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Some feedback Preface: offline, I've heard good things about working at Stripe. So the following is intended as constructive. The 'values' read more like a de

Some feedback Preface: offline, I've heard good things about working at Stripe. So the following is intended as constructive. The 'values' read more like a description of what the owners of any high-performance company would want out of their employees, transactionally-speaking. It reads much less like Stripe has a strong cultural identity. Reading this, it sort of feels like you are asking for a lot of my commitment to the Stripe mission without giving me any reason to buy into it. I'm not sure there is anything idiosyncratic about this list. It doesn't really convey to me what it's really like to "be a Stripe" as opposed to "being a Googler". Oh, and this phrase, "being a Stripe", it is the very worst kind of SV affectation. Maybe it works for people who are already at Stripe and proud to be there, but from the outside in, honestly it sends me cringing into the next universe. I don't think you have to be an enormous cynic to have that reaction to it. Overall this seems to fail the test it sets itself: it doesn't convince me that the top team at Stripe are striving to building the best imaginable place to work, which surely is the best part about building your own company.

sosodaft 9y ago
Things like "The bad news: joining Stripe is still a risky proposition." also make me cringe... don't tell me that anyone reading that sentence doesn't realize it's meant to entice them. Maybe it's not a fair comparison, but contrast with the Valve new employee handbook, which makes it clear what it's actually like to work there and how their culture impacts the workplace.
- jrgifford 9y ago
  Maybe I'm weird, but that was a refreshing part. Meant that they're being honest. It's not all always a rocket ship. Sometimes it's a meteor.
  - andrewingram 9y ago
    I'm not convinced, it's assuming a particular interpretation of risk. For people with great employment prospects, a company that still has a reasonable chance of failure is less risky than a safer company where they don't get to develop their skillset. For me, a risky job is one that doesn't make good strides towards lowering the impact that ageism is going to have on my career in a decade or so.
harryh 9y ago
A thing I like to do with values is invert them. If you don't still get something good then you're really just saying something bland and generic that any old company probably aspires to. Take Facebook's "Move fast and break things." The inverse would be something like "Take your time and do it right." Both of those values are great! They both have good and bad points and which one a company aspires to really tells you something about how they balance competing goals. This method doesn't work 100% of the time, but it's pretty good.
- logicallee 9y ago
  It sounds like you think that values should be a description of which of two reasonable choices a company wants its employees to choose... For example, a company's value as stated might be "Education and experience don't matter and the most junior employee can argue with architectural choices as long as they are willing to argue cogently and with evidence." Then if you "invert" it you get "Education and experience matter; give weight to other people's expertise, education and experience in a field." So both of them are "still something good", I guess. But a startup might choose the former. If I've understood your suggestion correctly, then the problem with your suggestion is that some cultural values are about things that tech startups get wrong, and the inversion is not any good at all. How do you invert something like "don't bully other employees or pick on them due to their belonging to some protected class - to overcome subconscious biases, if you do not belong to that class then stop for a moment and consciously treat them the same as if they belonged to the same class as yourself"? What is the "inversion" of this obvious cultural choice which is obviously good? Do you think that it is "bland and generic" just because it is obvious that it is right and its inversion is wrong? I don't think it's obvious at all, and I think a lot of companies get these cultural values completely wrong, and, for example, do foster an atmosphere of harassment. I want to get this comment away from the political so I'll make another, purely technical example: if a rule is, "make sure something actually builds before you check it in" then the inversion is "don't worry about making sure it builds before you check it in"? That's not "still something good" as you've stated, so...does it make the specific technical suggestion I listed "bland and generic"? So I'm not sure how helpful your rule is.
  - 9y ago
johan_larson 9y ago
Hands up everyone who has ever found a company values statement useful for anything.

sosodaft 9y ago

Things like "The bad news: joining Stripe is still a risky proposition." also make me cringe... don't tell me that anyone reading that sentence doesn't realize it's meant to entice them. Maybe it's not a fair comparison, but contrast with the Valve new employee handbook, which makes it clear what it's actually like to work there and how their culture impacts the workplace.

jrgifford 9y ago
Maybe I'm weird, but that was a refreshing part. Meant that they're being honest. It's not all always a rocket ship. Sometimes it's a meteor.
- andrewingram 9y ago
  I'm not convinced, it's assuming a particular interpretation of risk. For people with great employment prospects, a company that still has a reasonable chance of failure is less risky than a safer company where they don't get to develop their skillset. For me, a risky job is one that doesn't make good strides towards lowering the impact that ageism is going to have on my career in a decade or so.

harryh 9y ago

A thing I like to do with values is invert them. If you don't still get something good then you're really just saying something bland and generic that any old company probably aspires to. Take Facebook's "Move fast and break things." The inverse would be something like "Take your time and do it right." Both of those values are great! They both have good and bad points and which one a company aspires to really tells you something about how they balance competing goals. This method doesn't work 100% of the time, but it's pretty good.

logicallee 9y ago
It sounds like you think that values should be a description of which of two reasonable choices a company wants its employees to choose... For example, a company's value as stated might be "Education and experience don't matter and the most junior employee can argue with architectural choices as long as they are willing to argue cogently and with evidence." Then if you "invert" it you get "Education and experience matter; give weight to other people's expertise, education and experience in a field." So both of them are "still something good", I guess. But a startup might choose the former. If I've understood your suggestion correctly, then the problem with your suggestion is that some cultural values are about things that tech startups get wrong, and the inversion is not any good at all. How do you invert something like "don't bully other employees or pick on them due to their belonging to some protected class - to overcome subconscious biases, if you do not belong to that class then stop for a moment and consciously treat them the same as if they belonged to the same class as yourself"? What is the "inversion" of this obvious cultural choice which is obviously good? Do you think that it is "bland and generic" just because it is obvious that it is right and its inversion is wrong? I don't think it's obvious at all, and I think a lot of companies get these cultural values completely wrong, and, for example, do foster an atmosphere of harassment. I want to get this comment away from the political so I'll make another, purely technical example: if a rule is, "make sure something actually builds before you check it in" then the inversion is "don't worry about making sure it builds before you check it in"? That's not "still something good" as you've stated, so...does it make the specific technical suggestion I listed "bland and generic"? So I'm not sure how helpful your rule is.
- 9y ago

johan_larson 9y ago

Hands up everyone who has ever found a company values statement useful for anything.