What a wonderful advertisement for working at Stripe. The impact of long-form well-written essays like this is huge, and fits perfectly with the theme of the essay itself about helping others succeed at scale.
I like the personal notes included a ton, e.g. mentioning that he has struggled with depression personally, which I wouldn't have guessed, even if naively so. Being open and helpful with those topics helps a lot of people out in a serious way. Also love quotes like "I cannot say this enough: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview".
Just reading this post makes it tempting for me to apply at Stripe (They apparently have 530 roles open, wow! https://stripe.com/jobs/search), especially given all the other positive comments I've seen about the company.
> What a wonderful advertisement for working at Stripe.
Exactly, which is why some of this should be taken with a grain of salt.
By all accounts, Stripe really is a good place to work and their success speaks for itself. Yet, it's important to remember that this article is at least one part advertisement. I'm not suggesting anyone dismiss the contents, but keep the context in mind. The article goes to great lengths to speak about the positives of working at Stripe, but the section about terrible work/life balance is written vaguely enough for the reader to dismiss it as a personal quirk, for example.
However, it's important to keep in mind that patio11's popularity among developer communities is one of the reasons they hired him in the first place. He's paid to be a spokesperson for the company, among other things. He doesn't even try to hide that fact in the article:
> When I was hired, there was a fiction for my business cards but the job rounded to “Do anything required to make Stripe Atlas successful.” ... For about a year I was formally in the Marketing department
Indeed, the part about choosing peers to form one’s worldview really struck home for me. Probably also applies to who you follow on Twitter or which sites you read (like this one).
> Incidentally, invoking such questions ritualistically is a fairly accurate description of the job of a YC partner. If you start asking questions like "what's preventing you from launching today?" the answer, to the founders' own surprise, quite often turns out to be nothing.
Does anyone know enough about Stripe's product lines to comment on what the following paragraph means?
"My view on Stripe’s business prior to joining was “Stripe is basically a B2B SaaS company with extremely reliable capture of upside when users succeed.” I believe that substantially underappreciates the actual business. Large portions of Stripe’s business add another loop on top of the B2B SaaS loop, where Stripe is effectively indexing on its ability to grow the count and success of customers who are themselves structurally equivalent to B2B SaaS companies."
The "reliable capture of upside when users succeed" seems to be referring to the fees charged by Stripe. More revenue for the user means more revenue for Stripe as well. I don't know what the "effectively indexing" sentence refers to. Is there a network effect at play here, where being on Stripe encourages a user's customers and suppliers to also be on Stripe? Or is there a product offering that somehow creates that effect?
And then there's another loop mentioned later, which is presumably a product in development, and not something anyone involved with can comment on. (But I would love to hear about it if you could.)
I think it's the kind of mix of inside-baseball and jargon that makes it pretty much impossible to decode for those not involved in creating annual reports and executive summaries.
If you follow Patrick on Twitter you get used to this - even to the point where I didn’t realize this was from his blog but intuited it was a quote from him just by the style of writing.
I believe what he’s getting at here is close to the following: Stripe isn’t just providing payment (Reliable capture on success, aka Stripe gets money on revenue generation), but is also trying to provide tools to make the B2B model easier to deploy, based on their experience with these business models. Stripe Atlas or Sigma are probably a good example of those types of services - they’re trying to use their payments play to also push for selling you Business Intelligence or Legal.
Indexing is just taking knowledge and deploying it to make something faster, like a database index (I know I want to join on this column, so I index it).
I am familiar with and very much enjoy patio11's writing style. I enjoyed his "An update on a pre-registered result..." to the extent that I was actually laughing out loud while reading it, which was very much not the intent of the writing.
I now see two potential explanations. The first is Atlas, where Stripe enables the ecosystem of B2B SaaS companies to expand rapidly. The other, mentioned in a sibling to your comment, is marketplaces (Connect), where Stripe collects revenue from a number of operating payment networks. In both cases, Stripe is a B2B SaaS which serves other SaaS companies, which allows growth in a way that being a B2B SaaS that serves traditional business doesn't.
Kind of crazy how all these articles come out about what it's like working at Stripe and how to apply. Everyone I've talked to who has applied has not received a response from their application.
Even in my most recent experience I wrote a cover letter, reached out to multiple Stripe recruiters. Most of them either ignored me, or said that they were not working on that role and said my status is still "pending".
I imagine that Stripe's recruiting team is overwhelmed but it was unfortunate that they weren't able to get back to me. I ended up accepting an engineering manager position over payments at another company.
At almost every large, successful company there is a huge disconnect between what hiring is screening for and what corporate blog posts might suggest, to the point of engineers themselves being unaware of how the experience is for most applicants (after all, they are self-selected…) Usually this boils down to "you don't seem to have enough experience" or "you don't know anyone on the team who can vouch for you to get through the initial resume screen". A real shame, since it leaves a number of qualified applicants in a poor position, but presumably Stripe has enough people applying that they can afford passing up people.
I'm sorry to hear this and apologize. We're definitely still a comparatively small team wishing we had more efficient ways to handle our inbound funnel. (We do have some ideas here.) But this is good feedback and we should absolutely have provided a better experience.
Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad candidate experience is a lack of resources.
Exactly, it's clearly not a lack of resources, but explicitly not prioritizating candidate experience for candidates you're not actively pursuing. Which, by the way I think is a totally valid decision to make, but let's not kid around and make it sound like your hands were tied.
(1) The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people. We'll do the best we can to identify promising people but a lot of people will get something somewhat functionally equivalent to a form rejection. You could argue that this is merely a prioritization decision -- we could keep hiring recruiters until everyone could be individually assessed -- but doing so would require a recruiting team of comparable magnitude to the rest of the Stripe organization and so the current state is an unfortunate compromise given the current constraints and given the decision to have an open application form (which is, I think, on net better for everyone).
(2) Cases where people at Stripe mishandled the process. I know for a fact that some of the anecdotes shared in the thread are from many years ago, and I know that our process has improved since then (we have empirical data to this effect), but we're also acutely aware that we continue to make mistakes -- recruiting is a high-stakes and complex process with a lot of fallible moving parts. For whatever it's worth, we issue CSAT surveys to every candidate who interviews (about 6,000 onsite interviews in 2019), and track the results both at the aggregate Stripe level and at the individual recruiter level. And I get why some people here sound so annoyed -- what might be "another entry in a database" to a recruiter or hiring manager is "the future of my career" to someone on the other side. While it's always hard to know what to make of a set of anecdotes, and while our referral rate among Stripe employees is very high today, I'm nonetheless bothered by the number of cases shared here, and we're going to be digging in. (Specific anecdotes with more concrete dates or data are welcome at patrick@stripe.com.)
Couldn't you "pen test" your own hiring process? Have some folks stage applications and see the process failures first hand. You might get better data from running these experiments yourself rather than through a survey.
"The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people."
It is not inevitable and there are company that do recruiting better and other worse. For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear. That is a not a sub-optimal interview experience, like being in a coma is not a sub-optimal life experience.
I understand that working with recruiters is hard (who ever said: I know a recruiter who is a genius? Or even the lesser: I know that recruiter, they are brilliant), but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.
> For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear.
> but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.
Sorry, but it's not. I'm not giving Stripe a pass here per se, but the priority of an org is to make money so that they can offer positions.
Scaling recruiting is hard. Just like you might want an org who see thousands and thousands of applications every day to act more benevolently, the opposite also holds true.
Yes, it is not, but it should be.
And not "the priority" of the organization, which is, as you said, making money, but one of the priorities. In fact, using the double KPI method, "finding great candidates and treating all with basic respect" should be the guiding light/mantra/KPI of any recruiting team.
"Scaling recruiting is hard". Sure, plenty of things are hard when scaling, but calling back candidates after multiple rounds of interviews (just to highlight one common complaint) is not. That is a cultural problem.
> I understand that working with recruiters is hard (who ever said: I know a recruiter who is a genius? Or even the lesser: I know that recruiter, they are brilliant), but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.
Generally speaking, the same sort of superlatives used for high IQ aren't used to describe high EQ, but we probably should.
I have interacted with a few recruiters (not at Stripe, I've never applied there) who were off-the-charts in their ability to make people feel comfortable and at ease, occasionally even in the face of truly horrendous processes and systems failures.
Also, it's an interesting signal when you get ghosted by the hiring manager (bosses boss of the team lead I would have been reporting to) and the recruiter re-initiates communication to apologize and get things back on track.
I still never got that job, but that was basically because "Remote OK" really meant "Remote OK in theory because we like the idea of paying a lower salary, but in practice it's only 'OK' for overqualified candidates that we can't convince to relocate, or maybe a relative of ours", and definitely not the recruiter's fault (it turns out that the hiring manager wasn't a good fit for the organization. Go figure.).
I did get some really good chocolate chip cookies as a consolation prize, though.
My "genius" comment above was a bit salty and over the top. But, I had so many bad experiences with recruiters (of a company, independent) that is quite difficult at this point for me to take them seriously or offer any (professional, I am not talking about human of course) respect beyond what I grant to anyone, from poor to rich companies, from guilty to innocent managers, from stripes to stars. I understand it is the nature of the job, but also that the nature of jobs tends to attract certain people.
For example, the most common behavior with these recruiting companies (and I am fully employed and paid very well) is that they take 30 minutes of my time with the usual general questions, then they make me chat with some sort of hiring manager of the target company, then they send an email "I will let you know in a few days", and they never write back. I send an email saying "so?" and I never get an answer. Then, I find out they moved into real estate.
Ten, 15 times over a few years (why I continued answering? The hiring companies were quite interesting, one in Vegas, some in the East Coast where I don't have much of a network, they could, with emphasis on the conditional tense, be useful).
We can say that they are just a little piece of a bad process, or that it is the hiring manager/company fault, or "yes, but you did not have to deal with certain rude candidates" (and I have seen plenty of those rude candidates, there I certainly offer my solidarity). And if we go on with the circumnavigation of people, we find a justification for any sort of less-than-good behavior. If telling lies is part and parcel of one's job, they (recruiters/hiring managers/C-level) are still liars, they don't get a pass in my book.
It sounds like you found a decent recruiter and it is quite telling that a recruiter re-initiating a conversation and apologizing, things I happen to do also in my job, is now an "off-the-charts" EQ genius. That's the 101 for anyone with a modicum of professionalism. I am sure there are great recruiters around like there are plenty of needles in haystacks.
>
It sounds like you found a decent recruiter and it is quite telling that a recruiter re-initiating a conversation and apologizing, things I happen to do also in my job, is now an "off-the-charts" EQ genius. That's the 101 for anyone with a modicum of professionalism. I am sure there are great recruiters around like there are plenty of needles in haystacks.
Ah, sorry about that, I didn't mean to conflate the two quite so directly. I also didn't make it clear that I was ghosted by the hiring manager after the recruiter handed me off to them. The recruiter wasn't supposed to even be involved from that point forward, but they followed up anyway. However, you can ignore the anecdote as an unnecessary distraction if you like.
Anyway, sure, recruiters get a bad rap, in the same way as used-car salespeople do. I wasn't really arguing that the reputation the profession has is entirely undeserved. I was just saying that good and even great recruiters do actually exist. For many of the working-environment reasons you've mentioned, they often don't stay in the role of recruiting ICs, or even for relatively senior roles. They have better opportunities in recruiting-adjacent fields like executive search services, life-coaching, and so on.
It's not hard to have an automated system that tracks if a candidate that's been interacted with has been ghosted. If the candidate has been previously contacted then require communication with the candidate for any archiving or other rejection. Hell, require communication even if you reject them without ever talking to them. Sending an automated email tied to the HR system candidate status isn't expensive or hard. You can then reprimand the recruiter or their manager as appropriate if they don't do this or try to get around it
>For whatever it's worth, we issue CSAT surveys to every candidate who interviews (about 6,000 onsite interviews in 2019)
I interviewed in 2019 and never got a CSAT. The recruiter (and rest of the team) completely ghosted me after telling me an offer was coming. No further communication, and certainly no CSAT.
It seems that could be a huge hole and your entire CSAT program is subject to confirmation bias if you are not even sending them to the people who are most likely to respond with a negative experience. I'm not sure I would trust this "empirical data" you have.
What do you want him to say publicly ? Do you want him to say that he doesn't care about developers he doesn't hire ? Even if that's what every business owner thinks, you can't tell it because you will sounds like an arrogant person.
They don't have (and you should not expect them) to give a feedback to anyone who apply (as it is the case of the parent comment)
I don't have a horse in this race, but I always get surprised when people critique responses from high-profile members of organizations.
Have you ever seen a businessperson make a public statement on behalf of a company that espoused or accepted negative/neutral sentiment?
I dunno why people even bother responding or reacting internally to these statements. There's not a human being behind them -- there's a corporate entity who has to answer to stakeholders with a spotlight being shined on them.
It's purely politics and statesmanship, the human being is long gone, or only shows up in private settings after everyone's had several drinks.
Except Elon Musk. That's a man you can, probably, take at his word.
Well the answer is that they get lots of applications from really good developers who also have top colleges on their resumes and top companies they've worked at. So they interview them first and can't get to the rest. This is obvious but can't be said publicly.
This is also why people fight so hard to get prestigious companies and universities on their resume.
what sort of ideas are required besides sending an email to your IT folks and telling them to set up a JIRA project for tracking job applications? you could, in an afternoon, ensure that no applications are ever mysteriously forgotten about.
Crazy suggestion: figure out a way to dogfood your hiring process. Have an engineer with a few years experience at Stripe try to get through the application process and see what kind of feedback they bring back. Kind of like secret shoppers but for hiring.
Ironically, this is almost the exact same attitude I got in my poor experience interviewing with Stripe. Interviewers were constantly late to our calls and mixed up who would be interviewing me more than once. Despite that, I still was told I was going to receive an offer... only to be ghosted for weeks. Once the recruiter finally reached back out, they said the position had been cancelled but they would find me another position. Spoiler: I never heard back from them, and they ignored all of my further communications.
Throughout all of this, I was apologized to several times (credit is due there, I guess) and each time the excuse was "ha ha sorry things are such a mess, that's just how things are when you work at a start up!" First of all, "haha we're a startup" is not a valid excuse for being late to meetings and ignoring communication.
Second: you're a company worth tens of billions of dollars, have thousands of employees in offices around the globe, and were founded a decade ago. You are not a startup. You are not a "small team". Stop using it as an excuse.
> each time the excuse was "ha ha sorry things are such a mess, that's just how things are when you work at a start up!" First of all, "haha we're a startup" is not a valid excuse for being late to meetings and ignoring communication.
Pretending to act like a startup has become a cover for being sloppy at big companies. People want to pick and choose what it means to work like a startup, and usually they choose the aspects that give them flimsy excuses for bad behavior.
In reality, my experience with actual small startups has been that people are better at arriving to meetings on time and following through with commitments because small teams mean everyone knows each other. If you don't show up to the meeting, we can see you across the small office and hold you accountable.
It's the big companies where accountability starts to disintegrate. People know they can get away with dropping balls all over the place as long as they get their OKRs finished for quarterly review. Things start to slip through the cracks because that person you're dealing with is just another e-mail address, not your close coworker who sits on the other side of the room.
My college classmate put in a referral for a specific role a couple of weeks ago, and no word. Not even an email acknowledgement that my job application is in the system.
Well I don't know for Stripe but subconsciously recruiters will always consider people who apply to be needy compared to people who are 'hunted' via Linkedin.
When you do that kind of blog posts, you try to improve the image of the company externally so that more people want to work there. It could help with more people applying but also increase the acceptance rate of the offers.
When you have a lot of people applying then you just cherry pick the best ones
I applied for a new grad position two months ago, did the coding challenge and passed all test cases with clean code and time to spare and haven't heard a peep from them since. It's a shame considering how I only hear good things about the company and the recruiting process but almost all the big companies I've applied to have at least had the decency to let me know they aren't moving forward
what an amazing industry we work in! denying top talent every day because people aren't motivated enough to check emails, make phone calls, click buttons to schedule things.
Stripe likely has pick of the cream for open positions. It has been public knowledge for a while that they're a rocket ship, and that attracts top talent by definition (in addition to sharks and wolves [0] I'd presume).
Correct. Never responding after an application? Par for the course. But asking someone to complete a coding challenge or even an interview and then ghosting is downright unprofessional and should be unacceptable.
Totally agree. From what we can see in this thread, when a recruiter / hiring manager / HR department makes it a regular practice to ghost interviewed candidates, it has a significant effect on the company's reputation - that they lack common decency and respect. It does not seem worth it for whatever time/effort they might have saved by such behavior. To put it another way, it seems it'd be worth spending time and effort to improve the process and experience, to improve such a reputation.
I don't know about "most companies." Maybe most really big tech companies, places that are constantly getting crazy amounts of applications. And if you're living in a heavily populated city.
I live in a place with a fairly small population, and I got offers at 3/3 programming jobs I've applied for since my first in 2017.
I applied for the new grad position too a couple months back, having a previous FAANG internship and starting (and selling) my own startup during college. Never heard back or even got the coding challenge. I’ve used Stripe in my own projects a few times and have also heard good things so I’m bummed too.
When I was an undergrad I applied to Stripe several times with a FANG on my resume as well without any responses.
Two reasons for that are:
1) I went to a state school (NC State)
2) The FANG in question was Amazon, which I don't think they "count". I have friends that applied when they decided to leave Amazon and they didn't get interviews either.
If your FAANG was Amazon I'm guessing you're in the same boat.
Haha, you guessed it. I wish I knew how much my school would matter when I applied to colleges, and that Amazon isn’t as well respected as I hoped. Unfortunately Microsoft gave me a LeetCode hard for my internship interview and google auto declined me so I didn’t have a chance at them. Not sure what was up with that either.
Oh man. I have a juicy Stripe story from a friend, but I'd rather not share all of the details in case anyone from Stripe is here listening.
The gist is that I had a friend apply, go through a few interviews, and then just get completely ghosted. After several emails and attempts to reach out, the hiring manager replied to his email with a two word reply when my friend asked about his application status. That reply was "no thanks".
In my experience, stories like this are par for the course. While at Stripe, a few of my close friends and former co-workers were treated so poorly during the application process that I stopped referring anyone over a year before I left.
Yeah. I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of these blog posts are just astroturfing.
Well designed astroturfing, nonetheless.
Edit: Astroturfing is the wrong word, perhaps. What I mean to say is vocalized better in the replies. These all should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. A rock of salt?
I don't see how that would be possible. If you say you like working someplace, we know that you work there. You couldn't possibly be hiding who is paying you. I don't think that is a fair accusation.
I think it would be much better said that we should take with a grain of salt anyone's assessment of their current job.
Fair. Wrong word choice. The point just being that there could be a lot of company... encouragement... to be vocal about what you think of working at the org.
And of course, to the point you raise, we must always take that with a grain of salt. Nobody is going to come to the table with complete honesty about the problems at a company with their name right next to it.
Astroturfing just means faking grass roots / community movement. Makes less sense here than in politics, but it would be possible if the marketing department was writing these blog posts on behalf of engineers.
The connection is obvious. If you hear it sucks to apply or work there, you may decide against trying. If a dude with HN blogging cred says it's cool, you reconsider.
It's a terrible read, all sugar and good-buddy fluff. One could easily question the motivation for such cheese.
It's possible for both (a) people to enjoy working at a company and (b) for that company's recruitment process to be abysmally bad.
The people handling the recruiting functions are usually not the people you would be working with (unless you go into HR), and generally if HR starts ghosting you during the recruiting process it's because they're putting their efforts into the candidate they are trying to hire.
EDIT: Conversely, the opposite is also true. I used to work for a firm that was an absolute nightmare to work for, but the HR process was amazing.
He's more famous for generally being a developer blogger, he was well known here well before Starfighter. I think he always had the most karma before they got rid of 'top'. He was always very open about his bingo card creator software, and then his appointment reminder sass. His yearly round up of BCC was always a top voted post.
Afaik he originally became well known for his helpful posts and advice on Joel Spolsky's business of software forums before HN even existed. That's where I first came across him, useful info about SEO.
This is a long way of saying I thought he'd been hired as a developer advocate for their startup thing, Stripe Atlas, rather than a recruitment advisor.
That's a tough choice. In the end a functioning hr/payroll department beats a good experience.
I've worked in both. When the company with a good environment closes we were all let go. They mishandled my last paycheck so I'm still waiting. No way to get references. Had to contact government to get seperation papers. The bad environment place that stressed you out and then let your department go for something out of your control. The firing process felt good. They provided career support offered a reasonable settlement package. Easy to use as a reference as they provided a contact #
At most companies of this size, HR/payroll is separate from the recruiting department.
I'm definitely in agreement that a functioning HR/payroll department is a prerequisite for a good experience though. I had an employer that kept paying me after I left company, and they only stopped because I told them that this was the case. Obviously, afterwards, they sent me a letter saying they had "discovered" an overpayment, and I should send them back the money to exact cent, with no allowance for the cheque/mailing costs...
It's like when you see a dozen Glassdoor reviews for an employer where the only recommendation to management is to "keep doing what you're doing" and that any complaints are "sour grapes" or from employees who can't handle "growing pains".
Any positive glassdoor post should be suspect. You generally visit glassdoor for three reasons.
1. You are researching a company.
2. You own or work in hr at a company or have been told to post a review by management.
3. You are angry/unhappy at your current role or that you were let go. You go on to warn others / get even.
Rare is the person who is working a company and is happy who decides to visit glassdoor and tell everyone how happy they are. Have you done this? Know anyone who would follow this chain of events?
Glassdoor asks to leave a review for your current company or share your pay before looking up in detail about other companies. I wrote a review about my current company just for this reason but it was a honest review and not overly positive etc.
Wouldn't it make sense to give referrals some kind of VIP treatment, just to keep a pipeline of referrals open from any employees who are happy with their jobs?
I can't understand why a company wouldn't do that, even if they were overwhelmed with the challenge of hiring in general. The win is potentially exponential, if you get good people who come to work with people they already know how to work with.
I went through the whole loop, "cleared" the interviews (as per the recruiter) and was told to stand by for the offer. A week later, instead of the offer, they just said they ran out of headcount. Never heard back from them again (even though they said they'll reach out when they get headcount back).
Stories like this make absolutely no sense to me, and yet I hear them all the time about Stripe.
Why not just tell the candidate that they aren't getting an offer? Why make up elaborate stories about headcount? Why say you're going to follow up? It's clearly not a bandwidth issue since they took the time to respond anyway.
Even something like "We've filled all positions. Your application was strong, but not strong enough. It's unlikely we'll reach back out."
That's 1000x better than getting ghosted after being told they WOULD reach back out. Complete bullshit on their part and a total lack of integrity. There's really no excuse for it.
Saying that they ran out of headcount is both telling that they won't offer and offering a reason, which is exactly as your example: they filled all the positions.
It's a polite and somewhat sugar-coated reason instead of bluntly saying that they thought the person was not good enough, but it's standard to be polite when rejecting candidates.
> A week later, instead of the offer, they just said they ran out of headcount. Never heard back from them again (even though they said they'll reach out when they get headcount back).
Saying you'll get back to a candidate, especially when that candidate has already been told to expect an offer, and then ghosting is not polite. Any framing of this as acceptable behavior, be it polite or impolite, is unacceptable. You can say "oh that's just the way it is" and there's some truth to that, but that doesn't mean it isn't pure fucking bullshit and deserving of condemnation.
It is unacceptable in theory, in practice it sounds like most of the ghosted in this thread would gladly work there, given the opportunity. Money and visibility (and beauty) make many sins forgiven.
I had terrible interview experiences (rudeness, ghosting, and making zero sense) with Lyft, Airbnb, Twitter, but if they make the right offer, I might say yes (although I have quite a strong memory).
No - you are being far too generous towards Stripe here. If they say they cannot hire due to headcount, after saying they were going to make an offer, and they'll reach out again once they have headcount again - they are ghosting if they never follow up.
They lied, full stop, don't apologize for how "polite" it is (and it's not polite, it's disrespectful).
How is it polite to mislead candidates? Surely it can be uncomfortable to hear that you aren't up to par for a job or didn't interview well - but if that is the truth it is better to hear that truth than to hear some platitude about headcount. If I believed the "headcount" story I might invest time waiting to see if headcount opened up, or hold out hope that I'd potentially get an offer. On the other hand, if I heard that I had gaps X, Y, and Z I'd probably start working on X, Y, and Z - or at least think through how I could demonstrate my aptitude in those areas better or mitigate my weakness there and so on.
It's like if your doctor tried to be polite to you by not mentioning some serious disease because he was afraid it would make you feel bad. It might indeed make the candidate feel bad to hear about their (perceived) deficiencies - but if they do hear about it then they can do something about it!
The level of unprofessionalism is just ridiculous - all these 'great companies' with 'billions' can't fing manage to tell someone what time it is. So much ghosting, don't know what's going on, left in the lurch etc.
Is there literally not a single HR Portal that tracks status? That flags 'pending'? Notifications for '2 weeks no reply'?
The HR person can't grab the hiring manager and hand-hold the response?
An automated response would be just fine.
And just cordial as a minimum you know 'Thanks so much for turning out, but we can't move forward at this time'.
>Is there literally not a single HR Portal that tracks status? That flags 'pending'? Notifications for '2 weeks no reply'?
As a hiring manager, absolutely all portals/HR management software I have used up to this moment have this feature. Most of them highlight the application and put them in a visible 'No progress for X time' category; some even send separate e-mails for each long overdue candidate.
The truth is that - at least in the orgs I've been part of - the trend for HR is to be apathetic to the needs of the team they're hiring for and tone deaf in communication. Recruitment has been the least favourite bit of their job.
Over the years I have received Linkedin messages from a number of candidates whom I have referred to other teams/department after they interviewed for a position in mine. HR should've followed up with them; they didn't.
Years ago, before "FAANG" was a term, I was flown in for an interview with Amazon in Seattle, a city I like enough to have considered moving there. They put me up in a grimy capital-M Motel by the airport with a cracked sink and a $50 cab ride into town (back when that was expensive).
OTOH they were quite efficient with their response. It was a mutual "no" and they spared me the trouble by getting to me, with useful feedback, within 48 hours.
There is a lot of BS around the hiring process these days, but some parts of it are still in HR's control: namely the "before" and "after" of the actual interview day(s).
If that part is bad, it indicates rot in HR, which will be a problem every single time you interact with them.
I have nothing against Stripe, just commenting on the general case.
Just to give another anecdote. I went all the way to the onsite and within a couple of days I was given a few notes from each separate interview and a fairly clear reason for not proceeding with the hire at the time. They also did this in a video call. This was in either late 2016 or 2017.
Doesn't surprise me. I did an on-site a while back and several of the interviewers seemed like they'd rather be anywhere else rather than in the interview room. It's a good thing the product has scaled well because it seems like the culture hasn't.
This happened to a friend too, got totally ghosted by Stripe.
This is generally how our industry works, though, which is that it's not worth it to go through loop for a job unless you were referred by someone on the inside.
I interviewed in March, thought I did really well in the interviews, had great conversations with the hiring manager etc. After Covid hit they told me they were postponing hiring decisions and I never heard anything since. Sort of a weird way to manage things but I suppose the lockdowns have added quite a bit of chaos.
I'm surprised to hear so many in this thread had negative experiences. My experience as an applicant at Stripe was stellar from beginning to end, probably the most professional and well-executed interview process I've seen in my career. I can say that without bias because I ended up choosing another offer, but it was really difficult to turn down Stripe's after that.
I do mainly frontend work and am just shy of 10 years experience. My resume is solid and I can at least get my foot in the door at well known companies including FAANG. I'm not saying I'm going to get the job, but I feel like I can at least get a response.
I was job hunting earlier this year due to my last company (a fintech start up) shutting down and Stripe was the only company that just handed me an immediate "No" without even a recruiter call. I know one other engineer who is more mid level and she said she had applied and never even got a response.
I harbor no ill will toward them, but I'm really curious what their hiring criteria is and why it seems so different that most of the other major companies out there.
I'm tangentially familiar with the process, so let me paint a picture.
Imagine you have enough high-quality candidates such that you could have every single employee interviewing candidates all day every day, doing no other work. What do you do?
In the real world, most engineers top out at one or two phone screens a week, and/or one or two on-site interviews a week. Sometimes more. Each is 45 minutes at least, usually an hour. Each involves writing deliberate, thoughtful feedback and a professional assessment. Candidates that do well lead to decision meetings that take more time for all the interviewers to discuss -- candidates that do poorly can circuit-break.
Then there is scheduling! Is there physical space available for the candidate to interview? Can we get all the necessary interviewers? What if one or more of them can't make it (sick, etc.)? What if the candidate needs to reschedule? Time zones? Holidays?
Imagine Stripe has 100 recruiters (this is at least accurate within an order of magnitude). What does the back-of-the-napkin math look like for their maximum interviewing bandwidth?
Hiring is a really hard problem, even for well-equipped organizations. Even the best in the world do it badly sometimes. And the anecdote cases tend to shout the loudest. Maybe you had a typo on your resume. Maybe other candidates looked better. Maybe there is a nasty rumor about you. Maybe the recruiter was having a bad day. Or maybe you were just unlucky and arbitrarily cut.
I don't doubt this is true. However, given that the author put his name on it, it's impossible that this blog post could be anything but glowingly positive (unless he wanted to complain on his way out).
I asked for, and got, total editorial control of my voice in my spaces when I joined. Though in any universe where my experience at Stripe wasn't positive, I would be unlikely to have stayed for four years or to have written the post, right?
I tried to be honest about my frustrations, too, but there's a possibility my salaryman indirectness made them not leap off the page.
Sure, but you can't say too many bad things about the company. Of course you would never write "I don't like working here", as long as your real name is on the post.
"pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview." is something I have found to be difficult but required. Very nice friends of mine have simplistic views on issues I am interested in or lack the ambition I would like to have. We still close but we chat about personal problems, not work.
This is one of the few blogs where I'll always read the entire article, consistently great writing and thought-provoking ideas.
I agree with the other commenter regarding the Stripe application process. I've applied 2-3 times starting in 2015 and as recently as early 2020 and have never heard back, it's been the only company that never gets back to me!
Everything worked out, since I've landed some great positions at promising startups in the meantime, but I would have loved to experience the growth from ~500 to ~3000 employees like Patrick has.
Small improvement in this paragraph:
> “If you sell to doctors you prefer futures in which more money goes to doctors. Those are much better futures for you than futures with less money going to...
Since the article was just talking about call options, my first thought went to futures contracts instead of possible timelines. I think using "timelines" instead of futures would make this a bit more readable.
It is likely they don't really have many open positions no matter how good the applicants are. Seems they have some outside of the USA specific positions open.
The theory is that it's better not to respond at that point, because if they change their mind in 3 months, they'd rather not have rejected you so they can say "sorry we were slow".
It's sufficiently a term of art in Silicon Valley that HN had threads about it 13 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25042 Note comment from Drew Houston, who had just launched Dropbox here a month before.
You can use HN search to pull up a few thousand other instances.
why would you work at a company that may never go public and even if it does, already has such an oversized valuation you’ll likely not make much from it?
it seems predatory and abusive to employees to stay private this long
A quirk of Silicon Valley culture is that senior employees on the inside of it tend to be rather sophisticated about how they think about equity, and they also tend to be rather reticent about talking about that externally, because of factors such as legal and PR risk.
This is immensely frustrating to me, because thinking lucidly about equity is incredibly important for career planning for engineers who are startup-adjacent, work at AppAmaGooBookSoft, or who are in markets where those firms' offers set market terms. I think this sets us up for a continuance of the class system, where people who talked about this subject around the dinner table or have a frat brother who was in Google in 2004 know the score, and people who grew up in Chicago and didn't know what Google was in 2003 do not, even when they're evaluating career options which are heavily dependent on correctly valuing equity.
I did not always think lucidly about equity, and overly trusted the representations of folks on Internet watering holes who said that equity was likely to be nearly worthless. I would like to think I've learned a bit over the years.
I apologize for being indirect here; feel free to ask me about equity in some place where it will not be reasonably read as a comment on a firm I owe various duties to. (Offer broadly open to HNers.)
I don't think the equity is worthless. I just think an engineer can work at Facebook with a monthly vest and their equity is as good as cash. An engineer at stripe has illiquid shares that they hope they can convert to cash in 3+ years. Usually the hope of a large return would offset that (time value of money) but thats cancelled by the fact that stripe's private valuation is 30B+.
Not patio11 but you can still evaluate something like net preset value by doing discount to the eventual liquidity event. In reality this is complicated as you need to assign probabilities to (1) when liquidity event can occur (2) real value of your equity at the event (3) discount rate.
While estimating probability distributions is probably beyond what one can do without detailed inside knowledge (and even then), it's useful to think of a number of stories, eg: target_co will ipo in 3 years at 2x last raised value, target_co will ipo in 5 year at last raise, target_co will be acquired at 0.1x last raise in 8 years (what is the overhang?); let's say all at equal probabilities. For discount rate you can think of alternative places where you could work (eg. alternative_public_co will grow at -10, +20, +30% yoy with equal probability) + time value of not being able to liquidate (let's say another 10%).
This will give you some range of numbers to consider.
Maybe I'm misreading what Patrick is saying here but personally, if I believed that the equity part of an offer was worth near zero, then I'd ensure that the cash part of an offer met my needs and aspirations for the medium term.
Perhaps there is an argument that by being so focused on the cash part of an offer I probably left equity on the table, if the IPO lottery ticket came in perhaps I would find myself regretting that.
What you mean it's all about the money? Come on there is more than that. Everyone started at stripe should have known the implications of their options.
Why the hell does Stripe keep doing things outside of their payments wheelhouse? It makes no sense, especially with regard to publishing a magazine (???). Is this the whole “Hoover up talent and pay them absurd amounts” applied to an extreme?
Every time I read about Stripe, it seems that the most interesting people work/have worked there (Julia Evans, Aditya Mukerjee, Mudge, Brandur, Greg Brockman). And it seems like a great culture.
But the CEO's "progress studies" thing repels me because it reeks of the Kochs' efforts to implant conservatism into education. I don't want to enable that. It sucks.
BTW, I am one of the people who had their YC app reviewed by patio11 and it was a great experience. It's amazing how much time he's able to dedicate to individual Stripe Atlas participants -- thanks!
Can you explain what stood out to you as conservative about the "progress studies" article?
Wikipedia defines conservatism as "a political and social philosophy promoting traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization".
Patrick Collison's article [1] to me seems to be saying "we should be a lot more systematic and scientific in figuring out the drivers of societal progress, and aggressively invest in those things." That seems in direct opposition to conservatism, since it advocates a dramatic overhaul of ineffective institutions.
Collison's definition of progress does seem narrowly focused on measurable economic metrics. Is that the source of your grievance? I think that developments like women's suffrage and racial desegration should be included in discussions of "progress studies", whether or not they led to improvements in measurable metrics. Collison neglects to include examples of this type in his article, but it's not clear to me that he considers them unworthy of study.
> But the CEO's "progress studies" thing repels me because it reeks of the Kochs' efforts to implant conservatism into education. I don't want to enable that. It sucks.
If you had that amount of money (and that reputation), you'd probably try to improve the world _according to your vision of improvement_ too.
> A portion of my job is helping folks communicate that we're serious, reliable infrastructure for the largest participants in the global economy while also keenly appreciating that the user might be on a small team trying to sell bingo cards or politically-themed breakfast cereal.
AWS and Cloudflare are two other examples of XaaS companies that benefit from this mode of operation. They're both workable for a one-person team as much as they're for global enterprises.
The second-order effects that are described here around the "capture of upside" may be a little exaggerated. Credit cards and Stripe are common payment mechanisms for consumer, prosumer, and self-serve SAAS. I'm not denying there is a lot of money here, but I imagine the majority of B2B SaaS companies by revenue handle payment through annual contracts through checks and wire transfer.
I don't have any data here, but I'm thinking EHR, ERP, office building rent ("a SaaS company plus some glass and concrete") etc. If the service provided is annually worth 100k USD, theres probably
human-human interaction which facilitates the exchange of legal documents and money. Think Oracle, SAP, ADP, ServiceNow, Workday etc.
Does anyone know if Patrick has talked somewhere about why he decided to take a job at Stripe instead of continuing his consulting business or starting a new venture?
Patrick didn't strike me as someone interested in working at a "regular" job.
Yeah, not knowing about him at all when I watched a talk by him and then realised that he is somewhat of an icon for indie/solo founders, I was very surprised to find out he had starting working as an employee in the meantime. I know he's doing well, but since I had just started out solo myself it felt a little like he had thrown in the towel ;)
I picked up on a few points others here have mentioned already, but the most striking thing for me, particularly from the first half of the piece, is the huge emphasis on growth, recruitment and looking to do new things in the internal culture at Stripe.
Of course, this is reasonable and understandable for a business in Stripe’s position. However, the corollary seems to be a lack of focus on the core service that got many of our businesses using Stripe in the first place. In a nutshell, we use a payment processor like Stripe because we want to easily and reliably collect payments from our customers, so we can get on with what our business actually does.
It would be interesting to know how much is going on at Stripe, presumably involving people other than patio11, in that area. I have a business that was an early adopter back when Stripe launched in the UK, but our perception is that the challenges we face with online payments today aren’t necessarily the areas that recent developments at Stripe are addressing.
I really like long form idea packed essays like this.
One of the many ideas that jumped out at me:
> A huge portion of the value creation of Silicon Valley is through directly intervening on the ambition of impressionable people.
This seems especially applicable for software-only or software-heavy businesses that scale very efficiently. Increasing ambition by a little can result in large increase in impact on the other end.
Another idea that caught my attention:
> Silicon Valley was a place. It has become a metonymy for a community of practice. You can find outposts of Silicon Valley in Tokyo cafes, in WeWorks in Bangalore, and on the coast of Cape Town.
If we can inspire ambition all around the world that bodes well for our future.
The article really does make you want to apply. However, all remote jobs are Americas-only. Remote was supposed to be Stripe's next engineering hub even before the pandemic, so I'm curious if that will include Europe any time soon.
"every time I convince a Stripe customer to raise their prices ... we benefit directly" sounds like the exact words of an illegal cartel. While I doubt that that is Patrick's intent, if I were an antitrust attorney, this would convince me that the notion of payment processors as clearinghouses for price-fixing merits investigation.
This is a great example of how one can do something well-meaning at small scale (Advise tiny, tiny businesses that they would be better served having more confidence in their value) that can turn into something illegal at scale (Advise price leaders that they can safely lead by less and so-on).
A stripe customer is free to tell Stripe "Your fees are too high, and I'd prefer switching processors than raising prices".
I could be wrong. Is there an example of an illegal cartel, trying to persuade customers from whom it makes transaction fees, to raise prices? Surely this isn't a new thing under the sun.
Ultimately consumers foot the bill. It's why antitrust legislation gets pursued in the first place.
It's the raising of prices in the absence of market forces that gives room for the payment processor to increase fees. Theoretically all payment processors benefit from advocating that their clients raise prices. If some companies raise their prices, no issue, but the coordinated effort to do it is where you "smell a rat".
It's then up to the litigating party to try to find collusion between companies to do this. This is like how the anti-competitive hiring practices of Google/Apple/Facebook/etc were surfaced. They all had a set of practices that stood out as anomalous and during the subsequent investigation it was found that they colluded with each other to set the market (rate for hiring talent).
It's probably not the case here...and also patio11 has little risk saying so while living in Japan where industries are highly vertically-integrated/monopolistic.
Of course the customer can say that. And nowhere does Patrick suggest that taking his advice is a condition of continuing a relationship with Stripe. That's not the issue.
The issue is that coordinating pricing is illegal in any form. In any industry, each company could make more money if they knew their competitors would raise prices. Even calling a competitor to tell them that you are raising prices is illegal if they raise prices.
If there's even a single incident of two companies being advised to raise prices on products which compete with each other, it's about as close as it comes to an open and shut price fixing case. And this post makes it easier to prove because it suggests that companies know he's giving the same advice to their competitors. Whether that's said explicitly or not won't matter.
The idea that any form of price optimization among firms violates antitrust laws would put basically all management and marketing consulting at antitrust risk. This doesn’t sound plausible.
You will find that management consulting firms (and the companies that hire them) have fairly clear rules about how they approach and talk about pricing and competition to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Most notably, they would never ever: 1. Indicate that their advice always is to raise prices 2. They would never share the pricing advice they gave to a competitor.
I don't know if what Patrick does is problematic. It wouldn't surprise me if he was trying to be glib and his actual advice is more nuanced.
If one interprets it literally: Someone who receives advice from him to raise prices can look down Stripe's customer list and find its competition and feel confident that the competition will receive the same advice.
Again, I don't know what he does. All I know is that what he says if read by the right person would be sufficient to trigger their curiosity to ask for records of his correspondence and find out.
One of my friends worked at Stripe but left because she said that management is made up of young OGs that don't know how to manage but they've been at Stripe for so long they are rich and think they know what they're doing. It's hard to get real work done because of this from what I've heard.
To be fair, this can apply to a lot of young companies.
Fundamentally, the job to work in a startup is different from the job to work at a large company. The people that grew a company when it was small might not be the best people to grow a company when it becomes bigger.
I saw this at a previous company where the OGs were convinced they were untouchable because they created the entire technical solution with a handful of engineers. To their credit, it was an amazing accomplishment. Unfortunately, as the company grew, their solution ran into scalability and reliability concerns that couldn't be easily fixed. In every architecture meeting, there was always the disagreements between team "ten years ago, this product would have already been shipped with half the engineers" and team "but that product wouldn't work with the scale we need - it is an exponentially harder problem now"
Although sometimes they are right as well. It's often layers of people with many different lines between them slowing down the overal pace of development.
I don't buy the argument that ensuring scalability equals long processes. But I do believe that when the product grows in terms features, components etc, the pace also decreases. Even in the perfect multilithic software solution.
I've heard several times about the Stripe "Library" and "written culture", both in previous patio11 posts [1] and elsewhere. I understand part of that comes from the top and screening for writers. But I'm also curious about the basic mechanics of the library; wordpress? big ol' mediawiki? git repo of markdown docs? custom software?
How has the library process (if any) itself changed over time?
I've worked at non-startup BigCo/healthcare with formalized procedural docs, (technical) writers, change management, etc., and often they were minimal, boring, impersonal, frequently outdated -- and rarely read. I'm imagining (for better or worse) this is something a little more like a shared internal blog archive?
I may be mistaken here, but I think Patrick may be referring to the library of Stripe Press published books, which are available internally (and externally, if purchased)?
"Stripe is a celebration of the written word which happens to be incorporated in the state of Delaware. We produce prodigious amounts of it internally, most of it widely visible within the company." - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/
I am also very curious about this. I've been keeping track of knowledge mgmt tooling (esp. plain text) and approaches (e.g. ADR) for a couple years. Grand Unified Theory forthcoming :)
I work at Stripe. From a quick browse through my inbox and Chrome tabs, I see multi-thousand word documents in: Google Docs, Dropbox, markdown in Git, internal wiki, _other_ internal wiki, email to mailing lists, custom software, and internal wiki pages generated from markdown in Git.
All of these tools have weird superpowers and limitations that prevent them from becoming a unified catalog. Google Docs can do live concurrent editing between 40 people but can't relax width limits (e.g. for code listings), and ${WIKI_SOFTWARE} can embed every document format in the world but can't require certain pages to be changed via code review.
There's another internal meta-tool that acts like a search engine across the various vendor platforms, so I can search for [network egress policy] and be assured of somewhat reasonable results.
> My sleep schedule has ranged from atypical to disastrous, but that has been true for almost all of my adult life.
This is been my life as well, with the exception of a few years when I was doing over an hour of cardio per day (first on a swim team and later as a hobbyist distance runner).
It's so hard to shut down after just a 24 hour cycle but not doing so always catches up with you.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadBasically the exact work of Stripe Atlas
"Sometimes this involves scalable writing such as the Stripe Atlas guides. Sometimes I work with a single founder to get their B round accomplished."
I like the personal notes included a ton, e.g. mentioning that he has struggled with depression personally, which I wouldn't have guessed, even if naively so. Being open and helpful with those topics helps a lot of people out in a serious way. Also love quotes like "I cannot say this enough: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview".
Just reading this post makes it tempting for me to apply at Stripe (They apparently have 530 roles open, wow! https://stripe.com/jobs/search), especially given all the other positive comments I've seen about the company.
Exactly, which is why some of this should be taken with a grain of salt.
By all accounts, Stripe really is a good place to work and their success speaks for itself. Yet, it's important to remember that this article is at least one part advertisement. I'm not suggesting anyone dismiss the contents, but keep the context in mind. The article goes to great lengths to speak about the positives of working at Stripe, but the section about terrible work/life balance is written vaguely enough for the reader to dismiss it as a personal quirk, for example.
However, it's important to keep in mind that patio11's popularity among developer communities is one of the reasons they hired him in the first place. He's paid to be a spokesperson for the company, among other things. He doesn't even try to hide that fact in the article:
> When I was hired, there was a fiction for my business cards but the job rounded to “Do anything required to make Stripe Atlas successful.” ... For about a year I was formally in the Marketing department
> Incidentally, invoking such questions ritualistically is a fairly accurate description of the job of a YC partner. If you start asking questions like "what's preventing you from launching today?" the answer, to the founders' own surprise, quite often turns out to be nothing.
"My view on Stripe’s business prior to joining was “Stripe is basically a B2B SaaS company with extremely reliable capture of upside when users succeed.” I believe that substantially underappreciates the actual business. Large portions of Stripe’s business add another loop on top of the B2B SaaS loop, where Stripe is effectively indexing on its ability to grow the count and success of customers who are themselves structurally equivalent to B2B SaaS companies."
The "reliable capture of upside when users succeed" seems to be referring to the fees charged by Stripe. More revenue for the user means more revenue for Stripe as well. I don't know what the "effectively indexing" sentence refers to. Is there a network effect at play here, where being on Stripe encourages a user's customers and suppliers to also be on Stripe? Or is there a product offering that somehow creates that effect?
And then there's another loop mentioned later, which is presumably a product in development, and not something anyone involved with can comment on. (But I would love to hear about it if you could.)
Sigma is sold separately but built with everyones data too
I believe what he’s getting at here is close to the following: Stripe isn’t just providing payment (Reliable capture on success, aka Stripe gets money on revenue generation), but is also trying to provide tools to make the B2B model easier to deploy, based on their experience with these business models. Stripe Atlas or Sigma are probably a good example of those types of services - they’re trying to use their payments play to also push for selling you Business Intelligence or Legal.
Indexing is just taking knowledge and deploying it to make something faster, like a database index (I know I want to join on this column, so I index it).
I now see two potential explanations. The first is Atlas, where Stripe enables the ecosystem of B2B SaaS companies to expand rapidly. The other, mentioned in a sibling to your comment, is marketplaces (Connect), where Stripe collects revenue from a number of operating payment networks. In both cases, Stripe is a B2B SaaS which serves other SaaS companies, which allows growth in a way that being a B2B SaaS that serves traditional business doesn't.
Even in my most recent experience I wrote a cover letter, reached out to multiple Stripe recruiters. Most of them either ignored me, or said that they were not working on that role and said my status is still "pending".
I imagine that Stripe's recruiting team is overwhelmed but it was unfortunate that they weren't able to get back to me. I ended up accepting an engineering manager position over payments at another company.
(1) The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people. We'll do the best we can to identify promising people but a lot of people will get something somewhat functionally equivalent to a form rejection. You could argue that this is merely a prioritization decision -- we could keep hiring recruiters until everyone could be individually assessed -- but doing so would require a recruiting team of comparable magnitude to the rest of the Stripe organization and so the current state is an unfortunate compromise given the current constraints and given the decision to have an open application form (which is, I think, on net better for everyone).
(2) Cases where people at Stripe mishandled the process. I know for a fact that some of the anecdotes shared in the thread are from many years ago, and I know that our process has improved since then (we have empirical data to this effect), but we're also acutely aware that we continue to make mistakes -- recruiting is a high-stakes and complex process with a lot of fallible moving parts. For whatever it's worth, we issue CSAT surveys to every candidate who interviews (about 6,000 onsite interviews in 2019), and track the results both at the aggregate Stripe level and at the individual recruiter level. And I get why some people here sound so annoyed -- what might be "another entry in a database" to a recruiter or hiring manager is "the future of my career" to someone on the other side. While it's always hard to know what to make of a set of anecdotes, and while our referral rate among Stripe employees is very high today, I'm nonetheless bothered by the number of cases shared here, and we're going to be digging in. (Specific anecdotes with more concrete dates or data are welcome at patrick@stripe.com.)
It is not inevitable and there are company that do recruiting better and other worse. For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear. That is a not a sub-optimal interview experience, like being in a coma is not a sub-optimal life experience.
I understand that working with recruiters is hard (who ever said: I know a recruiter who is a genius? Or even the lesser: I know that recruiter, they are brilliant), but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.
Absolutely. That is category 2!
Sorry, but it's not. I'm not giving Stripe a pass here per se, but the priority of an org is to make money so that they can offer positions.
Scaling recruiting is hard. Just like you might want an org who see thousands and thousands of applications every day to act more benevolently, the opposite also holds true.
"Scaling recruiting is hard". Sure, plenty of things are hard when scaling, but calling back candidates after multiple rounds of interviews (just to highlight one common complaint) is not. That is a cultural problem.
Generally speaking, the same sort of superlatives used for high IQ aren't used to describe high EQ, but we probably should.
I have interacted with a few recruiters (not at Stripe, I've never applied there) who were off-the-charts in their ability to make people feel comfortable and at ease, occasionally even in the face of truly horrendous processes and systems failures.
Also, it's an interesting signal when you get ghosted by the hiring manager (bosses boss of the team lead I would have been reporting to) and the recruiter re-initiates communication to apologize and get things back on track.
I still never got that job, but that was basically because "Remote OK" really meant "Remote OK in theory because we like the idea of paying a lower salary, but in practice it's only 'OK' for overqualified candidates that we can't convince to relocate, or maybe a relative of ours", and definitely not the recruiter's fault (it turns out that the hiring manager wasn't a good fit for the organization. Go figure.).
I did get some really good chocolate chip cookies as a consolation prize, though.
For example, the most common behavior with these recruiting companies (and I am fully employed and paid very well) is that they take 30 minutes of my time with the usual general questions, then they make me chat with some sort of hiring manager of the target company, then they send an email "I will let you know in a few days", and they never write back. I send an email saying "so?" and I never get an answer. Then, I find out they moved into real estate. Ten, 15 times over a few years (why I continued answering? The hiring companies were quite interesting, one in Vegas, some in the East Coast where I don't have much of a network, they could, with emphasis on the conditional tense, be useful).
We can say that they are just a little piece of a bad process, or that it is the hiring manager/company fault, or "yes, but you did not have to deal with certain rude candidates" (and I have seen plenty of those rude candidates, there I certainly offer my solidarity). And if we go on with the circumnavigation of people, we find a justification for any sort of less-than-good behavior. If telling lies is part and parcel of one's job, they (recruiters/hiring managers/C-level) are still liars, they don't get a pass in my book.
It sounds like you found a decent recruiter and it is quite telling that a recruiter re-initiating a conversation and apologizing, things I happen to do also in my job, is now an "off-the-charts" EQ genius. That's the 101 for anyone with a modicum of professionalism. I am sure there are great recruiters around like there are plenty of needles in haystacks.
Ah, sorry about that, I didn't mean to conflate the two quite so directly. I also didn't make it clear that I was ghosted by the hiring manager after the recruiter handed me off to them. The recruiter wasn't supposed to even be involved from that point forward, but they followed up anyway. However, you can ignore the anecdote as an unnecessary distraction if you like.
Anyway, sure, recruiters get a bad rap, in the same way as used-car salespeople do. I wasn't really arguing that the reputation the profession has is entirely undeserved. I was just saying that good and even great recruiters do actually exist. For many of the working-environment reasons you've mentioned, they often don't stay in the role of recruiting ICs, or even for relatively senior roles. They have better opportunities in recruiting-adjacent fields like executive search services, life-coaching, and so on.
I interviewed in 2019 and never got a CSAT. The recruiter (and rest of the team) completely ghosted me after telling me an offer was coming. No further communication, and certainly no CSAT.
It seems that could be a huge hole and your entire CSAT program is subject to confirmation bias if you are not even sending them to the people who are most likely to respond with a negative experience. I'm not sure I would trust this "empirical data" you have.
They don't have (and you should not expect them) to give a feedback to anyone who apply (as it is the case of the parent comment)
It's not, in fact, what every business owner thinks.
Have you ever seen a businessperson make a public statement on behalf of a company that espoused or accepted negative/neutral sentiment?
I dunno why people even bother responding or reacting internally to these statements. There's not a human being behind them -- there's a corporate entity who has to answer to stakeholders with a spotlight being shined on them.
It's purely politics and statesmanship, the human being is long gone, or only shows up in private settings after everyone's had several drinks.
Except Elon Musk. That's a man you can, probably, take at his word.
This is also why people fight so hard to get prestigious companies and universities on their resume.
Ironically, this is almost the exact same attitude I got in my poor experience interviewing with Stripe. Interviewers were constantly late to our calls and mixed up who would be interviewing me more than once. Despite that, I still was told I was going to receive an offer... only to be ghosted for weeks. Once the recruiter finally reached back out, they said the position had been cancelled but they would find me another position. Spoiler: I never heard back from them, and they ignored all of my further communications.
Throughout all of this, I was apologized to several times (credit is due there, I guess) and each time the excuse was "ha ha sorry things are such a mess, that's just how things are when you work at a start up!" First of all, "haha we're a startup" is not a valid excuse for being late to meetings and ignoring communication.
Second: you're a company worth tens of billions of dollars, have thousands of employees in offices around the globe, and were founded a decade ago. You are not a startup. You are not a "small team". Stop using it as an excuse.
Pretending to act like a startup has become a cover for being sloppy at big companies. People want to pick and choose what it means to work like a startup, and usually they choose the aspects that give them flimsy excuses for bad behavior.
In reality, my experience with actual small startups has been that people are better at arriving to meetings on time and following through with commitments because small teams mean everyone knows each other. If you don't show up to the meeting, we can see you across the small office and hold you accountable.
It's the big companies where accountability starts to disintegrate. People know they can get away with dropping balls all over the place as long as they get their OKRs finished for quarterly review. Things start to slip through the cracks because that person you're dealing with is just another e-mail address, not your close coworker who sits on the other side of the room.
When you do that kind of blog posts, you try to improve the image of the company externally so that more people want to work there. It could help with more people applying but also increase the acceptance rate of the offers.
When you have a lot of people applying then you just cherry pick the best ones
[0] https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-story-from-s...
- You have a referral
- You went to MIT, Stanford, Caltech, CMU, Cal
- You're coming from FAANG or similar
The frontdoor is a waste of time.
Even with the above odds are against you, but at least you have someone to ask about progress/move things along for you.
I live in a place with a fairly small population, and I got offers at 3/3 programming jobs I've applied for since my first in 2017.
I should have said 'most bay area software companies' and even that could probably be qualified by 'competitive' or 'famous'.
Two reasons for that are:
1) I went to a state school (NC State)
2) The FANG in question was Amazon, which I don't think they "count". I have friends that applied when they decided to leave Amazon and they didn't get interviews either.
If your FAANG was Amazon I'm guessing you're in the same boat.
The gist is that I had a friend apply, go through a few interviews, and then just get completely ghosted. After several emails and attempts to reach out, the hiring manager replied to his email with a two word reply when my friend asked about his application status. That reply was "no thanks".
Well designed astroturfing, nonetheless.
Edit: Astroturfing is the wrong word, perhaps. What I mean to say is vocalized better in the replies. These all should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. A rock of salt?
I think it would be much better said that we should take with a grain of salt anyone's assessment of their current job.
And of course, to the point you raise, we must always take that with a grain of salt. Nobody is going to come to the table with complete honesty about the problems at a company with their name right next to it.
Within reason, at least.
It's entirely possible both are true, since they're mostly unrelated, so I don't understand the accusation of astroturfing.
It's a terrible read, all sugar and good-buddy fluff. One could easily question the motivation for such cheese.
The people handling the recruiting functions are usually not the people you would be working with (unless you go into HR), and generally if HR starts ghosting you during the recruiting process it's because they're putting their efforts into the candidate they are trying to hire.
EDIT: Conversely, the opposite is also true. I used to work for a firm that was an absolute nightmare to work for, but the HR process was amazing.
Afaik he originally became well known for his helpful posts and advice on Joel Spolsky's business of software forums before HN even existed. That's where I first came across him, useful info about SEO.
This is a long way of saying I thought he'd been hired as a developer advocate for their startup thing, Stripe Atlas, rather than a recruitment advisor.
Edit: It's on his blog that he was hired for Stripe Atlas https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-wo...
I'm well aware of who he is and what he's famous for though.
I've worked in both. When the company with a good environment closes we were all let go. They mishandled my last paycheck so I'm still waiting. No way to get references. Had to contact government to get seperation papers. The bad environment place that stressed you out and then let your department go for something out of your control. The firing process felt good. They provided career support offered a reasonable settlement package. Easy to use as a reference as they provided a contact #
I'm definitely in agreement that a functioning HR/payroll department is a prerequisite for a good experience though. I had an employer that kept paying me after I left company, and they only stopped because I told them that this was the case. Obviously, afterwards, they sent me a letter saying they had "discovered" an overpayment, and I should send them back the money to exact cent, with no allowance for the cheque/mailing costs...
1. You are researching a company.
2. You own or work in hr at a company or have been told to post a review by management.
3. You are angry/unhappy at your current role or that you were let go. You go on to warn others / get even.
Rare is the person who is working a company and is happy who decides to visit glassdoor and tell everyone how happy they are. Have you done this? Know anyone who would follow this chain of events?
I can't understand why a company wouldn't do that, even if they were overwhelmed with the challenge of hiring in general. The win is potentially exponential, if you get good people who come to work with people they already know how to work with.
This was for a pretty senior position.
Why not just tell the candidate that they aren't getting an offer? Why make up elaborate stories about headcount? Why say you're going to follow up? It's clearly not a bandwidth issue since they took the time to respond anyway.
Even something like "We've filled all positions. Your application was strong, but not strong enough. It's unlikely we'll reach back out."
That's 1000x better than getting ghosted after being told they WOULD reach back out. Complete bullshit on their part and a total lack of integrity. There's really no excuse for it.
> A week later, instead of the offer, they just said they ran out of headcount. Never heard back from them again (even though they said they'll reach out when they get headcount back).
Saying you'll get back to a candidate, especially when that candidate has already been told to expect an offer, and then ghosting is not polite. Any framing of this as acceptable behavior, be it polite or impolite, is unacceptable. You can say "oh that's just the way it is" and there's some truth to that, but that doesn't mean it isn't pure fucking bullshit and deserving of condemnation.
I had terrible interview experiences (rudeness, ghosting, and making zero sense) with Lyft, Airbnb, Twitter, but if they make the right offer, I might say yes (although I have quite a strong memory).
They came back to him to tell him his application was rejected. That was obviously the end of it.
I don't understand the anger here.
They lied, full stop, don't apologize for how "polite" it is (and it's not polite, it's disrespectful).
It's like if your doctor tried to be polite to you by not mentioning some serious disease because he was afraid it would make you feel bad. It might indeed make the candidate feel bad to hear about their (perceived) deficiencies - but if they do hear about it then they can do something about it!
Telling the candidate that you'll reach back out, and then not doing that, is complete bullshit.
They said “ we don’t want you in our band “
It was oddly personal and upsetting. Lol
How tone deaf is hr sometimes
Is there literally not a single HR Portal that tracks status? That flags 'pending'? Notifications for '2 weeks no reply'?
The HR person can't grab the hiring manager and hand-hold the response?
An automated response would be just fine.
And just cordial as a minimum you know 'Thanks so much for turning out, but we can't move forward at this time'.
As a hiring manager, absolutely all portals/HR management software I have used up to this moment have this feature. Most of them highlight the application and put them in a visible 'No progress for X time' category; some even send separate e-mails for each long overdue candidate.
The truth is that - at least in the orgs I've been part of - the trend for HR is to be apathetic to the needs of the team they're hiring for and tone deaf in communication. Recruitment has been the least favourite bit of their job.
Over the years I have received Linkedin messages from a number of candidates whom I have referred to other teams/department after they interviewed for a position in mine. HR should've followed up with them; they didn't.
OTOH they were quite efficient with their response. It was a mutual "no" and they spared me the trouble by getting to me, with useful feedback, within 48 hours.
There is a lot of BS around the hiring process these days, but some parts of it are still in HR's control: namely the "before" and "after" of the actual interview day(s).
If that part is bad, it indicates rot in HR, which will be a problem every single time you interact with them.
I have nothing against Stripe, just commenting on the general case.
However I realise it was just a bad person in a big company so I did not let it reflect badly on my use of the product.
This is generally how our industry works, though, which is that it's not worth it to go through loop for a job unless you were referred by someone on the inside.
I was job hunting earlier this year due to my last company (a fintech start up) shutting down and Stripe was the only company that just handed me an immediate "No" without even a recruiter call. I know one other engineer who is more mid level and she said she had applied and never even got a response.
I harbor no ill will toward them, but I'm really curious what their hiring criteria is and why it seems so different that most of the other major companies out there.
Imagine you have enough high-quality candidates such that you could have every single employee interviewing candidates all day every day, doing no other work. What do you do?
In the real world, most engineers top out at one or two phone screens a week, and/or one or two on-site interviews a week. Sometimes more. Each is 45 minutes at least, usually an hour. Each involves writing deliberate, thoughtful feedback and a professional assessment. Candidates that do well lead to decision meetings that take more time for all the interviewers to discuss -- candidates that do poorly can circuit-break.
Then there is scheduling! Is there physical space available for the candidate to interview? Can we get all the necessary interviewers? What if one or more of them can't make it (sick, etc.)? What if the candidate needs to reschedule? Time zones? Holidays?
Imagine Stripe has 100 recruiters (this is at least accurate within an order of magnitude). What does the back-of-the-napkin math look like for their maximum interviewing bandwidth?
Hiring is a really hard problem, even for well-equipped organizations. Even the best in the world do it badly sometimes. And the anecdote cases tend to shout the loudest. Maybe you had a typo on your resume. Maybe other candidates looked better. Maybe there is a nasty rumor about you. Maybe the recruiter was having a bad day. Or maybe you were just unlucky and arbitrarily cut.
I tried to be honest about my frustrations, too, but there's a possibility my salaryman indirectness made them not leap off the page.
I agree with the other commenter regarding the Stripe application process. I've applied 2-3 times starting in 2015 and as recently as early 2020 and have never heard back, it's been the only company that never gets back to me!
Everything worked out, since I've landed some great positions at promising startups in the meantime, but I would have loved to experience the growth from ~500 to ~3000 employees like Patrick has.
Small improvement in this paragraph:
> “If you sell to doctors you prefer futures in which more money goes to doctors. Those are much better futures for you than futures with less money going to...
Since the article was just talking about call options, my first thought went to futures contracts instead of possible timelines. I think using "timelines" instead of futures would make this a bit more readable.
I know I'm less likely to interview somewhere if my friends tell me they got ghosted.
Is this the newest jargon from the California swindler class?
You can use HN search to pull up a few thousand other instances.
it seems predatory and abusive to employees to stay private this long
This is immensely frustrating to me, because thinking lucidly about equity is incredibly important for career planning for engineers who are startup-adjacent, work at AppAmaGooBookSoft, or who are in markets where those firms' offers set market terms. I think this sets us up for a continuance of the class system, where people who talked about this subject around the dinner table or have a frat brother who was in Google in 2004 know the score, and people who grew up in Chicago and didn't know what Google was in 2003 do not, even when they're evaluating career options which are heavily dependent on correctly valuing equity.
I did not always think lucidly about equity, and overly trusted the representations of folks on Internet watering holes who said that equity was likely to be nearly worthless. I would like to think I've learned a bit over the years.
I apologize for being indirect here; feel free to ask me about equity in some place where it will not be reasonably read as a comment on a firm I owe various duties to. (Offer broadly open to HNers.)
While estimating probability distributions is probably beyond what one can do without detailed inside knowledge (and even then), it's useful to think of a number of stories, eg: target_co will ipo in 3 years at 2x last raised value, target_co will ipo in 5 year at last raise, target_co will be acquired at 0.1x last raise in 8 years (what is the overhang?); let's say all at equal probabilities. For discount rate you can think of alternative places where you could work (eg. alternative_public_co will grow at -10, +20, +30% yoy with equal probability) + time value of not being able to liquidate (let's say another 10%).
This will give you some range of numbers to consider.
Perhaps there is an argument that by being so focused on the cash part of an offer I probably left equity on the table, if the IPO lottery ticket came in perhaps I would find myself regretting that.
But the CEO's "progress studies" thing repels me because it reeks of the Kochs' efforts to implant conservatism into education. I don't want to enable that. It sucks.
BTW, I am one of the people who had their YC app reviewed by patio11 and it was a great experience. It's amazing how much time he's able to dedicate to individual Stripe Atlas participants -- thanks!
Wikipedia defines conservatism as "a political and social philosophy promoting traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization".
Patrick Collison's article [1] to me seems to be saying "we should be a lot more systematic and scientific in figuring out the drivers of societal progress, and aggressively invest in those things." That seems in direct opposition to conservatism, since it advocates a dramatic overhaul of ineffective institutions.
Collison's definition of progress does seem narrowly focused on measurable economic metrics. Is that the source of your grievance? I think that developments like women's suffrage and racial desegration should be included in discussions of "progress studies", whether or not they led to improvements in measurable metrics. Collison neglects to include examples of this type in his article, but it's not clear to me that he considers them unworthy of study.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-...
If you had that amount of money (and that reputation), you'd probably try to improve the world _according to your vision of improvement_ too.
> A portion of my job is helping folks communicate that we're serious, reliable infrastructure for the largest participants in the global economy while also keenly appreciating that the user might be on a small team trying to sell bingo cards or politically-themed breakfast cereal.
AWS and Cloudflare are two other examples of XaaS companies that benefit from this mode of operation. They're both workable for a one-person team as much as they're for global enterprises.
I don't have any data here, but I'm thinking EHR, ERP, office building rent ("a SaaS company plus some glass and concrete") etc. If the service provided is annually worth 100k USD, theres probably human-human interaction which facilitates the exchange of legal documents and money. Think Oracle, SAP, ADP, ServiceNow, Workday etc.
Patrick didn't strike me as someone interested in working at a "regular" job.
> AppAmaGooBookSoft have individual products with more engineers than our company has people total.
Which products would have more than 3000 engineers?
I picked up on a few points others here have mentioned already, but the most striking thing for me, particularly from the first half of the piece, is the huge emphasis on growth, recruitment and looking to do new things in the internal culture at Stripe.
Of course, this is reasonable and understandable for a business in Stripe’s position. However, the corollary seems to be a lack of focus on the core service that got many of our businesses using Stripe in the first place. In a nutshell, we use a payment processor like Stripe because we want to easily and reliably collect payments from our customers, so we can get on with what our business actually does.
It would be interesting to know how much is going on at Stripe, presumably involving people other than patio11, in that area. I have a business that was an early adopter back when Stripe launched in the UK, but our perception is that the challenges we face with online payments today aren’t necessarily the areas that recent developments at Stripe are addressing.
One of the many ideas that jumped out at me:
> A huge portion of the value creation of Silicon Valley is through directly intervening on the ambition of impressionable people.
This seems especially applicable for software-only or software-heavy businesses that scale very efficiently. Increasing ambition by a little can result in large increase in impact on the other end.
Another idea that caught my attention:
> Silicon Valley was a place. It has become a metonymy for a community of practice. You can find outposts of Silicon Valley in Tokyo cafes, in WeWorks in Bangalore, and on the coast of Cape Town.
If we can inspire ambition all around the world that bodes well for our future.
This is a great example of how one can do something well-meaning at small scale (Advise tiny, tiny businesses that they would be better served having more confidence in their value) that can turn into something illegal at scale (Advise price leaders that they can safely lead by less and so-on).
A stripe customer is free to tell Stripe "Your fees are too high, and I'd prefer switching processors than raising prices".
I could be wrong. Is there an example of an illegal cartel, trying to persuade customers from whom it makes transaction fees, to raise prices? Surely this isn't a new thing under the sun.
It's the raising of prices in the absence of market forces that gives room for the payment processor to increase fees. Theoretically all payment processors benefit from advocating that their clients raise prices. If some companies raise their prices, no issue, but the coordinated effort to do it is where you "smell a rat".
It's then up to the litigating party to try to find collusion between companies to do this. This is like how the anti-competitive hiring practices of Google/Apple/Facebook/etc were surfaced. They all had a set of practices that stood out as anomalous and during the subsequent investigation it was found that they colluded with each other to set the market (rate for hiring talent).
It's probably not the case here...and also patio11 has little risk saying so while living in Japan where industries are highly vertically-integrated/monopolistic.
The issue is that coordinating pricing is illegal in any form. In any industry, each company could make more money if they knew their competitors would raise prices. Even calling a competitor to tell them that you are raising prices is illegal if they raise prices.
If there's even a single incident of two companies being advised to raise prices on products which compete with each other, it's about as close as it comes to an open and shut price fixing case. And this post makes it easier to prove because it suggests that companies know he's giving the same advice to their competitors. Whether that's said explicitly or not won't matter.
I don't know if what Patrick does is problematic. It wouldn't surprise me if he was trying to be glib and his actual advice is more nuanced.
If one interprets it literally: Someone who receives advice from him to raise prices can look down Stripe's customer list and find its competition and feel confident that the competition will receive the same advice.
Again, I don't know what he does. All I know is that what he says if read by the right person would be sufficient to trigger their curiosity to ask for records of his correspondence and find out.
Fundamentally, the job to work in a startup is different from the job to work at a large company. The people that grew a company when it was small might not be the best people to grow a company when it becomes bigger.
I saw this at a previous company where the OGs were convinced they were untouchable because they created the entire technical solution with a handful of engineers. To their credit, it was an amazing accomplishment. Unfortunately, as the company grew, their solution ran into scalability and reliability concerns that couldn't be easily fixed. In every architecture meeting, there was always the disagreements between team "ten years ago, this product would have already been shipped with half the engineers" and team "but that product wouldn't work with the scale we need - it is an exponentially harder problem now"
How can someone be "OG" (Original Gangster, i.e. really old school) in a very well-funded company founded ten years ago?
Am I misunderstanding something?
How has the library process (if any) itself changed over time?
I've worked at non-startup BigCo/healthcare with formalized procedural docs, (technical) writers, change management, etc., and often they were minimal, boring, impersonal, frequently outdated -- and rarely read. I'm imagining (for better or worse) this is something a little more like a shared internal blog archive?
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/
https://press.stripe.com/
"Stripe is a celebration of the written word which happens to be incorporated in the state of Delaware. We produce prodigious amounts of it internally, most of it widely visible within the company." - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/
All of these tools have weird superpowers and limitations that prevent them from becoming a unified catalog. Google Docs can do live concurrent editing between 40 people but can't relax width limits (e.g. for code listings), and ${WIKI_SOFTWARE} can embed every document format in the world but can't require certain pages to be changed via code review.
There's another internal meta-tool that acts like a search engine across the various vendor platforms, so I can search for [network egress policy] and be assured of somewhat reasonable results.
This is been my life as well, with the exception of a few years when I was doing over an hour of cardio per day (first on a swim team and later as a hobbyist distance runner).
It's so hard to shut down after just a 24 hour cycle but not doing so always catches up with you.