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My Time Working at Stripe

jondlm.github.io

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Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#281

Post by mistrial9 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #277

What was the point of this to anyone who does not already know this person? I thought the internal memo was going to just be the background to set up the actual point which would be something they learned or something. Actually at first I thought it was going to be about Stripe's culture but there was really nothing too exceptionally bad, just ordinary bog standard work in a too-big company issues. The standout most…

you are provided with an up-close and detailed story of a person under pressure at a high-pressure company, and the ending is not a good ending for the high skill person. Since there is no conclusion drawn "for you" you must do the work of active imagination and decide for yourself, why "so what."

At a minimum, some empathy for the person writing to start with.. being nauseous or in a cold sweat over work situations, interviews, the expectations of a spouse over stable income.. lots of reasons.. This person is being a lot more than ten percent vulnerable in writing this.. they say right away they were torn over writing it in public.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#282

Post by zeroonetwothree »

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 wouldn’t say people skills “always” trump technical skills. Some projects require strong technical chops such that no amount of people skills will be sufficient. If everyone thought this way we wouldn’t have made so many of the recent major tech advances.

Now given a fixed level of technical skills it’s obviously always better to have more people skills, perhaps that’s what you meant.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#283

Post by jlund-molfese »

pjot wrote: post #222

> He gave me a coderpad link. I started to read through the question. I could already feel my mind moving like molasses. On the surface the question seemed straightforward enough. It presented a simple data structure and asked me to do some filtering based on a set of constraints. “No problem!” I thought. I fired up vim and got to work. Wait, since when can you use your own editor? Is this common? Did I just fail to…

Some companies will actually ask you to share your screen and run a bash script they provide to install dependencies live instead of providing a coderpad link.

I don't like those interviews at all. It feels invasive if you aren't prepared with a VM already, and then you have to worry about undoing whatever their script did afterward.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#284

Post by Brian_K_White »

mistrial9 wrote: post #281
Brian_K_White wrote: post #277

What was the point of this to anyone who does not already know this person? I thought the internal memo was going to just be the background to set up the actual point which would be something they learned or something. Actually at first I thought it was going to be about Stripe's culture but there was really nothing too exceptionally bad, just ordinary bog standard work in a too-big company issues. The standout most…

you are provided with an up-close and detailed story of a person under pressure at a high-pressure company, and the ending is not a good ending for the high skill person. Since there is no conclusion drawn "for you" you must do the work of active imagination and decide for yourself, why "so what." At a minimum, some empathy for the person writing to start with.. being nauseous or in a cold sweat over work situations,…

Posing a problem is not a story or a point.

All this is the posing of a problem, or the reciting of a sequence of mere events.

"I tried to go to work today, but there was too much snow in the driveway."

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#285

Post by nojvek »

Hey Jon,

Kudos for having courage to write it up. Enjoyed my time with you at Stripe.

Large company cog syndrome is very real. Especially when performance reviews are not tied to reality but someone’s inner monologue that you have no access to.

Take care. Time heals most wounds. Oregon is a beautiful place.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#286

Post by zeroonetwothree »

Aeolun wrote: post #80
DeathArrow wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.…

While this is true, I find myself depressed by the idea of exchanging coding for herding everyone in the right direction. I’ve been trying to make that switch as it’s the only career prospect I have, but…

Many companies have parallel IC tracks. And even though higher level ICs do need to “herd” more you’re still doing a fair amount of technical work (maybe at least until director equivalent).

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#287

Post by zeroonetwothree »

morning-coffee wrote: post #178
scott_w wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could pick a comment to explain a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” it would be this one right here.

Exactly... if you want to be miserable at work, by all means, "slack off as much as possible". I think we forget the big picture that "no one gets out alive" and that it's up to each of us to spend the time we have in a way that makes us happy. If you can afford to not spend 1/3 of your time at a job in order to fund the remaining 2/3 of your existence, lucky you! But if not, choosing to slack off at a job you hate i…

I agree completely. I’ve had periods where I just slacked off and I was miserable, leading to a negative feedback loop. The only way to break out was ironically to actually work more, which led to more enjoyment of it. Cognitive dissonance is powerful.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#288

Post by jondlm »

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…

Thank you for the kind words!

Thankfully I'm not ground down to a nub. I've found a lot of support over the last few years outside of work.

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#289

Post by cipheredStones »

neilv wrote: post #261

The stereotypical brogrammer hazing interview at the start kinda foreshadowed everything else. When you see that a company is playing games in an interview, the questions are what other forms will the doofus/jerky culture take if you join, and how will it affect you.

This is the entirety of the post's description of the interviewer and the interview itself:

> He introduced himself and we settled into the usual ritual of a phone screen. ... He gave me a coderpad link. ... It presented a simple data structure and asked me to do some filtering based on a set of constraints. ... He kindly ended the interview and asked if I had any questions.

Everything else is about the author struggling and being anxious. Where do you get "stereotypical brogrammer hazing"?

Re: My Time Working at Stripe

#290

Post by kelnos »

mndgs wrote: post #118

Sorry for a probably unpopular opinion here, and let me generalize a bit: Gen Z all the way... (Saying this makes me feel a bit old, I guess I'm certainly am than the author). On a serious note, in my book there are hints of perfectionism right from the start of the story (fonts dimming, wait 30 sec to join the meeting..). And too much fragility in personal attidudes. S/he is probably a relatively young idealistic pe…

The author mentions they have nearly 10 years of experience in the field, so assuming they went to college and got their first programming job soon thereafter, that puts them around 30-32, so fairly solidly millennial, if maybe on the younger side of it. Not that this matters; I'm always dubious of generalizations based on made up things like "generations".

I definitely got people-pleasing vibes, and I agree the whole "making my screen look neat and tidy" and "engineering my arrival time to the meeting" bits were too much. If I had an interviewer who cared about or was impressed by those "metrics", I would consider that pretty shallow.

Based on that first performance review they got, my feeling is they had a bad manager. I agree with the manager that communication is a crucially important part of work, but you don't give someone a low rating when they completed an otherwise wildly successful project. That's just cruel and demoralizing. You can attack the communication problem without demotivating your employee and possibly hurting their career progression.

Whenever a poor performance review is a surprise to the employee, that alone is a management failure. Don't wait until review time to discuss problems; bring them up immediately and try to address them. Maybe by the time the review comes up, the problem will be gone. And if it's not, the employee won't be surprised by the reasons behind a less-than-ideal review.

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