One thing that stood out to me was the aspect of having a strong culture of writing. Could anyone talk about how Stripe's culture of writing works a bit more? How does this manifest in things like product decisions/direction, setting technical direction, designing systems/APIs, etc?
Building Products at Stripe
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Re: Building Products at Stripe
#121) >>> Stripe runs on written long-form documents in a way that I haven’t seen before. 2) >>> The product shaping document will come at it from the perspective of a user. When you combine bullets 1 & 2, it makes for very good documentation. It was one of the things I loved about Stripe when I first tried to use them (plus the simplicity of the product at that time).
However, my latest experience with Stripe is that their documentation is becoming similar to Google documentation i.e. multiple pieces of documentation describing the same thing but the different documentation is not consistent especially when they are using the same scenario. For example, you might see 2 different documents (from Stripe) that talk about embedding an online payment form and those 2 would have the same example but one would give the impression that you only need to deal with X attributes while the other one will show you that you actually need Y attributes. Some of the attributes could also be named differently (the name has probably changed and one document has not been updated while the other has or was written after the attribute was changed).
Re: Building Products at Stripe
#131) >>> Stripe runs on written long-form documents in a way that I haven’t seen before. 2) >>> The product shaping document will come at it from the perspective of a user. When you combine bullets 1 & 2, it makes for very good documentation. It was one of the things I loved about Stripe when I first tried to use them (plus the simplicity of the product at that time). However, my latest experience with Stripe is that t…
This is similar to my experience. My company is doing a stripe integration and I wasted a week playing with the multiple different sample apps that were provided "as is" and only made significant progress by ignoring them and building my prototype up section by section from the "getting started" documentation.
Re: Building Products at Stripe
#141) >>> Stripe runs on written long-form documents in a way that I haven’t seen before. 2) >>> The product shaping document will come at it from the perspective of a user. When you combine bullets 1 & 2, it makes for very good documentation. It was one of the things I loved about Stripe when I first tried to use them (plus the simplicity of the product at that time). However, my latest experience with Stripe is that t…
Hi! I'm Jordan, a manager on the Documentation team at Stripe. Thank you (and thank you to others on thread) for sharing this valuable feedback. It would be great to get more details about your experience. This kind of feedback allows us to make specific changes that will help you (and likely many other users) in the near term. Drop me a line at jordan@stripe.com and I'd be more than happy to chat.
Re: Building Products at Stripe
#151) >>> Stripe runs on written long-form documents in a way that I haven’t seen before. 2) >>> The product shaping document will come at it from the perspective of a user. When you combine bullets 1 & 2, it makes for very good documentation. It was one of the things I loved about Stripe when I first tried to use them (plus the simplicity of the product at that time). However, my latest experience with Stripe is that t…
This is similar to my experience. My company is doing a stripe integration and I wasted a week playing with the multiple different sample apps that were provided "as is" and only made significant progress by ignoring them and building my prototype up section by section from the "getting started" documentation.
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Re: Building Products at Stripe
#16Stripe needs to reduce fees
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Re: Building Products at Stripe
#17Stripe needs to reduce fees
You can negotiate the fees
Re: Building Products at Stripe
#18In my experience, Stripe is full of very smart, interesting people, but most of what's described here is an aspirational view of how the current executives think product should work at Stripe. That's OK, in some sense any view of the "self" is going to be aspirational, but it seems naive/koolaidy to believe that all of the following things can be true at the same time (these are all quotes from the article): - "it’s…
Am I alone here in feeling like that all sounds incredibly exhausting and like a pretty draining place to work, and not-so-subtly seeks to attract workaholics?
It's like there's lip-service to things that we as software engineers enjoy about our profession (eg craftsmanship, deep thinking, high-quality work), but it comes across as just throat clearing before hammering in "moving very, very fast". I read that constant repetition of "moving fast" as "you will always have an endless backlog of work that you will nonetheless have to endlessly crank through with all your energy, and our hiring/retention policy only selects for that"
Re: Building Products at Stripe
#19In my experience, Stripe is full of very smart, interesting people, but most of what's described here is an aspirational view of how the current executives think product should work at Stripe. That's OK, in some sense any view of the "self" is going to be aspirational, but it seems naive/koolaidy to believe that all of the following things can be true at the same time (these are all quotes from the article): - "it’s…
Am I alone here in feeling like that all sounds incredibly exhausting and like a pretty draining place to work, and not-so-subtly seeks to attract workaholics? It's like there's lip-service to things that we as software engineers enjoy about our profession (eg craftsmanship, deep thinking, high-quality work), but it comes across as just throat clearing before hammering in "moving very, very fast". I read that constan…
> Am I alone here in feeling like that all sounds incredibly exhausting and like a pretty draining place to work, and not-so-subtly seeks to attract workaholics?
Yes, but if someone loves what they do why wouldn't they want to immerse themselves in it and get paid well for it?
Re: Building Products at Stripe
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I alone here in feeling like that all sounds incredibly exhausting and like a pretty draining place to work, and not-so-subtly seeks to attract workaholics? It's like there's lip-service to things that we as software engineers enjoy about our profession (eg craftsmanship, deep thinking, high-quality work), but it comes across as just throat clearing before hammering in "moving very, very fast". I read that constan…
> Am I alone here in feeling like that all sounds incredibly exhausting and like a pretty draining place to work, and not-so-subtly seeks to attract workaholics? Yes, but if someone loves what they do why wouldn't they want to immerse themselves in it and get paid well for it?
because they will burnout.....