Live data from Hacker News

What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

kalzumeus.com

161–170 of 280 posts

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#161
post #106
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not patio11 but you can still evaluate something like net preset value by doing discount to the eventual liquidity event. In reality this is complicated as you need to assign probabilities to (1) when liquidity event can occur (2) real value of your equity at the event (3) discount rate. While estimating probability distributions is probably beyond what one can do without detailed inside knowledge (and even then), it…

that makes sense. though it seems like many companies these days such as uber, palantir etc are actually worth less after IPO than before.

[deleted]

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#162
post #21
post #12

Kind of crazy how all these articles come out about what it's like working at Stripe and how to apply. Everyone I've talked to who has applied has not received a response from their application. Even in my most recent experience I wrote a cover letter, reached out to multiple Stripe recruiters. Most of them either ignored me, or said that they were not working on that role and said my status is still "pending". I ima…

I'm sorry to hear this and apologize. We're definitely still a comparatively small team wishing we had more efficient ways to handle our inbound funnel. (We do have some ideas here.) But this is good feedback and we should absolutely have provided a better experience.

Does your funnel explicitly exclude people from state schools or lower tier FAANGs? Seems like it does casually browsing LinkedIn.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#163
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad candidate experience is a lack of resources.

Well the answer is that they get lots of applications from really good developers who also have top colleges on their resumes and top companies they've worked at. So they interview them first and can't get to the rest. This is obvious but can't be said publicly. This is also why people fight so hard to get prestigious companies and universities on their resume.

[deleted]

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#164
I would expect Stripe to be the same sort of people that work in Apple, Mozzila, Microsoft, Ebay and the sort

Global LEFT, Anti White, Anti Freedom, Anti Invidauls , relying on the state, mainstream and what they are told without the ablity to rational think for themself

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#165
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, stories like this are par for the course. While at Stripe, a few of my close friends and former co-workers were treated so poorly during the application process that I stopped referring anyone over a year before I left.

Yeah. I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of these blog posts are just astroturfing. Well designed astroturfing, nonetheless. Edit: Astroturfing is the wrong word, perhaps. What I mean to say is vocalized better in the replies. These all should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. A rock of salt?

It's like when you see a dozen Glassdoor reviews for an employer where the only recommendation to management is to "keep doing what you're doing" and that any complaints are "sour grapes" or from employees who can't handle "growing pains".

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#166
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a basic thing too for a recruiting process. As soon as you get a no, send an automated email at least!

The theory is that it's better not to respond at that point, because if they change their mind in 3 months, they'd rather not have rejected you so they can say "sorry we were slow".

I don't think I've ever heard of someone changing their mind 3 months down the line. Maybe it happens.

I know I'm less likely to interview somewhere if my friends tell me they got ghosted.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#167

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 tr…

Do you know of anyone who does a god job for SaaS companies?

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#168
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Absolutely. That is category 2!

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#169
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Couldn't you "pen test" your own hiring process? Have some folks stage applications and see the process failures first hand. You might get better data from running these experiments yourself rather than through a survey.

You’re talking about a “secret shopper” test. They deliver very actionable findings, if there’s a will to improve.

Re: What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

#170

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 tr…

Fully agree, I don't have a problem paying Stripe if it means they are properly incentivized to help me run my business.

I'd be happy to throw them a few more percent if they could handle more of the complexity you've mentioned above. Right now, Stripe is both too complex to set up and too simple from a feature perspective.

I'm optimistic though since it seems companies like Paddle, Chargebee and others are blazing that path. As much as I love Stripe and what they originally did for online commerce, they're already starting to look like the lazy incumbent compared to the challengers right now. Market dominance is not a great incentive to create better products.

Post reply on HN