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My Time Working at Stripe

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Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#161

Post by bell-cot »

wkjagt wrote: post #84
DeathArrow wrote: post #31

>he asked the team, “for this meeting I’d like us to try and introduce ourselves a little differently. If you’re comfortable, I’d like us to try and be 10% more vulnerable than we normally would in a work setting.” I remember feeling a mix of anxiety and excitement rise in my chest. I sat pondering what I would share. I decided to go for more than 10%. I shared about how my marriage had almost collapsed a couple year…

Post: "If you’re comfortable, I’d like us to try and be 10% more vulnerable" This comment: "I'd rather not have my manager forcing me to do group therapy." How did "if you’re comfortable" become "forcing me", and "try and be 10% more vulnerable" become "group therapy"?

Read his description a couple more times, while pretending that you're a therapist. The "wait, what the ?" stuff can give you a better sense of his emotions and mental state, if you don't balk at the objective counterfactuals.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#162

Post by echoangle »

wkjagt wrote: post #87
Tainnor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, the manager asked only for “10% more vulnerable”. And they have absolutely no right to do that. "Being vulnerable" is not part of any job description.

That's why they said "if you're comfortable". It was totally optional. I don't understand your strong reaction to this.

Asking a question in front of a group, bur adding a "if you're comfortable", doesn't really make the problem go away. There's always a pressure to answer, even if you say that answering is optional. It's not a horrible violation but it's still kind of weird and unnecessary in a professional context.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#163

Post by echoangle »

shpx wrote: post #91
4hg4ufxhy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does 10% even mean? My food delivery order forgot the fries and it was upsetting? I'm pretty sure this is not what they are expecting.

It means whatever you feel like it means given how you feel in the moment/situation. It's not a task you can fail.

> It's not a task you can fail.

Really? If you are too honest, I am pretty sure you can fail spectacularly. Therapy is confidential for a reason.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#165

Post by pavel_lishin »

dnissley wrote: post #157
pavel_lishin wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a team building exercise, that I wasn't able to attend. The person running it decided that a great ice-breaker would be for everyone to name their greatest fear. I'm a parent. You can probably pretty easily infer what my greatest fear is. Would I share that? Fuck no! Not only am I not particularly willing to get that intimate with a bunch of strangers, I also don't want to be a huge fucking downer. What I do w…

Is it something bad happening to your kids? That seems perfectly appropriate to share

I don't fucking want to think about that during a fucking team building exercise. And I don't think anyone else wants to hear that, either.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#166

Post by gorgoiler »

DeathArrow wrote: post #32
olivermuty wrote: post #9

What you are experiencing is the symptom of working in a large company where no matter how well you perform, you can not significantly move the needle yourself. Coupled with the fact that, as you yourself pointed out, there is a literal endless amount of work to do, forever. This is also due to the nature of the company being so big. All companies always has work to do, and no one is ever «done», but in a giga-enterp…

>What you are experiencing is the symptom of working in a large company where no matter how well you perform, you can not significantly move the needle yourself. You can't move the needle unless you are part of management and learn how to do politics. Large companies mean lots of politics being done. And you want to position yourself on the part of the winning team. Also, people skills always trumps technical skills.…

I agree and this is good advice that works well. My counterpoint is that if you are very good at:

finding things that could be better or tools that should exist but don’t, and that if materialized would solve multiple problems at once instead of just one; and

explaining why that’s important in a way that everyone can buy into and dealing with naysayers who’ll want to cut you down and doomers who will say it’ll never work; and

have the focus, discipline and grit to make it through a 10k LoC project and land it on the other side while ekeing out code review along the way and not tripping over loose cables and uneven steps of your initial design / architecture / model that was either flawed from the outset or not malleable enough to fix after a month of entrenchment into your code; and finally

once you’re ready, to then go over the entire codebase and lift the old code up into your new way of doing things so that there is no split brain between the old way and your new tool:

then you can make it as a 10x engineer. It is exhausting but so is running up and down a football field, cycling laps around France, or serving tennis balls at 90mph for three hours at a time. Taking the elite-coder staff-engineering path isn’t for the faint hearted.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#167

Post by baumy »

wkjagt wrote: post #87
Tainnor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, the manager asked only for “10% more vulnerable”. And they have absolutely no right to do that. "Being vulnerable" is not part of any job description.

That's why they said "if you're comfortable". It was totally optional. I don't understand your strong reaction to this.

I promise you I mean this sincerely, and not in a memey internet insult kind of way - are you perhaps autistic?

I ask because this is exactly the type of comment one of my siblings would make, and she is on the spectrum. She wouldn't be able to understand the social dynamics at play here, whereas for other folks it's just common sense. "Optional" is not really optional in some social settings, and that's something autistic folks struggle with being aware of, much less understanding. The activity may be optional in the most pedantic sense; you won't be struck down by lightning if you decide not to participate. But there will be consequences.

All of which is another reason why this whole exercise is an awful idea, considering that the number of autistic folks in software engineering is probably a bit higher than the population baseline.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#168

Post by spencerflem »

tharkun__ wrote: post #143
spencerflem wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo you're being a bit dramatic. I find it nice to work with real people, I'm work from home right now and its odd to me just how little I know about the people I ostensibly share 8 hours a day with.

See I think there is a huge difference between naturally getting to know your coworkers and this group pressure sharing exercise. It's completely fine to get to know your coworkers. But let the oversharing ones (the extroverts) congegrate together naturally. We had someone like that on the team. Was likeable enough but wouldn't stop talking about everything in their life. That was their choice tho and I am fine to li…

I'm on the introvert side too fwiw, I just feel like inventing a dead cat is a pretty out there response for the situation, which was a gentle push to be a little more open than usual for those that feel comfortable. Definitely can be taken too far in either direction. Without any place for chit chat being set up for it though, at least in my company, the 'natural' amount of sharing is basically zero, which feels like not enough for me.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#169

Post by nine_zeros »

I think this post highlights one of the core reasons why tech jobs suck so much and why burnout is so common among such smart people.

It is because a lot of these jobs are oriented towards PERFORMANCE REVIEWS that are based on BS unrelated to the actual work - such as feelings of others or sometimes # of commits.

Big tech management has departed from being leaders to being raters and rankers of things they are unqualified to rate and rank. They have organizational authority which they should be using to make good choices for customers, employees and projects. But the management only uses it for reviews.

Of course, this is toxic. No one wants to be led by people who don't care more than them and don't contribute in helping the work. Why wouldn't someone get burned out in such an environment?

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#170

Post by whstl »

Tainnor wrote: post #43
DeathArrow wrote: post #31

>he asked the team, “for this meeting I’d like us to try and introduce ourselves a little differently. If you’re comfortable, I’d like us to try and be 10% more vulnerable than we normally would in a work setting.” I remember feeling a mix of anxiety and excitement rise in my chest. I sat pondering what I would share. I decided to go for more than 10%. I shared about how my marriage had almost collapsed a couple year…

I agree and this wasn't the only red flag in the post for me. The reverence for a company that does, in the end, "just" process payments or the part about "a billionaire liked my project"... I feel like there's something rather unhealthy about that kind of mindset. All the best to the author of the post, hopefully they can find more meaningful work.

> The reverence for a company that does, in the end, "just" process payments

It is funny how the more unimportant the company is, the more this kind of reverence is expected.

For me there was a stark contrast between two jobs I had:

Consultancy where I worked on software for local government that millions literally depend on? Keep your work-life 100% separate.

Marketing startup that spammed Google with crazy amounts of SEO-spam? Lots of instructions from HR to ask about personal matters in 1-on-1 meetings, weekly 2h mandatory confraternization followed by free beer, random CEO speech about his favorite topic for 1h every month.

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