google also does the flood-of-email with filters thing, and it still works at 30,000 employees. People don't subscribe to every single mailing list anymore, but most e-mails are CC'd to at least a team mailing list, as are (usually) every code review and every bug.

I get about 300 emails a day, several of which are mailing list digests with 25 emails apiece. I actually skim them all; I'm one of two people I know who doesn't use filters, and I think the other one gave up recently. For someone who's an informationavore like me, though, it's paradise, and a great way of keeping up the illusion of knowing everything.