17 ms·

Guide to scaling engineering organizations

664 points by joeyespo 8y ago

stevoski 8y ago
Judging by the article, you need to go through a _lot_ of interviews before Stripe makes you an offer. I wonder if they miss out on whole groups of job candidates because those candidates have good job prospects that don't involve this gruelling slog. Of course, Stripe does seem to have an excellent team.
- ppeetteerr 8y ago
  I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.
  - avip 8y ago
    That's the logical tradeoff for any company. Bad hires create an incredible amount of damage that can sink a whole team. It is x10 better to have no hire than a bad one.
    - ppeetteerr 8y ago
      I've worked in companies that struggle to hire any candidate, let alone top candidates. Stripe is amongst the top employers. The vast majority of smaller shops (banks, b2b software companies, agencies) just need to staff up and would rather hire and fire than miss out on a good candidate.
      - rizzom5000 8y ago
        Maybe, but hire and fire is also a great way to show the team that you don't know what you're doing as a hiring manager; not to mention how firing a team member, who may be incompetent but still well-liked, affects morale. Then, there is the problem where you fail to fire when you should. To me, this is just not a good way to build an effective team.
        ppeetteerr 8y ago
        No one is saying you should hire and fire a ton of people, only that rejecting good candidates for most companies is not possible given how difficult it is to find them. Talk to any recruiter and they will tell you that finding good (not great, just good) candidates is often a struggle.
        inimino 8y ago
        > hire and fire is also a great way to show the team that you don't know what you're doing It's an expensive (painful) signal that you actually do know what you need to do and are capable of it.
    - devonkim 8y ago
      I wouldn’t say ANY company necessarily. A lot of companies even in IT are body farms and low wage, expendable (but still necessary) labor is their lifeblood where they trade off quality for more volume. Employee turnover doesn’t matter much besides in the highest ranks in that case either. A “bad” hire in such companies is one that causes such irreparable harm that it costs the company more in reputation / brand than the paid out wages (this is the case with most large scale employers in the US like retail, sales, etc). FAANGS may have the funds together to hire out probably the rest of the entire software developer market but it doesn’t do them as much good to have laggards that can’t pass a FizzBuzz test. Sure works for a lot of defense contractors’ business models though, especially if the candidates are cleared.
      - ppeetteerr 8y ago
        You don't have to be a body farm to justify someone considered a "false positive" at a large employer. Most companies outside of the top employers have a hard time staffing up. They might just want someone to fix their bugs, not someone aspiring to invent the next Kubernetes.
        alexhutcheson 8y ago
        Unless you have clearly defined separate roles, titles, career ladders, etc. for the "bug fixers", this isn't a recipe for success. You would end up with an underclass of employees that are unhappy that they don't have the same career opportunities as others in their role, and a bunch of unhappy managers who are given the difficult task of enforcing this division. If you just need someone for narrowly-scoped tasks like fixing specific bugs, it might be better to hire a contractor, so the role expectations can be well-defined and agreed to up front.
        devonkim 8y ago
        Every company I’ve seen that needed people dedicated just to fix bugs was in a downward spiral with maintenance mode software. Those organizations outside really slow moving but well financed bureaucracies are disappearing rapidly as investors pull money by divesting or selling to larger companies that wind up casting off the unprofitable / non-growing lines of businesses they acquired. It’s pretty evil IMO to hire people as FTEs into such organizations when you are probably better off with consultants that are at least used to short term gigs.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      This is repeated so much but it’s just wrong. Companies are usually very socially toxic places, and the definition of “bad hire” is usually subverted to mean “does not capitulate to our bad monoculture.” It has nothing to do with hiring positive people, skilled people, etc.
    - lawn 8y ago
      It's missing nuance. For most companies missing out on an excellent hire is worse than hiring someone subpar.
    - jhpriestley 8y ago
      Why are bad hires so damaging? I've encountered very unskilled coworkers, they didn't do any serious damage, just wasted some people's time and money. I'd actually say the opposite: standout engineers can be very valuable, I'd rather work on a team with a couple lemons and one really good engineer than 3 middle of the road engineers. So I think that false negatives can be damaging, especially because it's probably the best people with the most options who won't bother with an excessive interview gauntlet.
      - avip 8y ago
        Not sure your 'lemons' qualify as 'bad hires'. I've refrained from defining, as it requires context, but the 2 pillars of badhirism are negative productivity and negative attitude. Being "unskilled", by itself and in void, does not imply a bad hire IMO. We are all "unskilled" occasionally.
      - Shaanie 8y ago
        Lemons can significantly impede a team's velocity and, more importantly, the team's overall happiness. It's difficult to enjoy and take pride in your work when the code base either looks like shit or require that you spend most of your time reviewing/cleaning up the mess the lemons create. Will your standout engineers enjoy working with the lemons?
        vonmoltke 8y ago
        I could substitute "the business" for "lemons" above and describe many (most?) companies. In that case, what effect are these lemons really having?
      - louthy 8y ago
        Unskilled is a problem of course, but with an unskilled, but ambitious individual, they can be mentored. In my mind a bad hire is someone that has a negative drag effect on the psychology of the work environment or the project. I had one hire who was brought in as a junior dev, thought he was better than he was and that he didn't deserve to do the grunt work he'd been assigned, and then proceeded to constantly bitch about anything he could. He was so negative that when he finally moved on I was super relieved. That psychology of "why even bother" can just sink into people's subconcious and become problematic. It's hard to spot who's going to be like that at an interview though.
    - ChrisCinelli 8y ago
      Intuitively I wanted to say "Yes 1000 times, unless you REALLY need to hire NOW, the effects of a bad hire are going to be a lot more negative than a no hire". But what about a very good hire that you end up missing that has been a very expensive mistake? I think we have a pretty high bias here. Organizations can see the effect of a bad hire and have more data on what went wrong during the hiring process, retrospect why that person passed and put more "tests" to prevent to repeat the mistake. But organizations can never measure the differential between the impact on the company of a candidate that was not hired and the present condition. There is simply no data about the impact that that person could have had. I heard a few detailed stories on "the guy that should not have been hired" and I can add my own stories. But the stories on the cool people that should have been hired are brief and rarely go beyond "I thought that guy was very smart." So I think we should make sure we check our hiring processes against negative positives. How? To be continued...
  - beagle3 8y ago
    Most definitely. A false positive often has negative contribution to the overall training (at the very least taking time from current members without giving back, but often also creating new problems). A false negative has zero cost (and zero benefit). I think it's a no-brainer that false negatives are much preferred to false positives in the overall tradeoff (and ... there is always a tradeoff between false positive and false negative)
    - wlll 8y ago
      While I agree with the sentiment, this isn't entirely true: > A false negative has zero cost (and zero benefit). False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave. It may well be that avoiding false positives in general is better for the business, but it's not as clear cut as you make out I believe, it's a balance.
      - sheepmullet 8y ago
        > False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave. Exactly! If a couple of people on my team of six leave and they can’t be replaced for 6-12 months then I’m going to quit as well. There will be more pressure on the remaining team to produce and most of the interesting long term work will be put on hold.
    - jonathanoliver 8y ago
      A false negative has zero realized cost. I would say there's missed opportunity cost.
      - beagle3 8y ago
        Yes. But a false positive has negative realized cost AND missed opportunity cost; I was implicitly subtracting the missed opportunity cost as it appears in both, but it should be stated explicitly - Thanks.
  - mandeepj 8y ago
    > Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring That's the case with Amazon and Google also.
    - ummonk 8y ago
      I was under the impression that for junior hires amazon has a low hiring bar but is aggressive in firing afterwards.
  - sheepmullet 8y ago
    > I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring. The top tech companies can reject 10 good candidates for every 1 that they hire because there is a massive surplus of engineers who want to work for these companies and so time to hire for them is actually reasonable. 99% of tech companies don’t have the overwhelming surplus of good applicants to make this work. So when they try they see time to hire jump from 4-8 weeks all the way up to 6-12 months without any real decrease in false positives.
- mebassett 8y ago
  What makes you think that? the article suggests a phone call with a recruiter, a video call with a tech team, and an onsite interview. 2 phone calls and an onsite doesn't seem like an excessive amount of interviews.
  - ppeetteerr 8y ago
    If you've ever done an onsite interview, you'd understand what a gruelling experience 6 hours of whiteboard problem solving really is. The worst part, of course, is that these exercises are completely irrelevant to the work most candidates will do on a day to day. That alone feels like a joke. Not to mention that you will be judged by people who also don't care about how well you balance a tree but are forced to anyway due to the archaic method of evaluating technical candidates.
    - romanhn 8y ago
      What does this have to do with Stripe? They're pretty clear on this point: "Our questions seek to understand how people approach real world problems, rather than testing for esoteric skills you might demonstrate on a whiteboard."
      - ppeetteerr 8y ago
        I'm referring to the long interview process, where there are two phone interviews and a day-long in person interview. It sounds like Stripe are trying to break the cycle of irrelevant questions during interviews, but it doesn't change the fact that a day-long interview is exhausting.
      - sonnyblarney 8y ago
        What one does on a whiteboard is not very esoteric.
    - patio11 8y ago
      (I work at Stripe and, while I don’t do engineering interviews, have strong views on the topic, which may or may not be equivalent to our views. I believe the following is substantially accurate regarding factual representations.) We don’t do whiteboard interviews for coding. If we have a coding interview, candidates can do it on their choice of their machine or a loaner machine from us with one of a few environments installed. Most interview loops have approximately two 45 minute coding interviews. The other interviews might focus on (depending on job/seniority/etc) design, architecture, product sense, industry knowledge, communication style, etc. (Each interview tests one cluster of skills against a rubric, as explained in the linked article.)
- Thibaut1 8y ago
  yea i agrew
- cbhl 8y ago
  From what I've heard of Stripe, this is a non-issue for them. Like Google/Facebook, their brand and compensation are strong enough that they have enough candidates at the top of the funnel. Plus they have specialized processes to explicitly reach groups of candidates that they're worried about missing (hiring through Triplebyte; posting on top universities' job boards; diversity programs like offering job interviews at Grace Hopper).
gadders 8y ago
>> In addition to building clear rubrics, we began unconscious bias training to maintain consistency and objectivity. Is that still valid? I thought the tests to support this concept had failed to be replicated? http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem.html?gtm=top&gtm=bottom http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem.... https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...
- Thibaut1 8y ago
  you r wrong
- GeorgeO84 8y ago
  I'm sure there are a lot of Google engineers willing to circulate an internal memo discussing the shortcomings of the IAT. After all they're a data-based company, right?
- bhuga 8y ago
  Unconscious bias is not implicit association. Unconscious bias is rationalizing decisions based on the candidate's personal characteristics as something else. Studies about unconscious bias readily replicate, i.e. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get-more-interviews https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes... Most training to overcome unconscious bias is about defining criteria before you see a candidate. If, before you view resumes, you've written down "We want someone with a master's degree and 4 years of experience in field X," you're much less likely to pass over a qualified resume, regardless of the candidate's personal characteristics.
  - gadders 8y ago
    Partly why I'm asking. Wikipedia seems to conflate the two [1]: A critical component of unconscious bias training is creating awareness for implicit bias. Since 1998, the online Implicit-Association Test (IAT) has provided a platform for the general public to assess their unconscious biases. Although the IAT measure has come under scrutiny, it has sparked conversation about unconscious bias in both popular media and the scientific community. In addition to the public’s increased awareness of the influence of implicit biases, the reality of racial and gender inequalities in our society has led to the creation of many unconscious bias training programs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_bias_training https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_bias_training
ppeetteerr 8y ago
This is the same process as with many other millennial-focused companies in SF.
- Thibaut1 8y ago
  ewqlly
Thibaut1 8y ago
sbsi dhudbe
- Thibaut1 8y ago
  euidbt
hoorayimhelping 8y ago
These are all great points and there are some good nuggets in this article but I feel like it misses the main issue with recruiting. The shortcoming in my experience, is hardly ever in the process, it's in the people who work in recruiting. When setting up pipelines, most of the people I worked with knew what we had to do - the points in this article are pretty obvious. What isn't obvious is how to find the right people to help us do that, or how to avoid the wrong people. Because the wrong people on the recruiting side of things can easily drag down the entire organization very quickly. I've only worked with a handful of recruiters that were actually worth anything - I'd like to see more about how to find them, what qualities to look for, and how to vet them. Building a process that doesn't suck is like bread and butter for day-to-day for a lot of engineers. A lot of us have been part of working recruiting pipelines and we've seen how it's supposed to work. It's usually pretty straightforward - what wee don't know is how to kickstart it with the right people. I'd love more information on the softer part of it, and the part that is often invisible to people iterating on the process - the specific contributions of individuals to get it up and running.
- PopeDotNinja 8y ago
  > I've only worked with a handful of recruiters that were actually worth anything I learned how to hire & train recruiters to work for me pretty effectively for certain pieces of recruiting. To you, what makes a recruiter good and/or not good? Maybe I can share some thoughts on how to improve the not good parts!
  - nosrednAhsoJ 8y ago
    I found that investing time in educating the recruiter on what you look for, and the why behind that criteria is key. A primary source of that investment is quick, direct feedback to the recruiter on why someone you just turned away is not a good fit. Helping them figure out how to deliver well-qualified candidates to you is not magic. It takes LOTS of effort. Once you develop that working relationship with a recruiter, never let go! I have a handful of recruiters that I work with because they quickly absorb the feedback I give and I never see another candidate with that missing requirement again. If a recruiter shows they can't adjust/learn from your feedback, find one that does.
syntaxing 8y ago
I really enjoy reading Stripe's posts. I remember they posted one about APIs and it was super fun to read [1]. Though to be honest, I think a title of "Guide to scaling software engineering organizations" seems more appropriate. I dread of a day where it's the norm for foundational engineers to have a similar interview structure as software engineers now. [1] https://stripe.com/blog/api-versioning https://stripe.com/blog/api-versioning
- o_____________o 8y ago
  What is a "foundational engineer"?
  - syntaxing 8y ago
    The old four main branches of engineering (mechanical, electric, chemical, and civil)
avitzurel 8y ago
I did not read the article to the end (I plan to). It's mostly good and I agree with the point it's making. However, I think we need to flip it on its head. From my point of view as an engineer, your pipeline doesn't really matter, no matter how smart and well thought out it is. The weakest link in the pipeline is what isn't mentioned here, how do you get candidates into the pipeline. I get 5-10 recruiting emails a week and about the same number of linked-in messages, none of them ever even come to a phone call. (and yes, I have gotten a few from Stripe as well). How do you email/call/text candidates? How do you define them? Do you have the same email for all or you distinguish between levels? A lof of companies have a good pipeline and they say "we don't do whiteboards" but their recruiters are doing a disgusting job at finding people, just absolutely shameful.
- selestify 8y ago
  Is that because you're not responding to the recruiting emails or they don't get back to you after you respond? How would you imorove that process?
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    One idea would be standardized questionnaires. Rather than job sites being collections of buzzwords and tools, if they presented questionnaires that matched a variety of similar job titles, employers could simply fill out the questionnaire and be matched with candidates who answer similarly.
ainiriand 8y ago
<rant> Some time ago I went to the Dublin open house because they were opening news teams here and one of the positions was backed api engineer. Considering that I've been doing the same for almost 10 years and that I got personally invited to the event I decided to apply to the role. They rejected me even before having a personal interview. I wonder what is happening behind the scenes but it was very demoralizing. Was anything wrong about my CV? About me? Am I too old? Right now, I prefer to stick with smaller companies, they have clearer intentions when contacting you and they are much more easier to approach. </rant>
- Fede_V 8y ago
  In my experience, it's incredibly difficult to get a strong positive signal from a CV. You can definitely find red flags (my favorite example: people describing themselves as experts deep learning with 1 year of experience and zero publications) - but, after removing the obviously unqualified, the next steps have very low accuracy. Honestly, it might have just been a sourcer/recruiter fuck up. If you can at all, ask a friend (or even a friend of a friend) if you can get an internal referal and bypass the broken resume filtering step.
  - rjayatilleka 8y ago
    Even worse, at some big companies, recruiters will ignore direct referrals and ask you to submit the resume internally through their req system. But then resumes get lost anyway. Good recruiters accept internal referrals directly.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    Honestly I dont that is true regarding CV, sure you can filter some extremely easily but its also pretty easy to see the good candidates even if there resume is terrible. Following up with a phone call will confirm it. And rarely result in an inept candidate. No offense to recruiters because they put in the work of sorting. But finding quality candidates to actually interview, those are easy to spot.
- repsilat 8y ago
  Better a rejection than complete radio silence, though. I went through a job hunt a couple of months ago. CV screening was by far the most stringent part of the process for me. I passed all of my phone screens and got offers from most of my on-sites, but getting an interview from an application was a crapshoot. Thankfully most rejections at that stage were prompt and unambiguous (though as you say, not helpful/informative.) Lyft was an exception, though. Their application page said something along the lines of "We respect your time, so we won't respond back if you don't make the cut." Pretty ironic, not responding back is about the most disrespectful thing they can do at that point in the process -- certainly worse than a curt "fuck off". (By contrast I loved Stripe's interview process.)
fbr 8y ago
Some additional great resources related to hiring: How to hire your first engineer - https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-hire-your-first-engineer/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-hire-your-first-engineer... Convincing Engineer to join your team and a basic structure for the process - https://blog.ycombinator.com/convincing-engineers-to-join-your-team/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/convincing-engineers-to-join-yo... General thoughts about hiring - http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire The book "Who" gives a good idea about a good process. Hard to apply when you are not looking for a "generalist" - https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194/ https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194/ Some of the manager tools podcasts episodes - https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/hiring-0 https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/hiring-0 Edit: formatting
- wtmt 8y ago
  Thanks for those links. If you see this soon, could you please edit your comment and remove the code block formatting for the five bullet points and instead use a blank line between each point to add newlines? [1] It’s difficult to read on a smaller screen and requires horizontal scrolling back and forth. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
- mildweed 8y ago
  How to run a solid, basic technical interview: https://slides.com/scottconnerly/2questioncodequiz https://slides.com/scottconnerly/2questioncodequiz
scarejunba 8y ago
Nice post, guys. Would you mind saying what you mean by 'lurking'? In all my life on the Internet, it's a positive thing when joining a community. You're invisible to everyone and just read. Why should people not do this? It seems harmless to be in read-only mode.
- jmcomets 8y ago
  I understood the use of "lurking" as "commenting unproductively in a channel". Although I may be mistaken, it makes a lot of sense to avoid such toxic behavior.
  - ownagefool 8y ago
    Weird, it's always meant reading and not posting to me, such as the parent suggested.
  - QuercusMax 8y ago
    Isn't that more along the lines of trolling or shitposting?
- mediocrejoker 8y ago
  I was confused by this too. I noticed that in both places they use the term, they say "lurk in", almost as if it's a term with an accepted meaning within Stripe. The fact that they say "read to your heart's content" also suggests that they aren't using "lurk" in it's usual meaning (which to me is reading but not commenting).
- elgenie 8y ago
  The "lurking into" in the blog post should probably be read as "jumping into". That is, reading is fine, but transitioning from lurker to active participant should be minimized. Stripe has a very specific culture of email transparency that they've posted about before, and they've likely developed company-specific jargon around it: https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency
- patio11 8y ago
zoba 8y ago
I really enjoyed this post, but, I would’ve liked to see more information about engineering team size when these things happened. For instance, the idea of “rotations” doesn’t make as much sense when there are 5 engineers versus 100. There were several instances where I would’ve liked to have known team size as a benchmark.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Rotations also don’t make sense for product or domain specialists, or people with career aspirations to focus on one specialization. As an ML engineer, I would quit immediately if I had to go through a rotation doing web development. But if you ask me to do occasional web development to deliver my ML product to customers, I’ll do it whole heartedly and solve it very fast.
bit_logic 8y ago
Probably the most important these days: don't blindly follow the interview process of big tech companies. They have an almost endless queue of very good candidates. Any other company has the exact opposite problem. They treat their candidates poorly (ridiculous whiteboard algorithm questions) and don't really care about losing good candidates. Other companies can't do this, they are lucky to even get good candidates applying.
ratherbefuddled 8y ago
The article seems to me to have lots of information on hiring and very little on scaling. In my experience hiring is one of the smaller problems in scaling, the largest by far is how you avoid massive drops in individual productivity that if unchecked come with large teams delivering complex functionality. It's a technical problem for engineers to solve more than it's an HR or management problem.
- gcbw2 8y ago
  if you hire people that won't do bullshit job over and over, you end up with a organization that doesn't have that kind of problem. You can see this happen in places that have layoffs every now and then, or that hires a dozen contractors for each fulltime employee. When that happens, you have people doing automation job while hoarding knowledge of which button to press, then you get to the point you describe.
gcbw2 8y ago
The good point of the article is bringing people up to speed as soon as they are hired. Yet everyone here will only see the bad points of the article, which is pretty much a recipe for bro-culture and hiring fluent english speakers exclusively.
- cosinetau 8y ago
  Not to mention how expensive that flow chart looks.
  - nosrednAhsoJ 8y ago
    It is not as expensive as hiring the wrong person. As you iterate, your win percentage (AKA how many people you bring in and actually hire) goes up. We got to a point where we hired 75% of the people we brought in to the office.
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      > It is not as expensive as hiring the wrong person. Do you have numbers to back that up?
      - nosrednAhsoJ 8y ago
        Having built & led many teams, the time and energy that goes into managing an underperformer or a poor culture fit far outweighs the cost of thorough interviewing. Even worse, you have to go through the hiring process again! So we can at least say it costs twice as much. As mentioned, this kind of investment in the hiring process requires you to actually iterate it and continuously improve your win percentage. If not, you might be throwing money away.
- mediocrejoker 8y ago
  Can you explain how the article is "a recipe for bro-culture"? Why is hiring fluent-speakers of the language in which the company conducts operations a bad thing?
mychael 8y ago
I fear that earlier stage companies will read posts like this and implement it blindly without considering the big picture, which is: - Stripe is a large and resourceful company with a relatively large engineering team. They can afford to have people focused only on things like this. - The demand to work at Stripe is high. Therefore they can afford to have a long, grueling interview process. Most engineers will not want to go through a 7 step hiring process at a low prestige company.
Olsi 8y ago
Hi for Everyone! I"ve got an interesting news. Would you like to have an interesting pastime in internet. http://VO1U8.TK http://VO1U8.TK Click here.
grandtour001 8y ago
Please no recruiter phone screens. It's just a choreographed dance where everybody knows what's goin to happen. The recruiter sells you the company about x, y, z values that nobody cares about. The candidate says something about looking for bigger opportunities and challenges.
- mratzloff 8y ago
  If it's rote for you, you probably aren't using those calls effectively to filter based on your dealbreakers.
  - wbc 8y ago
    mind sharing how you use these calls to filter companies?
    - sgustard 8y ago
      I have a sizable salary requirement, for one.
    - mratzloff 8y ago
      Company size, team size, role functions, salary range, culture...
aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
More like scaling _software_ engineering organizations.
sytelus 8y ago
TLDR; An article by high level exec at stripe. Its long low-information VP-style article with mostly things you already know like you need to define a recruiting plan, you should survey candidates for experience, your onboarding plan should provide overview of your products etc.
tintor 8y ago
What are the top reasons for candidates rejecting offers at Stripe?
munchbunny 8y ago
I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this. Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers. I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of how to evaluate and grow leadership and people management skills. Ironically, I see a lot of that from MBA programs. Actually getting good management in place is extremely hard to do and does more for talent retention than almost everything else. For every company blog post I've read that talks about scaling the organization, including Stripe, I also hear corresponding horror stories from friends and acquaintances who are leaving because they hate their manager and because their company isn't doing anything about it. Sure, it's relative, on the grand scale of managerial quality I'd wager that Stripe is on the right side of average, but I'd really like to see more focus on scaling leadership.
- physcab 8y ago
  This is honestly the best barometer of employee happiness. Managers who want to build political empires, don’t have their employees best interests at heart, who communicate poorly, who make questionable moral judgements, or push work down the pipe for the sake of doing work is what makes employees miserable. Companies who empower these types of managers are terrible to work for.
  - ChrisCinelli 8y ago
    I also found out that there are a few bad "managers" that end up raising because they are popular with people and their bosses. They usually have a very high EQ. You can see a few people with little technical acumen, shallow knowledge of the latest trends, very bad on processes and no work ethic that still rise in some organizations. These people spend a lot of time "managing up" on a side and on the other side they are also nice with their employees. They help them move up the ladder and pay higher bonuses demanding less work than other bosses. It is hard to find even good employees give a bad review to somebody that give them extra money and make them work "comfortably".
_robbywashere 8y ago
The criteria for candidate communication ability in the "example rubric" _sounds_ right, but is any of this backed by actual data?
boltzmannbrain 8y ago
Re "Don’t mistake productivity for engagement": The story is quite similar to my recent departure from a robotics startup. Even though the company had the suggested survey system in place, management made me feel like an engineering resource to be allocated rather than a person with career ambitions. The survey was one of several facades the CEO had in place.

664 points by joeyespo 8y ago

Judging by the article, you need to go through a _lot_ of interviews before Stripe makes you an offer. I wonder if they miss out on whole groups of job candidates because those candidates have good job prospects that don't involve this gruelling slog. Of course, Stripe does seem to have an excellent team.

ppeetteerr 8y ago
I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.
- avip 8y ago
  That's the logical tradeoff for any company. Bad hires create an incredible amount of damage that can sink a whole team. It is x10 better to have no hire than a bad one.
  - ppeetteerr 8y ago
    I've worked in companies that struggle to hire any candidate, let alone top candidates. Stripe is amongst the top employers. The vast majority of smaller shops (banks, b2b software companies, agencies) just need to staff up and would rather hire and fire than miss out on a good candidate.
    - rizzom5000 8y ago
      Maybe, but hire and fire is also a great way to show the team that you don't know what you're doing as a hiring manager; not to mention how firing a team member, who may be incompetent but still well-liked, affects morale. Then, there is the problem where you fail to fire when you should. To me, this is just not a good way to build an effective team.
      - ppeetteerr 8y ago
        No one is saying you should hire and fire a ton of people, only that rejecting good candidates for most companies is not possible given how difficult it is to find them. Talk to any recruiter and they will tell you that finding good (not great, just good) candidates is often a struggle.
      - inimino 8y ago
        > hire and fire is also a great way to show the team that you don't know what you're doing It's an expensive (painful) signal that you actually do know what you need to do and are capable of it.
  - devonkim 8y ago
    I wouldn’t say ANY company necessarily. A lot of companies even in IT are body farms and low wage, expendable (but still necessary) labor is their lifeblood where they trade off quality for more volume. Employee turnover doesn’t matter much besides in the highest ranks in that case either. A “bad” hire in such companies is one that causes such irreparable harm that it costs the company more in reputation / brand than the paid out wages (this is the case with most large scale employers in the US like retail, sales, etc). FAANGS may have the funds together to hire out probably the rest of the entire software developer market but it doesn’t do them as much good to have laggards that can’t pass a FizzBuzz test. Sure works for a lot of defense contractors’ business models though, especially if the candidates are cleared.
    - ppeetteerr 8y ago
      You don't have to be a body farm to justify someone considered a "false positive" at a large employer. Most companies outside of the top employers have a hard time staffing up. They might just want someone to fix their bugs, not someone aspiring to invent the next Kubernetes.
      - alexhutcheson 8y ago
        Unless you have clearly defined separate roles, titles, career ladders, etc. for the "bug fixers", this isn't a recipe for success. You would end up with an underclass of employees that are unhappy that they don't have the same career opportunities as others in their role, and a bunch of unhappy managers who are given the difficult task of enforcing this division. If you just need someone for narrowly-scoped tasks like fixing specific bugs, it might be better to hire a contractor, so the role expectations can be well-defined and agreed to up front.
      - devonkim 8y ago
        Every company I’ve seen that needed people dedicated just to fix bugs was in a downward spiral with maintenance mode software. Those organizations outside really slow moving but well financed bureaucracies are disappearing rapidly as investors pull money by divesting or selling to larger companies that wind up casting off the unprofitable / non-growing lines of businesses they acquired. It’s pretty evil IMO to hire people as FTEs into such organizations when you are probably better off with consultants that are at least used to short term gigs.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    This is repeated so much but it’s just wrong. Companies are usually very socially toxic places, and the definition of “bad hire” is usually subverted to mean “does not capitulate to our bad monoculture.” It has nothing to do with hiring positive people, skilled people, etc.
  - lawn 8y ago
    It's missing nuance. For most companies missing out on an excellent hire is worse than hiring someone subpar.
  - jhpriestley 8y ago
    Why are bad hires so damaging? I've encountered very unskilled coworkers, they didn't do any serious damage, just wasted some people's time and money. I'd actually say the opposite: standout engineers can be very valuable, I'd rather work on a team with a couple lemons and one really good engineer than 3 middle of the road engineers. So I think that false negatives can be damaging, especially because it's probably the best people with the most options who won't bother with an excessive interview gauntlet.
    - avip 8y ago
      Not sure your 'lemons' qualify as 'bad hires'. I've refrained from defining, as it requires context, but the 2 pillars of badhirism are negative productivity and negative attitude. Being "unskilled", by itself and in void, does not imply a bad hire IMO. We are all "unskilled" occasionally.
    - Shaanie 8y ago
      Lemons can significantly impede a team's velocity and, more importantly, the team's overall happiness. It's difficult to enjoy and take pride in your work when the code base either looks like shit or require that you spend most of your time reviewing/cleaning up the mess the lemons create. Will your standout engineers enjoy working with the lemons?
      - vonmoltke 8y ago
        I could substitute "the business" for "lemons" above and describe many (most?) companies. In that case, what effect are these lemons really having?
    - louthy 8y ago
      Unskilled is a problem of course, but with an unskilled, but ambitious individual, they can be mentored. In my mind a bad hire is someone that has a negative drag effect on the psychology of the work environment or the project. I had one hire who was brought in as a junior dev, thought he was better than he was and that he didn't deserve to do the grunt work he'd been assigned, and then proceeded to constantly bitch about anything he could. He was so negative that when he finally moved on I was super relieved. That psychology of "why even bother" can just sink into people's subconcious and become problematic. It's hard to spot who's going to be like that at an interview though.
  - ChrisCinelli 8y ago
    Intuitively I wanted to say "Yes 1000 times, unless you REALLY need to hire NOW, the effects of a bad hire are going to be a lot more negative than a no hire". But what about a very good hire that you end up missing that has been a very expensive mistake? I think we have a pretty high bias here. Organizations can see the effect of a bad hire and have more data on what went wrong during the hiring process, retrospect why that person passed and put more "tests" to prevent to repeat the mistake. But organizations can never measure the differential between the impact on the company of a candidate that was not hired and the present condition. There is simply no data about the impact that that person could have had. I heard a few detailed stories on "the guy that should not have been hired" and I can add my own stories. But the stories on the cool people that should have been hired are brief and rarely go beyond "I thought that guy was very smart." So I think we should make sure we check our hiring processes against negative positives. How? To be continued...
- beagle3 8y ago
  Most definitely. A false positive often has negative contribution to the overall training (at the very least taking time from current members without giving back, but often also creating new problems). A false negative has zero cost (and zero benefit). I think it's a no-brainer that false negatives are much preferred to false positives in the overall tradeoff (and ... there is always a tradeoff between false positive and false negative)
  - wlll 8y ago
    While I agree with the sentiment, this isn't entirely true: > A false negative has zero cost (and zero benefit). False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave. It may well be that avoiding false positives in general is better for the business, but it's not as clear cut as you make out I believe, it's a balance.
    - sheepmullet 8y ago
      > False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave. Exactly! If a couple of people on my team of six leave and they can’t be replaced for 6-12 months then I’m going to quit as well. There will be more pressure on the remaining team to produce and most of the interesting long term work will be put on hold.
  - jonathanoliver 8y ago
    A false negative has zero realized cost. I would say there's missed opportunity cost.
    - beagle3 8y ago
      Yes. But a false positive has negative realized cost AND missed opportunity cost; I was implicitly subtracting the missed opportunity cost as it appears in both, but it should be stated explicitly - Thanks.
- mandeepj 8y ago
  > Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring That's the case with Amazon and Google also.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    I was under the impression that for junior hires amazon has a low hiring bar but is aggressive in firing afterwards.
- sheepmullet 8y ago
  > I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring. The top tech companies can reject 10 good candidates for every 1 that they hire because there is a massive surplus of engineers who want to work for these companies and so time to hire for them is actually reasonable. 99% of tech companies don’t have the overwhelming surplus of good applicants to make this work. So when they try they see time to hire jump from 4-8 weeks all the way up to 6-12 months without any real decrease in false positives.
mebassett 8y ago
What makes you think that? the article suggests a phone call with a recruiter, a video call with a tech team, and an onsite interview. 2 phone calls and an onsite doesn't seem like an excessive amount of interviews.
- ppeetteerr 8y ago
  If you've ever done an onsite interview, you'd understand what a gruelling experience 6 hours of whiteboard problem solving really is. The worst part, of course, is that these exercises are completely irrelevant to the work most candidates will do on a day to day. That alone feels like a joke. Not to mention that you will be judged by people who also don't care about how well you balance a tree but are forced to anyway due to the archaic method of evaluating technical candidates.
  - romanhn 8y ago
    What does this have to do with Stripe? They're pretty clear on this point: "Our questions seek to understand how people approach real world problems, rather than testing for esoteric skills you might demonstrate on a whiteboard."
    - ppeetteerr 8y ago
      I'm referring to the long interview process, where there are two phone interviews and a day-long in person interview. It sounds like Stripe are trying to break the cycle of irrelevant questions during interviews, but it doesn't change the fact that a day-long interview is exhausting.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      What one does on a whiteboard is not very esoteric.
  - patio11 8y ago
    (I work at Stripe and, while I don’t do engineering interviews, have strong views on the topic, which may or may not be equivalent to our views. I believe the following is substantially accurate regarding factual representations.) We don’t do whiteboard interviews for coding. If we have a coding interview, candidates can do it on their choice of their machine or a loaner machine from us with one of a few environments installed. Most interview loops have approximately two 45 minute coding interviews. The other interviews might focus on (depending on job/seniority/etc) design, architecture, product sense, industry knowledge, communication style, etc. (Each interview tests one cluster of skills against a rubric, as explained in the linked article.)
Thibaut1 8y ago
yea i agrew
cbhl 8y ago
From what I've heard of Stripe, this is a non-issue for them. Like Google/Facebook, their brand and compensation are strong enough that they have enough candidates at the top of the funnel. Plus they have specialized processes to explicitly reach groups of candidates that they're worried about missing (hiring through Triplebyte; posting on top universities' job boards; diversity programs like offering job interviews at Grace Hopper).

gadders 8y ago

>> In addition to building clear rubrics, we began unconscious bias training to maintain consistency and objectivity. Is that still valid? I thought the tests to support this concept had failed to be replicated? http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem.html?gtm=top&gtm=bottom http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem.... https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...

Thibaut1 8y ago
you r wrong
GeorgeO84 8y ago
I'm sure there are a lot of Google engineers willing to circulate an internal memo discussing the shortcomings of the IAT. After all they're a data-based company, right?
bhuga 8y ago
Unconscious bias is not implicit association. Unconscious bias is rationalizing decisions based on the candidate's personal characteristics as something else. Studies about unconscious bias readily replicate, i.e. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get-more-interviews https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes... Most training to overcome unconscious bias is about defining criteria before you see a candidate. If, before you view resumes, you've written down "We want someone with a master's degree and 4 years of experience in field X," you're much less likely to pass over a qualified resume, regardless of the candidate's personal characteristics.
- gadders 8y ago
  Partly why I'm asking. Wikipedia seems to conflate the two [1]: A critical component of unconscious bias training is creating awareness for implicit bias. Since 1998, the online Implicit-Association Test (IAT) has provided a platform for the general public to assess their unconscious biases. Although the IAT measure has come under scrutiny, it has sparked conversation about unconscious bias in both popular media and the scientific community. In addition to the public’s increased awareness of the influence of implicit biases, the reality of racial and gender inequalities in our society has led to the creation of many unconscious bias training programs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_bias_training https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_bias_training

ppeetteerr 8y ago

This is the same process as with many other millennial-focused companies in SF.

Thibaut1 8y ago
ewqlly

Thibaut1 8y ago

sbsi dhudbe

Thibaut1 8y ago
euidbt

hoorayimhelping 8y ago

These are all great points and there are some good nuggets in this article but I feel like it misses the main issue with recruiting. The shortcoming in my experience, is hardly ever in the process, it's in the people who work in recruiting. When setting up pipelines, most of the people I worked with knew what we had to do - the points in this article are pretty obvious. What isn't obvious is how to find the right people to help us do that, or how to avoid the wrong people. Because the wrong people on the recruiting side of things can easily drag down the entire organization very quickly. I've only worked with a handful of recruiters that were actually worth anything - I'd like to see more about how to find them, what qualities to look for, and how to vet them. Building a process that doesn't suck is like bread and butter for day-to-day for a lot of engineers. A lot of us have been part of working recruiting pipelines and we've seen how it's supposed to work. It's usually pretty straightforward - what wee don't know is how to kickstart it with the right people. I'd love more information on the softer part of it, and the part that is often invisible to people iterating on the process - the specific contributions of individuals to get it up and running.

PopeDotNinja 8y ago
> I've only worked with a handful of recruiters that were actually worth anything I learned how to hire & train recruiters to work for me pretty effectively for certain pieces of recruiting. To you, what makes a recruiter good and/or not good? Maybe I can share some thoughts on how to improve the not good parts!
- nosrednAhsoJ 8y ago
  I found that investing time in educating the recruiter on what you look for, and the why behind that criteria is key. A primary source of that investment is quick, direct feedback to the recruiter on why someone you just turned away is not a good fit. Helping them figure out how to deliver well-qualified candidates to you is not magic. It takes LOTS of effort. Once you develop that working relationship with a recruiter, never let go! I have a handful of recruiters that I work with because they quickly absorb the feedback I give and I never see another candidate with that missing requirement again. If a recruiter shows they can't adjust/learn from your feedback, find one that does.

syntaxing 8y ago

I really enjoy reading Stripe's posts. I remember they posted one about APIs and it was super fun to read [1]. Though to be honest, I think a title of "Guide to scaling software engineering organizations" seems more appropriate. I dread of a day where it's the norm for foundational engineers to have a similar interview structure as software engineers now. [1] https://stripe.com/blog/api-versioning https://stripe.com/blog/api-versioning

o_____________o 8y ago
What is a "foundational engineer"?
- syntaxing 8y ago
  The old four main branches of engineering (mechanical, electric, chemical, and civil)

avitzurel 8y ago

I did not read the article to the end (I plan to). It's mostly good and I agree with the point it's making. However, I think we need to flip it on its head. From my point of view as an engineer, your pipeline doesn't really matter, no matter how smart and well thought out it is. The weakest link in the pipeline is what isn't mentioned here, how do you get candidates into the pipeline. I get 5-10 recruiting emails a week and about the same number of linked-in messages, none of them ever even come to a phone call. (and yes, I have gotten a few from Stripe as well). How do you email/call/text candidates? How do you define them? Do you have the same email for all or you distinguish between levels? A lof of companies have a good pipeline and they say "we don't do whiteboards" but their recruiters are doing a disgusting job at finding people, just absolutely shameful.

selestify 8y ago
Is that because you're not responding to the recruiting emails or they don't get back to you after you respond? How would you imorove that process?
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  One idea would be standardized questionnaires. Rather than job sites being collections of buzzwords and tools, if they presented questionnaires that matched a variety of similar job titles, employers could simply fill out the questionnaire and be matched with candidates who answer similarly.

ainiriand 8y ago

<rant> Some time ago I went to the Dublin open house because they were opening news teams here and one of the positions was backed api engineer. Considering that I've been doing the same for almost 10 years and that I got personally invited to the event I decided to apply to the role. They rejected me even before having a personal interview. I wonder what is happening behind the scenes but it was very demoralizing. Was anything wrong about my CV? About me? Am I too old? Right now, I prefer to stick with smaller companies, they have clearer intentions when contacting you and they are much more easier to approach. </rant>

Fede_V 8y ago
In my experience, it's incredibly difficult to get a strong positive signal from a CV. You can definitely find red flags (my favorite example: people describing themselves as experts deep learning with 1 year of experience and zero publications) - but, after removing the obviously unqualified, the next steps have very low accuracy. Honestly, it might have just been a sourcer/recruiter fuck up. If you can at all, ask a friend (or even a friend of a friend) if you can get an internal referal and bypass the broken resume filtering step.
- rjayatilleka 8y ago
  Even worse, at some big companies, recruiters will ignore direct referrals and ask you to submit the resume internally through their req system. But then resumes get lost anyway. Good recruiters accept internal referrals directly.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Honestly I dont that is true regarding CV, sure you can filter some extremely easily but its also pretty easy to see the good candidates even if there resume is terrible. Following up with a phone call will confirm it. And rarely result in an inept candidate. No offense to recruiters because they put in the work of sorting. But finding quality candidates to actually interview, those are easy to spot.
repsilat 8y ago
Better a rejection than complete radio silence, though. I went through a job hunt a couple of months ago. CV screening was by far the most stringent part of the process for me. I passed all of my phone screens and got offers from most of my on-sites, but getting an interview from an application was a crapshoot. Thankfully most rejections at that stage were prompt and unambiguous (though as you say, not helpful/informative.) Lyft was an exception, though. Their application page said something along the lines of "We respect your time, so we won't respond back if you don't make the cut." Pretty ironic, not responding back is about the most disrespectful thing they can do at that point in the process -- certainly worse than a curt "fuck off". (By contrast I loved Stripe's interview process.)

fbr 8y ago

Some additional great resources related to hiring: How to hire your first engineer - https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-hire-your-first-engineer/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-hire-your-first-engineer... Convincing Engineer to join your team and a basic structure for the process - https://blog.ycombinator.com/convincing-engineers-to-join-your-team/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/convincing-engineers-to-join-yo... General thoughts about hiring - http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire The book "Who" gives a good idea about a good process. Hard to apply when you are not looking for a "generalist" - https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194/ https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194/ Some of the manager tools podcasts episodes - https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/hiring-0 https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/hiring-0 Edit: formatting

wtmt 8y ago
Thanks for those links. If you see this soon, could you please edit your comment and remove the code block formatting for the five bullet points and instead use a blank line between each point to add newlines? [1] It’s difficult to read on a smaller screen and requires horizontal scrolling back and forth. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
mildweed 8y ago
How to run a solid, basic technical interview: https://slides.com/scottconnerly/2questioncodequiz https://slides.com/scottconnerly/2questioncodequiz

scarejunba 8y ago

Nice post, guys. Would you mind saying what you mean by 'lurking'? In all my life on the Internet, it's a positive thing when joining a community. You're invisible to everyone and just read. Why should people not do this? It seems harmless to be in read-only mode.

jmcomets 8y ago
I understood the use of "lurking" as "commenting unproductively in a channel". Although I may be mistaken, it makes a lot of sense to avoid such toxic behavior.
- ownagefool 8y ago
  Weird, it's always meant reading and not posting to me, such as the parent suggested.
- QuercusMax 8y ago
  Isn't that more along the lines of trolling or shitposting?
mediocrejoker 8y ago
I was confused by this too. I noticed that in both places they use the term, they say "lurk in", almost as if it's a term with an accepted meaning within Stripe. The fact that they say "read to your heart's content" also suggests that they aren't using "lurk" in it's usual meaning (which to me is reading but not commenting).
elgenie 8y ago
The "lurking into" in the blog post should probably be read as "jumping into". That is, reading is fine, but transitioning from lurker to active participant should be minimized. Stripe has a very specific culture of email transparency that they've posted about before, and they've likely developed company-specific jargon around it: https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency
patio11 8y ago

zoba 8y ago

I really enjoyed this post, but, I would’ve liked to see more information about engineering team size when these things happened. For instance, the idea of “rotations” doesn’t make as much sense when there are 5 engineers versus 100. There were several instances where I would’ve liked to have known team size as a benchmark.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Rotations also don’t make sense for product or domain specialists, or people with career aspirations to focus on one specialization. As an ML engineer, I would quit immediately if I had to go through a rotation doing web development. But if you ask me to do occasional web development to deliver my ML product to customers, I’ll do it whole heartedly and solve it very fast.

bit_logic 8y ago

Probably the most important these days: don't blindly follow the interview process of big tech companies. They have an almost endless queue of very good candidates. Any other company has the exact opposite problem. They treat their candidates poorly (ridiculous whiteboard algorithm questions) and don't really care about losing good candidates. Other companies can't do this, they are lucky to even get good candidates applying.

ratherbefuddled 8y ago

The article seems to me to have lots of information on hiring and very little on scaling. In my experience hiring is one of the smaller problems in scaling, the largest by far is how you avoid massive drops in individual productivity that if unchecked come with large teams delivering complex functionality. It's a technical problem for engineers to solve more than it's an HR or management problem.

gcbw2 8y ago
if you hire people that won't do bullshit job over and over, you end up with a organization that doesn't have that kind of problem. You can see this happen in places that have layoffs every now and then, or that hires a dozen contractors for each fulltime employee. When that happens, you have people doing automation job while hoarding knowledge of which button to press, then you get to the point you describe.

gcbw2 8y ago

The good point of the article is bringing people up to speed as soon as they are hired. Yet everyone here will only see the bad points of the article, which is pretty much a recipe for bro-culture and hiring fluent english speakers exclusively.

cosinetau 8y ago
Not to mention how expensive that flow chart looks.
- nosrednAhsoJ 8y ago
  It is not as expensive as hiring the wrong person. As you iterate, your win percentage (AKA how many people you bring in and actually hire) goes up. We got to a point where we hired 75% of the people we brought in to the office.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    > It is not as expensive as hiring the wrong person. Do you have numbers to back that up?
    - nosrednAhsoJ 8y ago
      Having built & led many teams, the time and energy that goes into managing an underperformer or a poor culture fit far outweighs the cost of thorough interviewing. Even worse, you have to go through the hiring process again! So we can at least say it costs twice as much. As mentioned, this kind of investment in the hiring process requires you to actually iterate it and continuously improve your win percentage. If not, you might be throwing money away.
mediocrejoker 8y ago
Can you explain how the article is "a recipe for bro-culture"? Why is hiring fluent-speakers of the language in which the company conducts operations a bad thing?

mychael 8y ago

I fear that earlier stage companies will read posts like this and implement it blindly without considering the big picture, which is: - Stripe is a large and resourceful company with a relatively large engineering team. They can afford to have people focused only on things like this. - The demand to work at Stripe is high. Therefore they can afford to have a long, grueling interview process. Most engineers will not want to go through a 7 step hiring process at a low prestige company.

Olsi 8y ago

Hi for Everyone! I"ve got an interesting news. Would you like to have an interesting pastime in internet. http://VO1U8.TK http://VO1U8.TK Click here.

grandtour001 8y ago

Please no recruiter phone screens. It's just a choreographed dance where everybody knows what's goin to happen. The recruiter sells you the company about x, y, z values that nobody cares about. The candidate says something about looking for bigger opportunities and challenges.

mratzloff 8y ago
If it's rote for you, you probably aren't using those calls effectively to filter based on your dealbreakers.
- wbc 8y ago
  mind sharing how you use these calls to filter companies?
  - sgustard 8y ago
    I have a sizable salary requirement, for one.
  - mratzloff 8y ago
    Company size, team size, role functions, salary range, culture...

aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago

More like scaling _software_ engineering organizations.

sytelus 8y ago

TLDR; An article by high level exec at stripe. Its long low-information VP-style article with mostly things you already know like you need to define a recruiting plan, you should survey candidates for experience, your onboarding plan should provide overview of your products etc.

tintor 8y ago

What are the top reasons for candidates rejecting offers at Stripe?

munchbunny 8y ago

I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this. Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers. I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of how to evaluate and grow leadership and people management skills. Ironically, I see a lot of that from MBA programs. Actually getting good management in place is extremely hard to do and does more for talent retention than almost everything else. For every company blog post I've read that talks about scaling the organization, including Stripe, I also hear corresponding horror stories from friends and acquaintances who are leaving because they hate their manager and because their company isn't doing anything about it. Sure, it's relative, on the grand scale of managerial quality I'd wager that Stripe is on the right side of average, but I'd really like to see more focus on scaling leadership.

physcab 8y ago
This is honestly the best barometer of employee happiness. Managers who want to build political empires, don’t have their employees best interests at heart, who communicate poorly, who make questionable moral judgements, or push work down the pipe for the sake of doing work is what makes employees miserable. Companies who empower these types of managers are terrible to work for.
- ChrisCinelli 8y ago
  I also found out that there are a few bad "managers" that end up raising because they are popular with people and their bosses. They usually have a very high EQ. You can see a few people with little technical acumen, shallow knowledge of the latest trends, very bad on processes and no work ethic that still rise in some organizations. These people spend a lot of time "managing up" on a side and on the other side they are also nice with their employees. They help them move up the ladder and pay higher bonuses demanding less work than other bosses. It is hard to find even good employees give a bad review to somebody that give them extra money and make them work "comfortably".

_robbywashere 8y ago

The criteria for candidate communication ability in the "example rubric" _sounds_ right, but is any of this backed by actual data?

boltzmannbrain 8y ago

Re "Don’t mistake productivity for engagement": The story is quite similar to my recent departure from a robotics startup. Even though the company had the suggested survey system in place, management made me feel like an engineering resource to be allocated rather than a person with career ambitions. The survey was one of several facades the CEO had in place.