I'm not sure they're weasel words when they own up to it in the next sentence:
But working here will mean some late nights, some weekends, and (especially if you end up in a position of significant responsibility) paying attention to email even during off-hours.
So you either don't work there as a parent or you become the caricature father from the 90s movies that misses all of his kids' games, fails to pick them up from school (although we solved this with Uber (TM)) etc.
At least they are being honest and upfront about it, IMO. Much better to do things this way than to do what some other companies do: promise 40-45 hour work weeks yet shame/withhold bonuses and raises to anybody not putting in over 50 hr/week.
Does Stripe compensate employees for working nights, weekends, and "paying attention" (really, being on call) off hours checking email? Or does it get rolled into the usual "salary"?
This paragraph is to me the number one indicator for a healthy and respectful company culture:
"We work hard to staff projects realistically. If overtime is needed we either compensate you by paying for additional hours or you can take the time off later."
Personal anecdote; I interviewed for Stripe @ Tokyo and had a few discussions on this point.
I was pretty sure, based on the research and discussions I had with people in the company, that they did take family very seriously, certainly much more seriously than the corporation I am working for currently.
I didn't get the job, but I believed it enough that I was ready to join if an offer was made. I like to think of myself as a dedicated father to 3 young children.
Problem is, Tokyo is among the worst places on the planet to work in terms of both business culture and commuting if you expect to be at home by 6 in time for dinner.
I find it much more likely to be stuck at that for more domestic companies (like the company I'm leaving) than for IT companies. Even then it is not inevitable.
Once I decided I didn't want to torture myself or my subordinates it became very easy to kill that culture - on my team at least. I told HR that I would not do OT until they provided x FTEs (which was slightly less than the peak usage rate of my team). When they balked at hiring, I told my team members to go home at 5:45 every day. Suddenly urgent dev requests are not urgent anymore and we have less meetings.
If one's manager is selfish or weak, he or she probably wants to score brownie points off of a subordinate's service overtime. It's easy for them to say "this is how it is in Japan" - but it's not a Japanese thing, just a weak leadership thing
This is pretty cool for the most part, with a refreshing dose of forthrightness. I thought it was going to descend into eye-rolling Silicon Valley territory, but (aside from referring to employees as "Stripes") it managed to give an interesting look at how they structure things and set their expectations.
And massive bonus points for not heaving the bloated, disease-spreading corpse of identity politics into view!
If your interested in how different companies deal with 'sharing' their culture you might enjoy https://handbook.work We have built this recently to start collecting company handbooks, and culture guides like this, as inspiration for writing your own. Or just for the curious.
this is exactly what i was hoping to find in this thread's comments. thanks! how long you been working on this? obviously would love to see a lot more (or even just links to articles about various companies cultures if you can't get a legit authoritative handbook for a given company)
We had been collecting these internally for a while now. We're working on a product in this space currently so this seemed like a good time to start sharing some of this stuff with the outside world.
We intend to keep curating on high quality full handbooks only but perhaps it's worth thinking about other sub sites or a blog at well at some point.
I had a small part in writing this. I think we're in violent agreement with regards to the underlying concern; here is how we phrased it in this document:
Our users entrust us with their money, their businesses, and their livelihoods. Drivers in San Francisco and jewelry sellers in Latvia and software developers in Tokyo rely on Stripe to feed their families. When we mess up, miss a deadline, or slow down, it matters. We take that responsibility seriously.
We could potentially have phrased this in terms of e.g. uptime, but the gory details are covered in an appropriate amount of detail in internal documents but not really appropriate for a guide we give candidates so that they have signal on whether they'd enjoy working here. For one thing, it's hard without an in-depth understanding of the system architecture to map a particular technical concern (like e.g. API uptime of a particular component) to the specific way that would manifest in a user's life. For another, our concerns are actually a lot broader than the technical part of the business. There is a lot of hard and important work that happens between HTTP 200 and money actually showing up in a real person's bank account. If we were shooting for "Be perfect at engineering 100% of the time" that would both probably be a poor target as an engineering matter and, incredibly, not be nearly good enough.
On the plus side: we've got lots of intellectually interesting problems to be found while poking around the plumbing of the economy. If that sounds interesting, we're always happy to chat.
Stripe has been one of my favourite startups in the last decade, you took a problem that was painful and solved it.
On top of that every single thing I've seen stripe do publicly has been well executed and gives the overall impression of competence, solidity and good service.
I guess that part is intentional, if you are handling money that's exactly what you'd want people to think.
Honestly, this is a failure to write for your audience.
This is not an exercise in creative writing, you aren't trying to create atmosphere, you're trying to convey information. That sort of writing requires sentences that are direct and to the point. I will be reading that page because I'm interested in working for Stripe and want more information that helps me decide if I want to, not for entertainment. So I want to know the facts. The facts we're conveyed perfectly by the GP in bullet points but your sentences put more emphasis on Latvian can drivers' families. When I read this I'm trying to achieve something, I am thinking about working at Stripe right now, so when I'm reading this I don't care about Latvian can drivers. What I do care about "highly mission critical operation."
Perhaps he was speaking more to me then. I find his description more compelling for me than emphasizing "highly mission critical operation" because I've worked for a giant bank, and I know they care about keeping track of money, and I do too of course if I'm being paid for it, but I personally am even more motivated if I can see how it relates to real end users whose faces I can envision.
The thing is, information is being lost in the wordy, flowery prose. The GP said three bullet points were missing when they actually are supposed to be there. I also felt like I missed a lot reading through it and I felt like I should start taking notes to see what it actually says. That's not good.
It seems like you and Stripe may not be a good fit due to (at a minimum) significantly different values and perspectives on standards of organizational communication.
Patio11's response is stated at a reasonable level of abstraction, and he even explains why he does so. I can understand if that's not your style, but you might want to consider that some people consider his comment to be a very clear reply with actionable information.
The beauty of this approach is that it appeals to the true significance of the business--building the cathedral rather than hammering a stupid rock.
Being intentional about a company's culture and practicing it on a consistent basis, from top to bottom, is very valuable in attracting talent and getting focus on the key things in the business. In our monthly checkins with employees, we reference our core values during the conversations.
They hint at this but don't really cover how incredibly "nice" everyone is expected to be. I have had multiple angles of sourcing on this including existing employees and high level management candidates. It doesn't sound bad on the face of it, but apparently the culture is non-confrontational to (what some perceive as) a fault.
In the cases where I know the people very well this is especially interesting because they are incredibly nice people that told me the culture is overly focused on not making people feel bad. Coming from these people this statement was a real eye opener.
I currently work in a very "nice" culture. People from places where being nice isn't a priority have trouble with it sometimes. One thing people tell me I'm good at in this culture is delivering constructive criticism in a way that is accepted and acted on without the recipient feeling "bad." All of that said, Stripe sounds like it takes the work culture I'm in today and squares it. Many people will not be able to operate effectively in that kind of culture -- both in terms of being able to deliver criticism with the right degree of nicety and in terms of not receiving or being able to understand criticism that would help them improve their performance. This is potentially a detriment to those people and to the company.
If I were Stripe I would cover this head on. In the spirit of what's already there, I'd add something like "are you capable of performing at your best without direct feedback about areas where you can improve?"
It's the kind of "nice" place where people dump a bunch of shit in your lap last minute... but when they do, they make sure to do so with a half-assed apology.
I see this a lot in west-american culture in general, actually (I'm European). Far more emphasis on form than content whenever communication is expected.
As I constantly interact both with europeans and americans, it's really shocking sometimes seeing the difference and how crippled the communication lines are when constantly worried about the form of the message.
The kicker is that communications that don't have that extra layer to them don't feel bad or are offensive in any way, unless people go out of their way to be rude/aggressive. It just feels a lot better: it's more honest, more trustworthy, you're not left wondering if the person on the other end is saying nice things just to make you feel better.
This usually leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth where these kinds of relationships have lots of asterisks to them and I don't feel I can trust the other person. I can't even imagine what it'd be like to be surrounded in that environment at work and feeling that way about all my colleagues.
(I'll add to that though that as someone who interacts with Stripe a lot, I've had nothing but positive experiences with them so YMMV)
Preface: offline, I've heard good things about working at Stripe. So the following is intended as constructive.
The 'values' read more like a description of what the owners of any high-performance company would want out of their employees, transactionally-speaking. It reads much less like Stripe has a strong cultural identity. Reading this, it sort of feels like you are asking for a lot of my commitment to the Stripe mission without giving me any reason to buy into it.
I'm not sure there is anything idiosyncratic about this list. It doesn't really convey to me what it's really like to "be a Stripe" as opposed to "being a Googler".
Oh, and this phrase, "being a Stripe", it is the very worst kind of SV affectation. Maybe it works for people who are already at Stripe and proud to be there, but from the outside in, honestly it sends me cringing into the next universe. I don't think you have to be an enormous cynic to have that reaction to it.
Overall this seems to fail the test it sets itself: it doesn't convince me that the top team at Stripe are striving to building the best imaginable place to work, which surely is the best part about building your own company.
Things like "The bad news: joining Stripe is still a risky proposition." also make me cringe... don't tell me that anyone reading that sentence doesn't realize it's meant to entice them.
Maybe it's not a fair comparison, but contrast with the Valve new employee handbook, which makes it clear what it's actually like to work there and how their culture impacts the workplace.
I'm not convinced, it's assuming a particular interpretation of risk. For people with great employment prospects, a company that still has a reasonable chance of failure is less risky than a safer company where they don't get to develop their skillset. For me, a risky job is one that doesn't make good strides towards lowering the impact that ageism is going to have on my career in a decade or so.
A thing I like to do with values is invert them. If you don't still get something good then you're really just saying something bland and generic that any old company probably aspires to.
Take Facebook's "Move fast and break things." The inverse would be something like "Take your time and do it right." Both of those values are great! They both have good and bad points and which one a company aspires to really tells you something about how they balance competing goals.
This method doesn't work 100% of the time, but it's pretty good.
It sounds like you think that values should be a description of which of two reasonable choices a company wants its employees to choose...
For example, a company's value as stated might be "Education and experience don't matter and the most junior employee can argue with architectural choices as long as they are willing to argue cogently and with evidence." Then if you "invert" it you get "Education and experience matter; give weight to other people's expertise, education and experience in a field."
So both of them are "still something good", I guess. But a startup might choose the former.
If I've understood your suggestion correctly, then the problem with your suggestion is that some cultural values are about things that tech startups get wrong, and the inversion is not any good at all.
How do you invert something like "don't bully other employees or pick on them due to their belonging to some protected class - to overcome subconscious biases, if you do not belong to that class then stop for a moment and consciously treat them the same as if they belonged to the same class as yourself"?
What is the "inversion" of this obvious cultural choice which is obviously good?
Do you think that it is "bland and generic" just because it is obvious that it is right and its inversion is wrong?
I don't think it's obvious at all, and I think a lot of companies get these cultural values completely wrong, and, for example, do foster an atmosphere of harassment.
I want to get this comment away from the political so I'll make another, purely technical example: if a rule is, "make sure something actually builds before you check it in" then the inversion is "don't worry about making sure it builds before you check it in"? That's not "still something good" as you've stated, so...does it make the specific technical suggestion I listed "bland and generic"?
dmlorenzetti & bryanlarsen both make the core point I try to get at in sibling comments to this one but I'll also dd that I think there are some useful things underneath your two specific examples:
1) I think a company that really epitomizes the point you are trying to make here is Slack. They seem to value diversity and inclusion more than any other SV company right now. This has probably helped them be successful, but to me it seems like they care about this value above and beyond the effect on their business. They want to make the world a better place and will expend resources to do so.
Conversely I slick of PayPal back in 2000. Levchin has spoken explicitly about how they valued hiring a team of people with very similar world views and how that helped them avoid wasting time arguing and instead focus on execution. I've also heard stories about how engineers would literally wrestle to solve disputes[1].
These sound like very different companies! I can imagine people that would relish working at the former and hate working at the latter (or vice versa). Both quite successful though.
2) WRT building before you check in that obviously brings me back to FB's "move fast and break things." I dunno about breaking the build as I've never worked there, but I definitely know that for the longest time FB was very very cavalier about breaking their external API. From one perspective that certainly sounds like a bad thing, but on the other hand maybe that "move fast" part really was a big part of the key to FB's success?
Perhaps some of the things that you think are absolutely wrong are just wrong according to your particular values. You should obviously want to work at a business that aligns with those values but perhaps there are other businesses that operate the opposite way and that oppositeness helps them succeed.
You make interesting points. I do think sometimes there really is no trade-off. So why doesn't every company adopt that policy which has no trade-offs? Because they don't know or haven't heard of it, thought of it. Simply writing a sentence could make anyone reading that sentence slap their forehead and say "why didn't I think of that" and instantly adopt it with no resistance - a policy can spread like a meme to everyone who's ever heard of it, resisted by no one. Then if you read it about a potential employer you can say "great! they've already heard of it."
You might think I'm being silly and that real values aren't like that - that I'm just not seeing the alternative viewpoint or trade-off.
But I actually think there are a huge class of values like this.
I think they are a huge class of values like this too. I just don't think it's as useful to state them outright in a corporate values statement. String too many of them together and you get this:
Just try to read it without your eyes glazing over. Can you even get to the end?
It's not that anything in the list is wrong or bad. It's just boring. It's obvious. Who cares? I bet 90% of IBM employees have never even read the damn thing much less ever actually changed anything about how they do their job because of it.
Great values statements are great because they are shocking, because they get people to pay attention, and because they actually get people to change how they do things. Move fast and BREAK THINGS(1). The god damn CEO telling employees to break things. That's how you differentiate yourself.
1. Sorry to keep using this example. It's just the best. I don't even particularly like Facebook but this is just a fucking great corporate values statement. It's so great that millions of people outside the company know it and have thought about it.
I stopped, but obviously could have continued to go through the rest of the document. So by your proposed standard of "is the inverted version still good" the answer is "absolutely". But that doesn't make these good values!
I agree with you that it is not a great document at all. Even though it can be inverted without any problem or challenge. I simply can't accept the inversion tool you proffered.
You know....that's a really go rewrite you did. You have me pondering the usefulness of my tool. I'm not ready to abandon it but you've convinced me that it needs refining.
Still, I started off making an entirely different point - (that there are many good values that can't be inverted) on which I think we were agreed. So in the end I really argued most strongly (and took the biggest karma hit on) for things we actually agreed on! So thanks for your discussion, too :).
I don't think you inverted the values correctly! For example, starting out with these:
• Dedication to every client’s success
• Innovation that matters-for our company and for the world
• Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships
The obvious inversion (to me) is:
• Dedication to every client’s failure
• Innovation that matters to nobody
• Mistrust and lack of responsibility in all relationships
But actually, the positive values as written are contradictory. What if there's a conflict between innovation that matters to the world vs a client's success - which comes first? Both are positive. But these values don't discriminate.
I didn't introduce the idea of inversion, and if you look through this thread from the top you will see that I used it as defined by the person who introduced it, who called the above inversions (in a sibling comment to yours) "very good."
You might have missed it beecause there are a couple of conversations going on in this thread. Pay attention to the usernames.
Anyway for the inversions, I am playing by that person's rules and following that person's terminology, not simply negating these statements.
Some statements can't be inverted. (For example it's not possible to invert "don't murder your colleagues.")
A "no harassment" clause doesn't tell you anything.
It could be there because the company is serious about combating harassment. Or it could be there because the company has a harassment problem and is covering its ass.
The lack of the clause could be because the company actually has a harassment culture or because the company has a great culture and has never seen the need to add the clause.
The point is that every company will say that they're against harassment so the only way you can tell how effective they are about it is through deeds not words.
But clauses that can be inverted positively actually have a chance of telling you something.
[I]f a rule is, "make sure something actually builds before you check it in" then the inversion is "don't worry about making sure it builds before you check it in"? ...does it make the specific technical suggestion I listed "bland and generic"?
I think you hit the nail on the head when you called it a generic technical rule -- it's not a value that distinguishes the culture of the company. So while it might be sensible corporate policy, it doesn't really say anything about the company culture (not sure I would call it bland, but that's just wordsmithing).
Taking that a step further, suppose company policy included that and a host of other "bland technical rules" with which most practitioners agree. Then company values might state "We follow industry best practices." You can imagine an inversion, "We feel free to ignore best practices if it helps ship a product early", that would express something meaningful about the culture of working there.
I think you are over analyzing it and trying to find faults. At least two of the things you mentioned should be company policies, not values.
Values are things you push for, but might not attain (think aspirational goals), but policies are "set in stone" and if you don't follow them you're punished.
Using the examples you mentioned that are clearly policies, "don't bully other employees or pick on them due to their belonging to some protected class" is a perfect example of a policy vs value. That's clearly a policy and one that if didn't exist at a job, I'd never join said company. Bullying isn't something we strive not to do, it's something we must not do, or else be fired. Checking in broken code may get you a slap on the wrist the first time, but repeatedly do that and again you'll likely be punished.
I've reviewed your comment. Firstly, it sounds like you think "don't murder other employees" is a policy at 100% of companies, but I don't think I've ever worked at a company with such a policy and neither have you. Your definition of policy is weird - you think policies exist regardless of whether they do. I base this on your comment that you'd never work at a company without such a policy.
Secondly, I'm afraid I disagree with the essence of your comment, even given your weird definition of the meaning of policy.
It seems that your view is that the second a value is phrased in an actionable and effective way you call it a policy: I read your definition of a value as something that cannot be parsed or disagreed with such as "awesome is better than great and great is better than good; but good is better is than bad." That sounds like a value, but if I made it meaningful, actionable, and effective, then it would become a policy. (according to you.)
We are just too far apart to have a meaningful conversation I'm afraid. I read your comment carefully several times before coming to this conclusion.
I regret, occamrazor, that your interpretation and proposed facts reduce to an absurd interpretation of this conversation, and are wrong, respectively.
1. You are wrong that all companies you know of have "comply with applicable laws" in their policies.
Before we get to your interpretation, first let's look at the proposed fact that all companies you know of have "comply with applicable laws" in their policies. There are extremely clear examples such as Uber which actively did not have such a policy as well as very actively keep regulators from enforcing laws against them: https://www.google.com/search?q=uber+regulators - read those links. "Uber used an elaborate secret program to hide from government regulators"; "Justice Department begins criminal probe into Uber's use of software to help drivers evade local regulators."
Here are Uber's 14 official cultural values: https://www.quora.com/What-are-Ubers-14-core-cultural-values which include "always be hustling" and "let builders build". One definition of hustle is a fraud or swindle, or obtaining illicitly. At any rate none of those values had anything like "comply with applicable laws." Likewise AirBNB certainly did not have a core policy of complying with hotel and zoning regulations.
Objectively speaking, it is absolutely false that "comply with applicable laws" is an actual policy at all companies you know of. You're simply mistaken about the world.
But let's step away from this and see why your interpretation is also wrong.
2. Your interpretation if you were right about 1 is wrong
So your facts themselves are wrong but let us assume the counterfactual that your facts are true, and that "all companies" have a "comply with applicable laws" in their policies.
Under your interpretation "comply with applicable laws" also subsumes "don't harrass people based on a protected class" since that's illegal.
Continuing with your (wrong) interpretation, when jsjohnst writes about that statement, "if it didn't exist at a job, I'd never join said company" then it's nonsense given that no such company can exist under your proposed interpretation.
So it is like saying "I would never join a company that did not abide by the laws of physics." Under your interpretation, a nonsense statement. (All companies abide by the laws of physics; all companies have a policy of "comply with applicable laws" under your wrong facts, and under your wrong interpretation this implies not harrassing people based on a protected class.)
Your interpretation changes jsjohnst's statement to be as meaningful as declaring he would not work for a company that did not abide by the laws of physics. Clearly he has no reason to express such a sentiment.
Therefore your interpretation must also be rejected from this conversation.
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I am sorry to be so harsh but as we are talking about values and policies, we cannot introduce wrongness on so many levels, because the results are disastrous.
I hope you do not feel that I have made this personal. I attacked only a 1-line interpretation you have offered and clearly you are free to change your mind. I do respect your contributions to hackernews and believe you are right on many other things, however, not this issue.
Think about it from a less absolutist logical angle, and you may eventually appreciate it. Currently, you are looking for counterexamples for the sake of argument, instead of considering the cases where the principle is useful. You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Values != policies; the way you put them in a stroke relationship makes me think that you think they're related. They're not.
The point of an inversion test for values is to see if they have any information content (i.e. can act as a discriminator between companies). If the inversion of a value is something that you'd obviously not do, then it's not actually a value; it's just something that normal people should do. Policies are like this. If a policy is inverted and it sounds absurd or criminal, that's ok - policies are hard rules that define normal behaviour. But if a value is inverted and it sounds absurd, it's not actually a value.
Policies are a dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.
Values suggest an inclination or bias between two acceptable behaviours.
The reason it's important to distinguish between them is that high-level policies, whether stated explicitly or not, are by and large the same at every company (precisely because their inverse is abnormal or ridiculous); values, on the other hand, make companies distinct. Reading about a company's policies won't tell you whether it's a good place to work or not, although reading between the lines of what they assert their policies to be, may give you a clue as to their values.
I completely disagree with every single sentence you've just written. Since I disagree with every single thing you've just written we are not going to be able to talk effectively.
I will just quote one line. You write:
>Reading about a company's policies won't tell you whether it's a good place to work or not.
which is one of the most absurd things I've ever read. I don't see how we can engage in meaningful conversation, sorry. We can just drop it.
I just realized that in another comment you called me "silly" but we can just agree that we have very different viewpoints. We view these matters completely differently.
> I completely disagree with every single sentence you've just written.
Well then, I'm very sorry to say, you don't understand what values mean or simply are just going for broke on being argumentative. GP did a better job than I explaining why you were mistaken on what a value is in this context, if you refuse to accept it, that's your right. Just realize you're risking coming off as someone who thinks the earth is flat.
you agree that a company's policies don't tell you anything about whether it's good to work there? "If you clock in to work even 1 minute late even a single time, you are not eligible for your bonus that month" is a real policy I've actually heard about. it doesn't tell me anything about working there?
You guys don't know what a policy is. you (jsjonst) think it's "follow all applicable laws" which subsume anything illegal like harassment over some protected status. so you think no company needs any specific policy about anything related to that.
your parent thinks policies don't say anything about what it's like to work somewhere.
you both think there are no values that are unambiguously good and whose alternative no one adopts or would adopt, but which are meaningful to adopt. To me "meaningfully adopt" means "immediately add actionable, objective policies everyone can follow" to. to me, that's how you adopt a value. through policies. to you two, there is no relationship between the two.
I simply disagree with both of you.
we have nothing further to talk about. we are too far apart.
I can agree to disagree with the two of you without calling you flat-Earthers.
These guys closed DefendEurope's account. DefendEurope wants to stop NGOs that are working with smugglers to ship illegal migrants from the coast of Libya to Europe. Our future is being destroyed by these illegal migrants and other immigrants because there are enough of them to make native populations a minority, such as in Britain in 2066.
What is it that Stripe believes in? Does it believe in the immoral act of bringing in culturally incompatible "Replacement Migration", as the UN calls it?
You're using loaded language, I'm speaking the truth. They are illegal, economic migrants. It's that simple. Saying that you're giving people a better shot at life is a ridiculous, loaded statement. These people will not be working in high-tech Europe, they will be receiving help from the state for many generations to come all the while transforming the continent to the point of civil war. Where is the dignity in sitting on your ass all day, having abandoned your own country that you should have worked to improve?
We could spend all day linking each other studies, well if you actually had any to support your view point that this does any good at all for either party. But in case this doesn't happen, I'll leave you with this: In Tokyo, it is common to send children alone to school via the metro. Meanwhile in 'multicultural' (part 3rd world) London, the mayor says terrorist attacks are just part of living in a big city.
"He said this week during an interview with a German media that European countries should take measures to make it more difficult for migrants to leave Africa through the current transit routes."
I'm in the US, so this won't be comparing apples to oranges, but...
Many people think the same thing about illegal Mexican immigrants. But I've lived in Arizona, and I got to know quite a few. Most were hard working. I met a few willing to bum off the system. I also met quite a few legal citizens that bummed off the system. So I think your fear that the illegal immigrants will be receiving help from the state is unfounded.... unless of course they are denied working opportunities because of their origin, in which case, yes, I'd say there's some cultural compatibility issues (on the end of the local citizens).
As for your second point... does Great Britian allow in more migrants than other countries? If not, and they experience more terrorist attacks, that would suggest that it's not the migrants causing it. I could be way off the mark here, and I would appreciate any scholarly links on the matter.
I am saddened that you base your opinions on your personal experience. You are right that Mexicans are hard working. Their average IQ is unfortunately low, but they are hard workers. Every group is different. For example, have you heard of the Parsi? These are geniuses living in India that fled Persia a long time ago. They are just 60,000 persons but have many billionaires among them, many Harvard/MIT/etc professors, and so on. Each group is different, why that is I won't go into on here. All I can say is Europe is receiving the worst bunch they could imagine.
> Many people think the same thing about illegal Mexican immigrants. But I've lived in Arizona, and I got to know quite a few. Most were hard working. I met a few willing to bum off the system. I also met quite a few legal citizens that bummed off the system. So I think your fear that the illegal immigrants will be receiving help from the state is unfounded....
Years ago I worked in a city where there were many illegal Mexican immigrants, and I worked alongside them in the factory where I worked, and my impression pretty much aligned with yours.
But I still think that we should severely restrict the immigration of low-skilled, low-educated citizens of other countries. Roughly half of the population of the US has an IQ of 100 or below, and the number of jobs they are capable of doing is shrinking. I don't think it's fair that this segment of the market should be flooded with competition that will reduce wages and opportunities for our current citizens.
My position is based on the premise that the aim of US immigration policy should be to benefit US citizens, rather than the citizens of other countries. I understand that many well-intentioned people disagree with me on that point, and I don't think they're horrible, heartless people because of it. I just happen to see things differently.
I would have thought that even a socialist like yourself could have at least admitted that these NGOs are a problem as they are being funded to fix problems but are being run by people whose aim it is to receive funding for as long as possible. You could call this corruption, but I don't know if you've heard of it.
It really shows the state of things, doesn't it? We've gotten to the point where the left side of the political spectrum has transformed themselves from being failed communists to being eternal minority protectors. You will never admit any problem that shows a minority in a light that's worse than the native population. And you will never admit that white people do not want to be replaced by non-white foreigners.
You doom Europe to a decade or more of fascism, dictatorships, and massive deportations. As the problems get worse, the solutions become more extreme.
This comment and your replies are far too unsubstantiated and incendiary to qualify as civil by Hacker News standards. We're not here to wage ideological war, we're here to gratify our intellectual curiosity and those are completely exclusive of each other.
But they have Visa as an investor - while they want to be the payment processor of the web, the will probably have some investor guidelines to live with.
Some red flags that pop up to me (though I'm not looking for a job at Stripe myself, so that's important to keep in mind):
> Stripes
Oiy. Painting all of your employees in a branded moniker isn't a great way to start off. It immediately creates a "us" vs. "them" attitude - "Oh, she wasn't a real Stripe."
> Many successful Stripes ensure that they have dinner with their families or friends almost every evening.
"Many". "Successful". "Almost". Lots of weasel words that indicate that Stripe is unwilling to make a commitment to build a company where people don't need to stay late, because they want to keep their employee count low. I've worked in the financial industry for three separate jobs now; I know it's possible.
Also, the only reference to holiday is that it is highly likely to be interrupted. When the entirety of your conversation about maintaining a balance between work and the remaining portion of poeple's lives consists of how it will be interrupted (and that it's perfectly acceptable), you're not describing a healthy environment, IMO.
If you really want to attract high skill, experienced talent, talk about how you're trying to fix this problem.
> not just because we don’t have cubicles
So, open office plans? Not very employee friendly. I'd personally rather have a cubicle.
> We’re moving quickly, changing regularly
Last time I heard this, the company had moved from Angular to React to Dart, each time before the previous re-write was completed. It's left a nightmare for the remaining front end folks to maintain and clean up. They also did yearly re-orgs that changed folk's titles and job responsibilities.
And lets be honest, stability is important to employee morale and happiness. If it wasn't, a lot less ink would have been spilled on topics like "Who Moved My Cheese?" The lack of stability is not really a good thing.
> We care about being right and it often takes reasoning from first principles to get there.
First principles from computer science or real life programming? The two are not very compatible, and it sounds a lot like a recipe for constantly re-learning lessons.
> Expect to receive feedback, and sometimes unsolicited work, from talented coworkers with less state about your projects than you have
AKA time lost bringing new folks up to speed, just to have them leave again shortly.
> we want to feel serious responsibility for the full long-term consequences of what we do.
<rant>Do you feel serious responsibility for the innocent parties caught up in your fraud protection schemes; for freezing your client's money and making investment profit on it?
I know how hard fraud is to combat; but there are too many people caught in the crossfire to not acknowledge it.</rant>
Long story short, the culture described here sounds like a soft sell into an environment that would be pretty hard to work in, especially if you have a life outside of work.
You are making the mistake of critiquing their values statement based on whether they align with your personal values rather than whether they have cleared illustrated their own values.
Hence my opening sentence, which points out which are flags to me.
If those are truly representative to Stripe's values, then Stripe isn't a place I would want to work, for the reasons I pointed out. I would also not recommend it to anybody, based on what I perceive to be unhealthy values.
Painting all of your employees in a branded moniker isn't a great way to start off.
It's necessary in this case. If it isn't made clear that the word for someone who works at Stripe is "Stripe", then people will apply common grammatical conventions and call them "Stripers"... which has an unfortunate autocorrection.
Um, the vast majority of companies don't have cutesy nicknames of their employees yet manage to write thousands of documents about them without any problems.
If I'm talking to someone uninitiated and I say "I am a Stripe" they would look at me like am have 30 heads. Not a good way to make outside friends. I would say "I work at the payment processing company Stripe."
I wouldn't assume they're called Stripers, I'd assume they're called employees.
I don't get the whole "Stripes" thing. Nor do I get "Whovian" or "Dead Head” or anything in-between. You work somewhere/watch something/listen to something, that doesn't require a cutesy label. (IMHO of course, your results may vary.)
This seems like some kind of self-selection proxy.
When I was younger I thought cubicles were the worst: the pinnacle of boring-grey office culture. Now that I'm older, I yearn for a quiet place to call my own.
'Cubicles' if done right can be pretty damn good! When I worked at IBM, everybody got a 'PWA': four 9ft tall walls, a sliding door, a corner desk, and a few shelves. It was amazing, and took up no more space than a standard cubicle.
Do they mention something about making good money? This sounds a little like a cult where people find their personal fulfillment while sometimes even being able to have dinner with their family and having some weekends off.
Don't want to be too self promotional, but my startup, Tettra, put together a list of all the culture decks we could find. Check it out if you like reading about culture:
I'm going to be a little contrarian but I wonder what happened to the good (or maybe bad) old days of just come to the company and do your job. You work these hours, and have these benefits, and this is how much vacation/sick time (none of this you have fake unlimited time). Do the job well and we will pay you more. You don't even have to like the people or even the company but you have to have proper biz etiquette.
Believe it or not that is how companies use to operate till recently. Most companies didn't even have guides/books/web pages on culture.
I know, know, know to attract top talent you have to make a place look more than just a job like your on some epic moral spiritual journey.
Now I read this stuff and it sounds like a great mission statement that is being forced on to the employees in some disingenuous way to make people "passionately" pump out work overtime while blindly believing whatever the company says.
The biggest irony out of all the culture "guides/books/page" is that they often tout or say how much they are for diversity (I know stripe doesn't in this case). It seems wrong to say you are for diversity when you are requiring people to think and act a certain way because you think its optimal.
>Believe it or not that is how companies use to operate till recently. Most companies didn't even have guides/books/web pages on culture.
This is because whether or not a company acknowledges it, a culture does exist and whatever that culture looked like had real impact. I agree that companies often take it too far, and a company saying it's culture is one way doesn't mean that it's entirely accurate. But it's generally better to be explicit about your culture if you can be so that employees have realistic expectations.
Define "until recently"... internal culture has definitely been an issue at companies for 20-30 years now - I can remember discussions about it quite commonly in the mid-90s. It's just good business; would you rather pay unhappy people a lot more to keep coming to work, or pay them less but have them be happier and more productive? Back in the factory days this wasn't an issue - you didn't much care if an employee came back the next day, as long as you could find someone to fill the spot on the line. But in modern companies, there's a huge cost to turnover.
None of these things tell you that much about a company's values or corporate culture. Consider that both Uber and Lyft could probably both say all of these things, despite having radically different internal cultures and values.
A company's culture is how it thinks about resolving disputes, making decisions internally, and how employees should generally behave towards one another, especially when in conflict. It's not the benefits, or dress code, or HR department.
As Uber's proven, just because everyone gets to wear t-shirts, doesn't mean they aren't jerks to each other.
Yes but they are never going to tell you the actual internal culture.
In fact I believe it isn't stating concrete things (ie a lack of formality) that may actually lead to things like Uber.
When you say this is the hours, and this your vacation time, and this is who you talk to about personal issues (aka HR) you are setting an expectation. And yeah you set clear goddamn concrete things like if you get caught harassing or fishing of the company pier we will terminate you. You tell them concretely up front.
When you don't set guidelines people can forget its work and do just plain inappropriate things!
They're telling you the actual internal culture. Your argument here seems to be since you don't believe that, they should just tell you their corporate policies instead. Those are an entirely different thing. Work hours, vacation time and HR complaint guidelines aren't corporate culture.
Uber did in fact have a doc with 14 key guidelines, but with drastically different contents. "Step on toes", "always be hustling" etc. The harassment issue wasn't so much a cultural value as an organizational failure that partially resulted from not valuing general respect for other employees, which when carried to its extreme means tolerating behavior that would be unacceptable at other companies. It also reportedly had a general culture of looking for ways to circumvent government rules, which is also going to undermine your ability to discourage harassment.
Yes, it's possible that guidelines misrepresent a company's culture. But it seems unfair and arguably, unproductive, to presume that. It's an open statement of what they want their culture to be, which seems a lot better than simply not having any goal at all.
Are you really saying you'd prefer to work for a company that doesn't think about what its internal culture and values should be?
> Are you really saying you'd prefer to work for a company that doesn't think about what its internal culture
maybe.... kidding. culture is really hard to define. But yes your point is taken but my point is by defining concrete things you can create a culture.
For example one concrete thing could be a company that says our top level executives or performers are only paid 3x than the lowest paid employee. That would indicate a lot more to me than the fluff that Stripe wrote.
> and values should be?
I absolutely care about this. This IMO is different than culture (or maybe they overlap). You can have intense high work ethic culture that have many of the big picture same values as one that does not (one example would be school systems).
You can also have very similar companies in goals and values in completely different areas of the world that have completely different culture because naturally that region has
a different culture.
> You don't even have to like the people or even the company
This is a really big problem for companies. Trust is not something that you can fake or "present" in an etiquette sense of the word. When workers at a company do not like each other, they do not trust each other. Where they do not trust each other, a growing bureaucracy creates formal process creep to ensure that different interests are protected. Bureaucracy and formal process slow work down and prevent the organization from adapting quickly to changing market conditions. Organizations which cannot adapt in time with the argument lose touch, become irrelevant, decline, and eventually close.
The specific culture which evolves at the company is less important than its role in ensuring that the people in the company like each other and therefore can continue to trust each other.
I was sort of exaggerating there but I'm not entirely sure liking == trusting (or the obvious reversal). In fact I would not be surprised if having say two personalities that do not mesh well one on one but work great on a team to maybe beneficial to the whole group.
Some personalities might be better at different roles. My point is not everyone has to like everyone.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadOof. Two weasel words in the one sentence. Especially in such an important sentence, that shoots up a big red flag for me.
edit: It didn't sound as nuts as Netflix's hiring manifesto, but something about it still seems fishy.
But working here will mean some late nights, some weekends, and (especially if you end up in a position of significant responsibility) paying attention to email even during off-hours.
"We work hard to staff projects realistically. If overtime is needed we either compensate you by paying for additional hours or you can take the time off later."
This makes me feel like I am being respected.
I was pretty sure, based on the research and discussions I had with people in the company, that they did take family very seriously, certainly much more seriously than the corporation I am working for currently.
I didn't get the job, but I believed it enough that I was ready to join if an offer was made. I like to think of myself as a dedicated father to 3 young children.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan#Ties_with_bus...
Once I decided I didn't want to torture myself or my subordinates it became very easy to kill that culture - on my team at least. I told HR that I would not do OT until they provided x FTEs (which was slightly less than the peak usage rate of my team). When they balked at hiring, I told my team members to go home at 5:45 every day. Suddenly urgent dev requests are not urgent anymore and we have less meetings.
If one's manager is selfish or weak, he or she probably wants to score brownie points off of a subordinate's service overtime. It's easy for them to say "this is how it is in Japan" - but it's not a Japanese thing, just a weak leadership thing
There's quite a number of people still there after, say, 10pm.
And massive bonus points for not heaving the bloated, disease-spreading corpse of identity politics into view!
We intend to keep curating on high quality full handbooks only but perhaps it's worth thinking about other sub sites or a blog at well at some point.
Glad you like it!
- "Don't let Stripe go down. Uptime is more important than features. Failure is not an option."
- "Don't lose a transaction. We handle real money and people depend on us not to lose it."
- "Don't let our customers get ripped off. Security of funds really matters."
Our users entrust us with their money, their businesses, and their livelihoods. Drivers in San Francisco and jewelry sellers in Latvia and software developers in Tokyo rely on Stripe to feed their families. When we mess up, miss a deadline, or slow down, it matters. We take that responsibility seriously.
We could potentially have phrased this in terms of e.g. uptime, but the gory details are covered in an appropriate amount of detail in internal documents but not really appropriate for a guide we give candidates so that they have signal on whether they'd enjoy working here. For one thing, it's hard without an in-depth understanding of the system architecture to map a particular technical concern (like e.g. API uptime of a particular component) to the specific way that would manifest in a user's life. For another, our concerns are actually a lot broader than the technical part of the business. There is a lot of hard and important work that happens between HTTP 200 and money actually showing up in a real person's bank account. If we were shooting for "Be perfect at engineering 100% of the time" that would both probably be a poor target as an engineering matter and, incredibly, not be nearly good enough.
On the plus side: we've got lots of intellectually interesting problems to be found while poking around the plumbing of the economy. If that sounds interesting, we're always happy to chat.
On top of that every single thing I've seen stripe do publicly has been well executed and gives the overall impression of competence, solidity and good service.
I guess that part is intentional, if you are handling money that's exactly what you'd want people to think.
This is not an exercise in creative writing, you aren't trying to create atmosphere, you're trying to convey information. That sort of writing requires sentences that are direct and to the point. I will be reading that page because I'm interested in working for Stripe and want more information that helps me decide if I want to, not for entertainment. So I want to know the facts. The facts we're conveyed perfectly by the GP in bullet points but your sentences put more emphasis on Latvian can drivers' families. When I read this I'm trying to achieve something, I am thinking about working at Stripe right now, so when I'm reading this I don't care about Latvian can drivers. What I do care about "highly mission critical operation."
Microsoft's mission statement was once "A computer on every desk, running Microsoft software". Mission accomplished in the 1990s.
Patio11's response is stated at a reasonable level of abstraction, and he even explains why he does so. I can understand if that's not your style, but you might want to consider that some people consider his comment to be a very clear reply with actionable information.
Being intentional about a company's culture and practicing it on a consistent basis, from top to bottom, is very valuable in attracting talent and getting focus on the key things in the business. In our monthly checkins with employees, we reference our core values during the conversations.
Paragraph 2 => You will work nights and week ends all the time. You'll never be compensated for it.
In the cases where I know the people very well this is especially interesting because they are incredibly nice people that told me the culture is overly focused on not making people feel bad. Coming from these people this statement was a real eye opener.
I currently work in a very "nice" culture. People from places where being nice isn't a priority have trouble with it sometimes. One thing people tell me I'm good at in this culture is delivering constructive criticism in a way that is accepted and acted on without the recipient feeling "bad." All of that said, Stripe sounds like it takes the work culture I'm in today and squares it. Many people will not be able to operate effectively in that kind of culture -- both in terms of being able to deliver criticism with the right degree of nicety and in terms of not receiving or being able to understand criticism that would help them improve their performance. This is potentially a detriment to those people and to the company.
If I were Stripe I would cover this head on. In the spirit of what's already there, I'd add something like "are you capable of performing at your best without direct feedback about areas where you can improve?"
As I constantly interact both with europeans and americans, it's really shocking sometimes seeing the difference and how crippled the communication lines are when constantly worried about the form of the message.
The kicker is that communications that don't have that extra layer to them don't feel bad or are offensive in any way, unless people go out of their way to be rude/aggressive. It just feels a lot better: it's more honest, more trustworthy, you're not left wondering if the person on the other end is saying nice things just to make you feel better.
This usually leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth where these kinds of relationships have lots of asterisks to them and I don't feel I can trust the other person. I can't even imagine what it'd be like to be surrounded in that environment at work and feeling that way about all my colleagues.
(I'll add to that though that as someone who interacts with Stripe a lot, I've had nothing but positive experiences with them so YMMV)
Preface: offline, I've heard good things about working at Stripe. So the following is intended as constructive.
The 'values' read more like a description of what the owners of any high-performance company would want out of their employees, transactionally-speaking. It reads much less like Stripe has a strong cultural identity. Reading this, it sort of feels like you are asking for a lot of my commitment to the Stripe mission without giving me any reason to buy into it.
I'm not sure there is anything idiosyncratic about this list. It doesn't really convey to me what it's really like to "be a Stripe" as opposed to "being a Googler".
Oh, and this phrase, "being a Stripe", it is the very worst kind of SV affectation. Maybe it works for people who are already at Stripe and proud to be there, but from the outside in, honestly it sends me cringing into the next universe. I don't think you have to be an enormous cynic to have that reaction to it.
Overall this seems to fail the test it sets itself: it doesn't convince me that the top team at Stripe are striving to building the best imaginable place to work, which surely is the best part about building your own company.
Maybe it's not a fair comparison, but contrast with the Valve new employee handbook, which makes it clear what it's actually like to work there and how their culture impacts the workplace.
Take Facebook's "Move fast and break things." The inverse would be something like "Take your time and do it right." Both of those values are great! They both have good and bad points and which one a company aspires to really tells you something about how they balance competing goals.
This method doesn't work 100% of the time, but it's pretty good.
For example, a company's value as stated might be "Education and experience don't matter and the most junior employee can argue with architectural choices as long as they are willing to argue cogently and with evidence." Then if you "invert" it you get "Education and experience matter; give weight to other people's expertise, education and experience in a field."
So both of them are "still something good", I guess. But a startup might choose the former.
If I've understood your suggestion correctly, then the problem with your suggestion is that some cultural values are about things that tech startups get wrong, and the inversion is not any good at all.
How do you invert something like "don't bully other employees or pick on them due to their belonging to some protected class - to overcome subconscious biases, if you do not belong to that class then stop for a moment and consciously treat them the same as if they belonged to the same class as yourself"?
What is the "inversion" of this obvious cultural choice which is obviously good?
Do you think that it is "bland and generic" just because it is obvious that it is right and its inversion is wrong?
I don't think it's obvious at all, and I think a lot of companies get these cultural values completely wrong, and, for example, do foster an atmosphere of harassment.
I want to get this comment away from the political so I'll make another, purely technical example: if a rule is, "make sure something actually builds before you check it in" then the inversion is "don't worry about making sure it builds before you check it in"? That's not "still something good" as you've stated, so...does it make the specific technical suggestion I listed "bland and generic"?
So I'm not sure how helpful your rule is.
1) I think a company that really epitomizes the point you are trying to make here is Slack. They seem to value diversity and inclusion more than any other SV company right now. This has probably helped them be successful, but to me it seems like they care about this value above and beyond the effect on their business. They want to make the world a better place and will expend resources to do so.
Conversely I slick of PayPal back in 2000. Levchin has spoken explicitly about how they valued hiring a team of people with very similar world views and how that helped them avoid wasting time arguing and instead focus on execution. I've also heard stories about how engineers would literally wrestle to solve disputes[1].
These sound like very different companies! I can imagine people that would relish working at the former and hate working at the latter (or vice versa). Both quite successful though.
2) WRT building before you check in that obviously brings me back to FB's "move fast and break things." I dunno about breaking the build as I've never worked there, but I definitely know that for the longest time FB was very very cavalier about breaking their external API. From one perspective that certainly sounds like a bad thing, but on the other hand maybe that "move fast" part really was a big part of the key to FB's success?
Perhaps some of the things that you think are absolutely wrong are just wrong according to your particular values. You should obviously want to work at a business that aligns with those values but perhaps there are other businesses that operate the opposite way and that oppositeness helps them succeed.
1. http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-...
You might think I'm being silly and that real values aren't like that - that I'm just not seeing the alternative viewpoint or trade-off.
But I actually think there are a huge class of values like this.
I guess that's just my opinion.
https://www.ibm.com/ibm/values/us/
Just try to read it without your eyes glazing over. Can you even get to the end?
It's not that anything in the list is wrong or bad. It's just boring. It's obvious. Who cares? I bet 90% of IBM employees have never even read the damn thing much less ever actually changed anything about how they do their job because of it.
Great values statements are great because they are shocking, because they get people to pay attention, and because they actually get people to change how they do things. Move fast and BREAK THINGS(1). The god damn CEO telling employees to break things. That's how you differentiate yourself.
1. Sorry to keep using this example. It's just the best. I don't even particularly like Facebook but this is just a fucking great corporate values statement. It's so great that millions of people outside the company know it and have thought about it.
I've rewritten the top of the document to invert it.
https://pastebin.com/YmKB0uNV
I stopped, but obviously could have continued to go through the rest of the document. So by your proposed standard of "is the inverted version still good" the answer is "absolutely". But that doesn't make these good values!
I agree with you that it is not a great document at all. Even though it can be inverted without any problem or challenge. I simply can't accept the inversion tool you proffered.
Thanks!
(meanwhile all my other contri bributors
• Dedication to every client’s success
• Innovation that matters-for our company and for the world
• Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships
The obvious inversion (to me) is:
• Dedication to every client’s failure
• Innovation that matters to nobody
• Mistrust and lack of responsibility in all relationships
But actually, the positive values as written are contradictory. What if there's a conflict between innovation that matters to the world vs a client's success - which comes first? Both are positive. But these values don't discriminate.
You might have missed it beecause there are a couple of conversations going on in this thread. Pay attention to the usernames.
Anyway for the inversions, I am playing by that person's rules and following that person's terminology, not simply negating these statements.
Some statements can't be inverted. (For example it's not possible to invert "don't murder your colleagues.")
It could be there because the company is serious about combating harassment. Or it could be there because the company has a harassment problem and is covering its ass.
The lack of the clause could be because the company actually has a harassment culture or because the company has a great culture and has never seen the need to add the clause.
The point is that every company will say that they're against harassment so the only way you can tell how effective they are about it is through deeds not words.
But clauses that can be inverted positively actually have a chance of telling you something.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you called it a generic technical rule -- it's not a value that distinguishes the culture of the company. So while it might be sensible corporate policy, it doesn't really say anything about the company culture (not sure I would call it bland, but that's just wordsmithing).
Taking that a step further, suppose company policy included that and a host of other "bland technical rules" with which most practitioners agree. Then company values might state "We follow industry best practices." You can imagine an inversion, "We feel free to ignore best practices if it helps ship a product early", that would express something meaningful about the culture of working there.
Values are things you push for, but might not attain (think aspirational goals), but policies are "set in stone" and if you don't follow them you're punished.
Using the examples you mentioned that are clearly policies, "don't bully other employees or pick on them due to their belonging to some protected class" is a perfect example of a policy vs value. That's clearly a policy and one that if didn't exist at a job, I'd never join said company. Bullying isn't something we strive not to do, it's something we must not do, or else be fired. Checking in broken code may get you a slap on the wrist the first time, but repeatedly do that and again you'll likely be punished.
Secondly, I'm afraid I disagree with the essence of your comment, even given your weird definition of the meaning of policy.
It seems that your view is that the second a value is phrased in an actionable and effective way you call it a policy: I read your definition of a value as something that cannot be parsed or disagreed with such as "awesome is better than great and great is better than good; but good is better is than bad." That sounds like a value, but if I made it meaningful, actionable, and effective, then it would become a policy. (according to you.)
We are just too far apart to have a meaningful conversation I'm afraid. I read your comment carefully several times before coming to this conclusion.
1. You are wrong that all companies you know of have "comply with applicable laws" in their policies.
Before we get to your interpretation, first let's look at the proposed fact that all companies you know of have "comply with applicable laws" in their policies. There are extremely clear examples such as Uber which actively did not have such a policy as well as very actively keep regulators from enforcing laws against them: https://www.google.com/search?q=uber+regulators - read those links. "Uber used an elaborate secret program to hide from government regulators"; "Justice Department begins criminal probe into Uber's use of software to help drivers evade local regulators."
Here are Uber's 14 official cultural values: https://www.quora.com/What-are-Ubers-14-core-cultural-values which include "always be hustling" and "let builders build". One definition of hustle is a fraud or swindle, or obtaining illicitly. At any rate none of those values had anything like "comply with applicable laws." Likewise AirBNB certainly did not have a core policy of complying with hotel and zoning regulations.
Objectively speaking, it is absolutely false that "comply with applicable laws" is an actual policy at all companies you know of. You're simply mistaken about the world.
But let's step away from this and see why your interpretation is also wrong.
2. Your interpretation if you were right about 1 is wrong
So your facts themselves are wrong but let us assume the counterfactual that your facts are true, and that "all companies" have a "comply with applicable laws" in their policies.
Under your interpretation "comply with applicable laws" also subsumes "don't harrass people based on a protected class" since that's illegal.
Continuing with your (wrong) interpretation, when jsjohnst writes about that statement, "if it didn't exist at a job, I'd never join said company" then it's nonsense given that no such company can exist under your proposed interpretation.
So it is like saying "I would never join a company that did not abide by the laws of physics." Under your interpretation, a nonsense statement. (All companies abide by the laws of physics; all companies have a policy of "comply with applicable laws" under your wrong facts, and under your wrong interpretation this implies not harrassing people based on a protected class.)
Your interpretation changes jsjohnst's statement to be as meaningful as declaring he would not work for a company that did not abide by the laws of physics. Clearly he has no reason to express such a sentiment.
Therefore your interpretation must also be rejected from this conversation.
-
I am sorry to be so harsh but as we are talking about values and policies, we cannot introduce wrongness on so many levels, because the results are disastrous.
I hope you do not feel that I have made this personal. I attacked only a 1-line interpretation you have offered and clearly you are free to change your mind. I do respect your contributions to hackernews and believe you are right on many other things, however, not this issue.
You're making yourself look silly, not harsh!
The point of an inversion test for values is to see if they have any information content (i.e. can act as a discriminator between companies). If the inversion of a value is something that you'd obviously not do, then it's not actually a value; it's just something that normal people should do. Policies are like this. If a policy is inverted and it sounds absurd or criminal, that's ok - policies are hard rules that define normal behaviour. But if a value is inverted and it sounds absurd, it's not actually a value.
Policies are a dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.
Values suggest an inclination or bias between two acceptable behaviours.
The reason it's important to distinguish between them is that high-level policies, whether stated explicitly or not, are by and large the same at every company (precisely because their inverse is abnormal or ridiculous); values, on the other hand, make companies distinct. Reading about a company's policies won't tell you whether it's a good place to work or not, although reading between the lines of what they assert their policies to be, may give you a clue as to their values.
I will just quote one line. You write:
>Reading about a company's policies won't tell you whether it's a good place to work or not.
which is one of the most absurd things I've ever read. I don't see how we can engage in meaningful conversation, sorry. We can just drop it.
I just realized that in another comment you called me "silly" but we can just agree that we have very different viewpoints. We view these matters completely differently.
Well then, I'm very sorry to say, you don't understand what values mean or simply are just going for broke on being argumentative. GP did a better job than I explaining why you were mistaken on what a value is in this context, if you refuse to accept it, that's your right. Just realize you're risking coming off as someone who thinks the earth is flat.
You guys don't know what a policy is. you (jsjonst) think it's "follow all applicable laws" which subsume anything illegal like harassment over some protected status. so you think no company needs any specific policy about anything related to that.
your parent thinks policies don't say anything about what it's like to work somewhere.
you both think there are no values that are unambiguously good and whose alternative no one adopts or would adopt, but which are meaningful to adopt. To me "meaningfully adopt" means "immediately add actionable, objective policies everyone can follow" to. to me, that's how you adopt a value. through policies. to you two, there is no relationship between the two.
I simply disagree with both of you.
we have nothing further to talk about. we are too far apart.
I can agree to disagree with the two of you without calling you flat-Earthers.
we just have completely different opinions.
What is it that Stripe believes in? Does it believe in the immoral act of bringing in culturally incompatible "Replacement Migration", as the UN calls it?
You're using loaded language. Not a good way to have a engaging discussion.
We could spend all day linking each other studies, well if you actually had any to support your view point that this does any good at all for either party. But in case this doesn't happen, I'll leave you with this: In Tokyo, it is common to send children alone to school via the metro. Meanwhile in 'multicultural' (part 3rd world) London, the mayor says terrorist attacks are just part of living in a big city.
"He said this week during an interview with a German media that European countries should take measures to make it more difficult for migrants to leave Africa through the current transit routes."
http://www.africanews.com/2017/07/07/europe-s-generosity-mot...
Many people think the same thing about illegal Mexican immigrants. But I've lived in Arizona, and I got to know quite a few. Most were hard working. I met a few willing to bum off the system. I also met quite a few legal citizens that bummed off the system. So I think your fear that the illegal immigrants will be receiving help from the state is unfounded.... unless of course they are denied working opportunities because of their origin, in which case, yes, I'd say there's some cultural compatibility issues (on the end of the local citizens).
As for your second point... does Great Britian allow in more migrants than other countries? If not, and they experience more terrorist attacks, that would suggest that it's not the migrants causing it. I could be way off the mark here, and I would appreciate any scholarly links on the matter.
Years ago I worked in a city where there were many illegal Mexican immigrants, and I worked alongside them in the factory where I worked, and my impression pretty much aligned with yours.
But I still think that we should severely restrict the immigration of low-skilled, low-educated citizens of other countries. Roughly half of the population of the US has an IQ of 100 or below, and the number of jobs they are capable of doing is shrinking. I don't think it's fair that this segment of the market should be flooded with competition that will reduce wages and opportunities for our current citizens.
My position is based on the premise that the aim of US immigration policy should be to benefit US citizens, rather than the citizens of other countries. I understand that many well-intentioned people disagree with me on that point, and I don't think they're horrible, heartless people because of it. I just happen to see things differently.
I would have thought that even a socialist like yourself could have at least admitted that these NGOs are a problem as they are being funded to fix problems but are being run by people whose aim it is to receive funding for as long as possible. You could call this corruption, but I don't know if you've heard of it.
It really shows the state of things, doesn't it? We've gotten to the point where the left side of the political spectrum has transformed themselves from being failed communists to being eternal minority protectors. You will never admit any problem that shows a minority in a light that's worse than the native population. And you will never admit that white people do not want to be replaced by non-white foreigners.
You doom Europe to a decade or more of fascism, dictatorships, and massive deportations. As the problems get worse, the solutions become more extreme.
This is what you create: https://www.rt.com/news/358766-french-writer-israel-gaza/
But they have Visa as an investor - while they want to be the payment processor of the web, the will probably have some investor guidelines to live with.
> Stripes
Oiy. Painting all of your employees in a branded moniker isn't a great way to start off. It immediately creates a "us" vs. "them" attitude - "Oh, she wasn't a real Stripe."
> Many successful Stripes ensure that they have dinner with their families or friends almost every evening.
"Many". "Successful". "Almost". Lots of weasel words that indicate that Stripe is unwilling to make a commitment to build a company where people don't need to stay late, because they want to keep their employee count low. I've worked in the financial industry for three separate jobs now; I know it's possible.
Also, the only reference to holiday is that it is highly likely to be interrupted. When the entirety of your conversation about maintaining a balance between work and the remaining portion of poeple's lives consists of how it will be interrupted (and that it's perfectly acceptable), you're not describing a healthy environment, IMO.
If you really want to attract high skill, experienced talent, talk about how you're trying to fix this problem.
> not just because we don’t have cubicles
So, open office plans? Not very employee friendly. I'd personally rather have a cubicle.
> We’re moving quickly, changing regularly
Last time I heard this, the company had moved from Angular to React to Dart, each time before the previous re-write was completed. It's left a nightmare for the remaining front end folks to maintain and clean up. They also did yearly re-orgs that changed folk's titles and job responsibilities.
And lets be honest, stability is important to employee morale and happiness. If it wasn't, a lot less ink would have been spilled on topics like "Who Moved My Cheese?" The lack of stability is not really a good thing.
> We care about being right and it often takes reasoning from first principles to get there.
First principles from computer science or real life programming? The two are not very compatible, and it sounds a lot like a recipe for constantly re-learning lessons.
> Expect to receive feedback, and sometimes unsolicited work, from talented coworkers with less state about your projects than you have
AKA time lost bringing new folks up to speed, just to have them leave again shortly.
> we want to feel serious responsibility for the full long-term consequences of what we do.
<rant>Do you feel serious responsibility for the innocent parties caught up in your fraud protection schemes; for freezing your client's money and making investment profit on it?
I know how hard fraud is to combat; but there are too many people caught in the crossfire to not acknowledge it.</rant>
Long story short, the culture described here sounds like a soft sell into an environment that would be pretty hard to work in, especially if you have a life outside of work.
If those are truly representative to Stripe's values, then Stripe isn't a place I would want to work, for the reasons I pointed out. I would also not recommend it to anybody, based on what I perceive to be unhealthy values.
It's necessary in this case. If it isn't made clear that the word for someone who works at Stripe is "Stripe", then people will apply common grammatical conventions and call them "Stripers"... which has an unfortunate autocorrection.
If I'm talking to someone uninitiated and I say "I am a Stripe" they would look at me like am have 30 heads. Not a good way to make outside friends. I would say "I work at the payment processing company Stripe."
I don't get the whole "Stripes" thing. Nor do I get "Whovian" or "Dead Head” or anything in-between. You work somewhere/watch something/listen to something, that doesn't require a cutesy label. (IMHO of course, your results may vary.)
This seems like some kind of self-selection proxy.
When I was younger I thought cubicles were the worst: the pinnacle of boring-grey office culture. Now that I'm older, I yearn for a quiet place to call my own.
'Cubicles' if done right can be pretty damn good! When I worked at IBM, everybody got a 'PWA': four 9ft tall walls, a sliding door, a corner desk, and a few shelves. It was amazing, and took up no more space than a standard cubicle.
http://culturecodes.co
Believe it or not that is how companies use to operate till recently. Most companies didn't even have guides/books/web pages on culture.
I know, know, know to attract top talent you have to make a place look more than just a job like your on some epic moral spiritual journey.
Now I read this stuff and it sounds like a great mission statement that is being forced on to the employees in some disingenuous way to make people "passionately" pump out work overtime while blindly believing whatever the company says.
The biggest irony out of all the culture "guides/books/page" is that they often tout or say how much they are for diversity (I know stripe doesn't in this case). It seems wrong to say you are for diversity when you are requiring people to think and act a certain way because you think its optimal.
This is because whether or not a company acknowledges it, a culture does exist and whatever that culture looked like had real impact. I agree that companies often take it too far, and a company saying it's culture is one way doesn't mean that it's entirely accurate. But it's generally better to be explicit about your culture if you can be so that employees have realistic expectations.
Of course culture concerns existed before but it was way more spelt out if you will.
When I used to ask companies "hey what is your culture like" they would say...
Well:
* We work 9-5 but when something big is due people stay to get the job done
* Our dress code is blah blah
* We have a yearly off site trip to some where
* You get this much vacation and we encourage taking it
* We have a diversity program
* We have continued education programs
* We love families and provide such and such
* If you have any problems we have a unbiased HR teams
All of these are concrete!!!
Far more useful than the ambiguous stuff Stripe is saying that almost all companies would say regardless.
A company's culture is how it thinks about resolving disputes, making decisions internally, and how employees should generally behave towards one another, especially when in conflict. It's not the benefits, or dress code, or HR department.
As Uber's proven, just because everyone gets to wear t-shirts, doesn't mean they aren't jerks to each other.
In fact I believe it isn't stating concrete things (ie a lack of formality) that may actually lead to things like Uber.
When you say this is the hours, and this your vacation time, and this is who you talk to about personal issues (aka HR) you are setting an expectation. And yeah you set clear goddamn concrete things like if you get caught harassing or fishing of the company pier we will terminate you. You tell them concretely up front.
When you don't set guidelines people can forget its work and do just plain inappropriate things!
I'm sure Uber has/had a similar manifesto. Do you think they put in the whole sexual harassment in that document.
It's like a government writing what the culture of a country should be.
You really need blind interviews to know what the culture is.
See: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/07/uber-work...
Yes, it's possible that guidelines misrepresent a company's culture. But it seems unfair and arguably, unproductive, to presume that. It's an open statement of what they want their culture to be, which seems a lot better than simply not having any goal at all.
Are you really saying you'd prefer to work for a company that doesn't think about what its internal culture and values should be?
maybe.... kidding. culture is really hard to define. But yes your point is taken but my point is by defining concrete things you can create a culture.
For example one concrete thing could be a company that says our top level executives or performers are only paid 3x than the lowest paid employee. That would indicate a lot more to me than the fluff that Stripe wrote.
> and values should be?
I absolutely care about this. This IMO is different than culture (or maybe they overlap). You can have intense high work ethic culture that have many of the big picture same values as one that does not (one example would be school systems).
You can also have very similar companies in goals and values in completely different areas of the world that have completely different culture because naturally that region has a different culture.
That being said you make valid points.
This is a really big problem for companies. Trust is not something that you can fake or "present" in an etiquette sense of the word. When workers at a company do not like each other, they do not trust each other. Where they do not trust each other, a growing bureaucracy creates formal process creep to ensure that different interests are protected. Bureaucracy and formal process slow work down and prevent the organization from adapting quickly to changing market conditions. Organizations which cannot adapt in time with the argument lose touch, become irrelevant, decline, and eventually close.
The specific culture which evolves at the company is less important than its role in ensuring that the people in the company like each other and therefore can continue to trust each other.
Some personalities might be better at different roles. My point is not everyone has to like everyone.