What it’s like to work for Stripe

Engineering staff have been hired with a range of work experience, i.e. some college hires, some self taught, some with industry background, any combination of the above - the (engineering) corporate culture grows organically as the team matures and works together

Marketing, BizDev, &c staff have been hired with significant industry experience, I don't know where they serve their apprenticeships, but it isn't here wherever here is - they bring a view of corporate culture with them from their previous experience, this doesn't seem to meld well with the growing culture on the engineering side.

I'm sure this isn't ubiquitous, but the tech industry seems to be very keen on nurturing engineers and, in a sense, taking a responsibility for the quality of the engineering community at large, but for other job functions is happy to be, for want of a better word, parasitic, relying on someone else to train those people, whether they be HR, Marketing, BizDev or whatever.

This is one of the worst policies I've ever encountered. Companies that I've been involved with often do this at first, because at first, everyone SHOULD do support. After a few years, it's horribly unproductive. It creates a long term crisis culture that is reactive rather than proactive. Many days the entire development team will not be working on their individual development tasks and instead be ganging up on some perceived production crisis.

You need to introduce the concept of triage, not gang-support and no rotating support. Rotating support isn't just bad for your developers, it's a horrible way to support your customers. One week you have a problem that gets resolved quickly because the guy on support actually wrote the code that you are having a problem with. The next week, the same support call takes three days because the guy on support has no idea where that code even lives and has to learn the process. You might say 'oh, but that's how we cross train', to which I, as a customer, point out that those three days I had to wait for an answer were unacceptable, and you should have a better plan on cross training than 'wait til something breaks and throw completely clueless resources at it'.

Also, the fact that you had the talk initially set for the dinner time basically means that your culture is already incompatible with the lifestyle of those who value family over work. I am not saying it's a bad thing, I used to actually sleep at work when I was younger, but it is an indication of problems you'll face once your team gets over a certain size. Diversity has a smaller common overlap.