19 ms·

Lessons from Stripe

378 points by rspivak 7y ago

purple_ducks 7y ago
Not directed at author but I looked at his bio after reading the article. He spent his time mostly as an engineering manager and yet in his bio has: "I led engineering teams at Stripe" Do managers in software companies actually think they lead teams? I've seen or heard "led engineering" or variants so much from mid level management that I wonder if my perspective is skewed. Seems crazy to me.
- m12k 7y ago
  I don't think it's uncommon to have a 'lead of team leads' called an engineering manager. They're typically the people who were good enough at being team leads that they advance to making sure all the team leads are good at it too.
- rpedela 7y ago
  Yes? Why would you think otherwise?
  - alex_sf 7y ago
    I think his (somewhat murky) point was the there is a frequently a distinction between 'managing' and 'leading' a team, particularly a technical one. Managing is generally considered a role that involves HR/scheduling/career development type tasks, i.e. soft skills. Leading, alternatively, is perceived as a harder technical role. Sometimes involving overall architecture and design depending on the role. More hard skills.
    - seibelj 7y ago
      It would be difficult to be an effective engineering manager if one was not technical. Otherwise any people manager could be an engineering manager. Engineering managers don't necessarily get their hands dirty, but they need to understand what's really going on with their teams and their progress in order to make informed decisions.
- sergiotapia 7y ago
  Do you qualify the person with the most merged PR's as the leader of the engineering team then? Someone has to have the vision and the strength to keep things outside of that vision out of the scope of work and know how to say `No`.
- jakear 7y ago
  In my (limited) experience, engineering managers manage engineers. Product managers do not, though some think they do.
  - edoceo 7y ago
    And when they (PM) think they manage the engineers - oh heck
- burlesona 7y ago
  Two reasons it shouldn’t sound crazy: 1. Just grammatically, managers need some verb to use. If he said “I managed Engineering,” it would be really difficult to argue that isn’t what an engineering manager does. But good managers lead, so they prefer the word lead over manage, even though the meaning in context is quite similar. 2. You seem to be implying that managers suck and don’t know anything about engineering, so how could they claim leadership? Speaking from my career path, most eng managers come out of engineering and are pretty technical. At Atlassian (where I’m a front-line Engineering Manager), you have to earn your way to Senior Engineer before you can join the management track, and the managers for several steps up the ladder are accountable for technical outcomes. It’s very common in our office for the front line managers (aka Team Leads) to lead whiteboarding and pair a lot during the early phases of a project to make sure it’s built on a sound design, and to be similarly involved throughout projects to ensure they’re tracking to completion on schedule and hitting our quality bar. My understanding is Stripe works very similarly. So, yeah, I buy that he “led” engineering teams there.
  - sbarre 7y ago
    > But good managers lead, so they prefer the word lead over manage, even though the meaning in context is quite similar. I would actually argue that good managers _support_ their teams, they don't lead them. A tech lead or architect should be leading the engineering team, and the manager should be supporting the team's efforts and clearing the path for them.
- wbronitsky 7y ago
  Mark led engineering teams at Stripe. That is a fact that your assumptions cannot disprove.
vfc1 7y ago
I don't know, this super optimism as a value might lead to situations where something is going clearly in the wrong direction, but people get afraid of pointing it out due to fear of going against the company values, and getting natural overly optimistic personalities out of their delusional high and back into reality.
- bestouff 7y ago
  Sure. But maybe that means one could reword its "we're going headfirst into the wall" prophecy into something more constructive, like "I think we could avoid this pitfall, here's my plan".
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- bschne 7y ago
  Having thought about this issue a lot previously, I think it's important to not overgeneralize based on vague value statements. Optimism can possibly mean anything from not blocking new initiatives through year-long corporate approval processes to cult-like you-have-to-drink-our-kool-aid internal communication that shuts down any and all critical voices and oversells what a company is doing and where it is currently at even to their own employees internally. For me personally, optimism is a good thing when it means not taking issues as set in stone, genuinely believing that the future will be better than now and that one has some amount of control over that, and trying things out that might not work instantly - all while retaining one's critical thinking and being honest about the facts. I have never met anyone who works at stripe or heard an inside take, but from the interviews with the founders I've heard, they don't strike me as the kind of people to push the delusional kind of "optimism" and shut down critical voices.
- minxomat 7y ago
  I agree in the sense that small problems which have technical solutions should be pointed out and overcome. However, in later-stage startups and in larger companies, trying to change the direction might not be the wise thing to do. This highly depends on your position, but as an individual contributor and even as someone in the lower management lane (manager, director), your job most of the time is implementing the CEO's vision, whatever that is. If you find yourself disagreeing with that vision, it might be best to change jobs.[1] In smaller startups, where you might be able to steer more aggressively, you should still ask yourself whether the company is clearly in the wrong direction only from your perspective or if there are factors which you don't have any insight into (no matter how close you are to founder(s)) which would re-contextualize the issue. Not disagreeing, but these are some caveats which I found useful to keep in mind. [1] - There was a story about someone from Apple(?) here a while ago who was let go after a lunch with <someone important> where he expressed his dissatisfaction with the company's direction. He then took up japanese caligraphy. Maybe someone remembers and can link it here.
andrewingram 7y ago
How do you teach optimism in the way Stripe is looking for though? As someone with a hefty amount of anxiety and depression weighing down on me most of the time, I often feel like I'm the only person in the room who can't get excited about things, but I don't want to be the weight bringing everyone else down. Is there not a danger of this value becoming a proxy for "people with depression and similar mental health problems aren't welcome at Stripe"?
- draw_down 7y ago
  Your last sentence is saying the quiet part loud, IMO.
- _lm1s 7y ago
  I have a similar problem. I'm always pessimistic, stressful and anxious. After my job interview for a machine learning job, HR gave me a personaly test. It turns out that they were literally horrified by the results and told me that every response I made was the exact opposite they were looking for. I got the job nevertheless but mental issues do become a barrier in one's career. I knowingly try to be alone in the office, don't take any breaks and don't talk to anyone unless it's necessary. Haven't heard a complaint yet. But I would suggest to the opposite, communication is important.
  - rabidrat 7y ago
    That's interesting, what was the point of the personality test? I mean it's crappy if you can 'fail' it, so in that sense I'm glad it's not an actual hurdle, but then why give a candidate the test in the first place? If it's to know how best to work with you, then they should save it for after you've been hired.
    - _lm1s 7y ago
      They said they wanted to see if I was a good fit for the organization's culture. Technical interview went really well, so they did not cared that much about the test results. But they requested me to take the test again hoping I would get better results. What a joke :)
echelon 7y ago
How does one build a strong startup culture like Stripe? I'm looking to strike out on my own, and while I know there are other fundamental concerns I should be worried about, this is something that I continue to dwell on. A strong team can make or break a company. I'd appreciate any advice or reading material.
- tyingq 7y ago
  I don't know if this is right, but from the outside, it looks like a company where the tech team has the most seats at the table. Versus sales, or some separate product management team running the show. That model seems to work well with what Stripe does. It probably doesn't work well in many other niches.
- afarrell 7y ago
  > Reading material Patrick Lencioni has written a few good books on company culture. Some of them are in the "business novel" style of The Phoenix Project and Critical Chain, which has the benefit of working well in audiobook format. If you prefer more straightforward nonfiction, then read The Advantage.
- alexashka 7y ago
  Make money. Most problems in business are not problems if there is enough money to go around. By figuring out how to make money, you solve most other problems along the way.
- tim333 7y ago
  check out Lecture 11 - Hiring and Culture, Part 2 (Patrick and John Collison, Ben Silbermann) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Dl8rZ6qwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Dl8rZ6qwE and perhaps https://www.infoq.com/presentations/stripe-culture-2016/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/stripe-culture-2016/ though that's more corporate.
elwell 7y ago
> When considering ideas, we think “how might it work?” is more interesting than “why will it fail?” Engineering involves critical thinking. You should have a firm belief that what you wish to create can be created. However, that is simply a foundation upon which to throw as many "why will it fail?" permutations as you can generate. This isn't pessimism, it's the culling of error, like a sculpture from a block of marble.
- olau 7y ago
  There's a context-dependent trade-off between analyzing, using the currently available information and what can be reasonably be deduced from that, and experimenting.
- elliotf 7y ago
  The difference being having a more positive/helpful/constructive mindset. With "how might it work" you're proposing solutions to the potential "why will it fail" problems rather than dumping more obstacles in the way. "this will work if we do X because it will fail if Y" vs "this isn't going to work because Y" I think the prior would be a more pleasant experience.
- yawboakye 7y ago
  Some clarification on the "why will it fail?" question. It's different and less constructive than "how will it fail?" which asks for failure modes and mitigations. It's a superior discussion to "why will it fail?" That said, "why will it fail?" is also inferior to the pre-mortem discussion starter: "why did it fail?"
- pjmorris 7y ago
  Agreed. I recently read Fernando Corbato's Turing Award speech, "On Building Systems That Will Fail" [0] Corbato drove development of Multics and its predecessor, CTSS, laying the foundation for much of current operating systems practice. He states his main thesis as 'the question to ask when designing such systems is not: "if something will go wrong, but when will it?"' I do not think he asks this in a defeatist sense (look at what he built!), but in a realist sense. He claims that, for a sufficiently complicated system built on new ideas, that neither rigor in design nor thoroughness in testing is sufficient to account for all of the unintended consequences of the system's design. Without considering the negative consequences of new designs, one is apt to learn them by hard experience. [0] http://larch-www.lcs.mit.edu:8001/~corbato/turing91/ http://larch-www.lcs.mit.edu:8001/~corbato/turing91/
deedubaya 7y ago
It's interesting to hear an internal perspective of how "great" Stripe's recruiting processes is. As an external applicant, I would say it was better than most, but still an internal recruiter shit-show. Week-long windows between email responses, dropped balls, and even no-shows for scheduled calls. Seeing this contrast makes me wonder if Stripe employees are just high on their own supply? Recruiting is hard. I can only imagine it gets harder at scale. I'd bet that Stripe's best recruiting is done through employee referrals... and that is probably building a mono-culture.
- noirbot 7y ago
  Obviously anecdotal, but when I interviewed with Stripe earlier this year I saw both sides of this - I had a recruiter ghost me for almost a month and a number of times important information about interviews got lost in an email chain. It was about as messy as I would expect from any company that size trying to arrange interviews. That said, the interview process itself, once it was set up, was one of the best interview processes that I've participated in. The PDF they send about the questions and scope of each interview helped me know how to prepare. Each interview had a specific goal and angle on determining if I was a good engineer, and at the end of the day, I felt like we all had a good idea of each other. I ultimately didn't get the offer, but because the process was robust, I didn't have a regret of "I could have done better" or "These questions were unfair and I should have gotten the job". I was confident that Stripe had a good measure of my skills and mindset, and that they'd simply decided I wasn't a good fit. It's hard to really ask for more than than from the process itself. I can't say if it's effective for them, but at least to me, it seemed like Stripe had thought more about the interview process than most companies I've ever been with or interviewed with. There's obviously going to be implementation issues and problems around the specific people who have to implement it, but the plan itself seems well conceived.
  - decebalus1 7y ago
    I had an engineer leave my team (regrettable attrition, one of the best engineers I worked with) and accept a position at Stripe. I'm reading your description and impression of the interview process and it 100% matches what he told me about his experience. He managed to convince me to consider Stripe as my next career move.
bgentry 7y ago
I had the pleasure of working with Mark for ~3.5 years at Heroku just prior to him joining Stripe. Since leaving Stripe, he’s been working on research projects at Ink & Switch, one of which they recently chose to focus on as a stand-alone business: https://museapp.com/ https://museapp.com/
pliao39 7y ago
I'm impressed that Stripe has been able to maintain it's culture over the years, as it grows in headcount and size. I recall reading this blog from 2012 (although I read it in 2014): https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes-culture https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes-culture And the consistency between then and now is fairly impressive. Ambition and Optimism seem like codified values that have emerged over time. But the one thread that is consistent is their thoughtfulness on hiring. It should be no surprise to anyone here though, given that their interviewing doesn't consist of the standard 4-5 leetcode questions, but rather much more thoughtful rounds like a bug squash, architecture, and lots of hands on coding - algorithm rounds exist, but kept to a minimum. Not to say that this is good and should be the new standard - just that it is extremely thoughtful and was going against the grain. Wish more companies would think about their hiring practices from first principles and didn't just copy Google
- tempsy 7y ago
  Unless you actually work there, how are you so confident that Stripe's actual culture has been "maintained" outside of reading company sanctioned blog posts/think pieces...? Or that the actual culture has ever even closely mirrored the one that has been outwardly portrayed? Glassdoor is not perfect, but I think I get more insight into the reality on the ground looking through recent reviews than a blog post, and at least from what I can see recent reviews over the last few months are extremely mixed.
leowoo91 7y ago
Most values and keeping the team healthy, reflects the vision of founders I suppose.
docker_up 7y ago
One criticism I've heard from former Stripe employees is that many of the people in high positions are Stripe are young with no management training, especially in the non-engineering parts of the company. So it sets up for a lot of problems, and cultural problems because they don't know how to manage people or large organizations well.
- disgruntledphd2 7y ago
  Sounds like basically every successful startup in Silicon Valley. Certainly I heard the same from friends at FB and Google back in the day.
SaveClyde 7y ago
I recently had my onsite for Engineering Manager role at Stripe. Stripe interview process is lengthy, I met 14-15 people. There's a mini onsite (3 45 minute interviews) if you cleaer that one there will be a full day onsite which consists 1:1 Management Roleplay, Technical Roleplay, Technical Discussion, 3 behavioral interviews there is a lot of overlap between mini onsite and full day onsite. After meeting so many folks and spending so much time, the feedback you get is minimal. In my case the recruiter informed that everything was great but the team did not feel the spark.
- achow 7y ago
  Wow! I wonder how much of interview overhead it would be for Sr Enggrs and Managers. Multiple rounds of interviews like this is overkill.
  - klenwell 7y ago
    No kidding. When I hear about long grueling hiring processes like this, I wonder what the hiring company is finding out in the 8th hour of interviews that they didn't in the 7th. Or in the case of one job my sister applied to: the 8th interview! In this case, maybe that one person, at the end of a long day, who didn't feel the spark?
  - robocat 7y ago
    Maybe to get internal buyin? It's not so easy to flip the bozo-bit and write someone off if you were involved with the interview process to hire someone.
- ticmasta 7y ago
  >> everything was great but the team did not feel the spark. That's a really poor response. I can understand that many of us would have that same implicit gut feeling, but recruitment, and especially supposedly exemplar recruiters like Stripe, have an obligation to articulate their reasons for decisions in a much more grounded framework. When I say obligation I mean primarily to their internal stakeholders (to candidates would be nice, but let's be realistic here); the team's primary objective is to define & put process around finding, assessing and hiring people, not optimize for efficiently applying bias and "gut feeling" quickly to large pools of people.
tempsy 7y ago
Stripe's Glassdoor profile consistently perplexes me. For a company that large that has been around as long as it has to only have 81 reviews is very strange. There is no easy way with Glassdoor to get a true measure of # reviews per total active FTEs per year but it feels much lower than other companies that are both younger and smaller.
- novok 7y ago
  With a staff level under a few hundred, it isn't that strange. People only tend to complain more about negative experiences vs. positive and the internet lurker rule (%99 lurk, %1 write content) explains the rest of the numbers.
starptech 7y ago
... and why have you left stripe ??? :/
- iliekcomputers 7y ago
  You can feel good about a workplace and still leave (need a change, better opportunities elsewhere etc)
kbyatnal 7y ago
The point about optimism is very interesting and I completely agree re: ambition - hard problems are more feasible than easy ones. However, I don't agree with the point about ad clicks. > "Ambitious problems for Stripe look like enabling more internet businesses and supporting entrepreneurs in more countries, not getting more ad clicks." I used to have a similar mindset until I actually ended up working on Ads at Google. There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of small business merchants, mom and pop stores, etc that rely on ads (be that Google, Facebook, Instagram, whatever) to run their businesses. In fact, these are the vast majority of ad buyers! The huge multi-billion dollar corporations are far and few between. That's what drove many of the engineers (including myself). A small increase in conversion ratio (be that through better ranking, filtering, query interpretation, etc) meant a huge deal to these merchants and in some cases, could be the difference between life and death for some of these small companies. And at the scale Google operates at, very small incremental changes = huge impact. The engineers and projects, at least in my team, were driven by exactly the same goals mentioned here - to "enable more businesses" and "support entrepreneurs" all across the world. It's easy to get sucked into the hype and blanket statements of "ads are bad" (I was guilty of that too). I've since left Google, but that experience really internalized for me that things like this are never so black and white.
- Allower 7y ago
  I don't believe this for a second. You done been duped son
- ace_of_spades 7y ago
  thanks for this interesting perspective, I haven’t really thought about ads from this point of view before. However, does the desire of advertisement buyers to convert justify the profiling and tracking of peoples behaviors to the extent that it is happening? You don’t seem to provide any reasonable justification beyond that not only big but also small companies profit from this state of affairs. This doesn’t make the power and behavior of google any less creepy or undesirable.
  - awillen 7y ago
rossdavidh 7y ago
I have seen a lot more problems come from an excess of optimism, than an dearth of it. You should not be so optimistic that you don't think about how to roll back changes if they turn out to be a bad idea, for example. Backups and rollback plans and code reviews and etc. are all fundamentally pessimistic. An excess of optimism can lead to no plan B. Every startup pivot relied upon NOT having so much optimism that you will not believe a pivot is required. Not to say that optimism is all bad, but it's not all good either, and in the U.S. corporate world I see a lot more problems from an excess of optimism than from the reverse.
kamyarg 7y ago
Optimism I believe does have a very positive effect on both productivity of the people and how much they love working in a place. But in my experience overdoing it might make your employees start developing this "This does not make sense at all, why are these people living in dreams?" mindset. From chats I had, I could feel some of my colleagues also had a hesitation towards the goals etc. It was interesting to see people become frustrated especially if they have been used to being slightly pessimistic and cautious due to their background(title(Finance background), nationality(mostly non-US and UK people) etc.) Overall very nice article though, I do believe moving fast in hiring is the most yield/effort you can do to hire great people. Best companies I worked for(above one included) moved extremely fast in hiring, worst take 2-3 weeks just to reply to an email let alone scheduling an onsite. Wish decision makers in recruiting knew this. p.s. love the Stripe Docs and Technical blog posts, this one specifically was very informative: https://stripe.com/en-de/blog/api-versioning https://stripe.com/en-de/blog/api-versioning

378 points by rspivak 7y ago

Not directed at author but I looked at his bio after reading the article. He spent his time mostly as an engineering manager and yet in his bio has: "I led engineering teams at Stripe" Do managers in software companies actually think they lead teams? I've seen or heard "led engineering" or variants so much from mid level management that I wonder if my perspective is skewed. Seems crazy to me.

m12k 7y ago
I don't think it's uncommon to have a 'lead of team leads' called an engineering manager. They're typically the people who were good enough at being team leads that they advance to making sure all the team leads are good at it too.
rpedela 7y ago
Yes? Why would you think otherwise?
- alex_sf 7y ago
  I think his (somewhat murky) point was the there is a frequently a distinction between 'managing' and 'leading' a team, particularly a technical one. Managing is generally considered a role that involves HR/scheduling/career development type tasks, i.e. soft skills. Leading, alternatively, is perceived as a harder technical role. Sometimes involving overall architecture and design depending on the role. More hard skills.
  - seibelj 7y ago
    It would be difficult to be an effective engineering manager if one was not technical. Otherwise any people manager could be an engineering manager. Engineering managers don't necessarily get their hands dirty, but they need to understand what's really going on with their teams and their progress in order to make informed decisions.
sergiotapia 7y ago
Do you qualify the person with the most merged PR's as the leader of the engineering team then? Someone has to have the vision and the strength to keep things outside of that vision out of the scope of work and know how to say `No`.
jakear 7y ago
In my (limited) experience, engineering managers manage engineers. Product managers do not, though some think they do.
- edoceo 7y ago
  And when they (PM) think they manage the engineers - oh heck
burlesona 7y ago
Two reasons it shouldn’t sound crazy: 1. Just grammatically, managers need some verb to use. If he said “I managed Engineering,” it would be really difficult to argue that isn’t what an engineering manager does. But good managers lead, so they prefer the word lead over manage, even though the meaning in context is quite similar. 2. You seem to be implying that managers suck and don’t know anything about engineering, so how could they claim leadership? Speaking from my career path, most eng managers come out of engineering and are pretty technical. At Atlassian (where I’m a front-line Engineering Manager), you have to earn your way to Senior Engineer before you can join the management track, and the managers for several steps up the ladder are accountable for technical outcomes. It’s very common in our office for the front line managers (aka Team Leads) to lead whiteboarding and pair a lot during the early phases of a project to make sure it’s built on a sound design, and to be similarly involved throughout projects to ensure they’re tracking to completion on schedule and hitting our quality bar. My understanding is Stripe works very similarly. So, yeah, I buy that he “led” engineering teams there.
- sbarre 7y ago
  > But good managers lead, so they prefer the word lead over manage, even though the meaning in context is quite similar. I would actually argue that good managers _support_ their teams, they don't lead them. A tech lead or architect should be leading the engineering team, and the manager should be supporting the team's efforts and clearing the path for them.
wbronitsky 7y ago
Mark led engineering teams at Stripe. That is a fact that your assumptions cannot disprove.

vfc1 7y ago

I don't know, this super optimism as a value might lead to situations where something is going clearly in the wrong direction, but people get afraid of pointing it out due to fear of going against the company values, and getting natural overly optimistic personalities out of their delusional high and back into reality.

bestouff 7y ago
Sure. But maybe that means one could reword its "we're going headfirst into the wall" prophecy into something more constructive, like "I think we could avoid this pitfall, here's my plan".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bschne 7y ago
Having thought about this issue a lot previously, I think it's important to not overgeneralize based on vague value statements. Optimism can possibly mean anything from not blocking new initiatives through year-long corporate approval processes to cult-like you-have-to-drink-our-kool-aid internal communication that shuts down any and all critical voices and oversells what a company is doing and where it is currently at even to their own employees internally. For me personally, optimism is a good thing when it means not taking issues as set in stone, genuinely believing that the future will be better than now and that one has some amount of control over that, and trying things out that might not work instantly - all while retaining one's critical thinking and being honest about the facts. I have never met anyone who works at stripe or heard an inside take, but from the interviews with the founders I've heard, they don't strike me as the kind of people to push the delusional kind of "optimism" and shut down critical voices.
minxomat 7y ago
I agree in the sense that small problems which have technical solutions should be pointed out and overcome. However, in later-stage startups and in larger companies, trying to change the direction might not be the wise thing to do. This highly depends on your position, but as an individual contributor and even as someone in the lower management lane (manager, director), your job most of the time is implementing the CEO's vision, whatever that is. If you find yourself disagreeing with that vision, it might be best to change jobs.[1] In smaller startups, where you might be able to steer more aggressively, you should still ask yourself whether the company is clearly in the wrong direction only from your perspective or if there are factors which you don't have any insight into (no matter how close you are to founder(s)) which would re-contextualize the issue. Not disagreeing, but these are some caveats which I found useful to keep in mind. [1] - There was a story about someone from Apple(?) here a while ago who was let go after a lunch with <someone important> where he expressed his dissatisfaction with the company's direction. He then took up japanese caligraphy. Maybe someone remembers and can link it here.

andrewingram 7y ago

How do you teach optimism in the way Stripe is looking for though? As someone with a hefty amount of anxiety and depression weighing down on me most of the time, I often feel like I'm the only person in the room who can't get excited about things, but I don't want to be the weight bringing everyone else down. Is there not a danger of this value becoming a proxy for "people with depression and similar mental health problems aren't welcome at Stripe"?

draw_down 7y ago
Your last sentence is saying the quiet part loud, IMO.
_lm1s 7y ago
I have a similar problem. I'm always pessimistic, stressful and anxious. After my job interview for a machine learning job, HR gave me a personaly test. It turns out that they were literally horrified by the results and told me that every response I made was the exact opposite they were looking for. I got the job nevertheless but mental issues do become a barrier in one's career. I knowingly try to be alone in the office, don't take any breaks and don't talk to anyone unless it's necessary. Haven't heard a complaint yet. But I would suggest to the opposite, communication is important.
- rabidrat 7y ago
  That's interesting, what was the point of the personality test? I mean it's crappy if you can 'fail' it, so in that sense I'm glad it's not an actual hurdle, but then why give a candidate the test in the first place? If it's to know how best to work with you, then they should save it for after you've been hired.
  - _lm1s 7y ago
    They said they wanted to see if I was a good fit for the organization's culture. Technical interview went really well, so they did not cared that much about the test results. But they requested me to take the test again hoping I would get better results. What a joke :)

echelon 7y ago

How does one build a strong startup culture like Stripe? I'm looking to strike out on my own, and while I know there are other fundamental concerns I should be worried about, this is something that I continue to dwell on. A strong team can make or break a company. I'd appreciate any advice or reading material.

tyingq 7y ago
I don't know if this is right, but from the outside, it looks like a company where the tech team has the most seats at the table. Versus sales, or some separate product management team running the show. That model seems to work well with what Stripe does. It probably doesn't work well in many other niches.
afarrell 7y ago
> Reading material Patrick Lencioni has written a few good books on company culture. Some of them are in the "business novel" style of The Phoenix Project and Critical Chain, which has the benefit of working well in audiobook format. If you prefer more straightforward nonfiction, then read The Advantage.
alexashka 7y ago
Make money. Most problems in business are not problems if there is enough money to go around. By figuring out how to make money, you solve most other problems along the way.
tim333 7y ago
check out Lecture 11 - Hiring and Culture, Part 2 (Patrick and John Collison, Ben Silbermann) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Dl8rZ6qwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Dl8rZ6qwE and perhaps https://www.infoq.com/presentations/stripe-culture-2016/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/stripe-culture-2016/ though that's more corporate.

elwell 7y ago

> When considering ideas, we think “how might it work?” is more interesting than “why will it fail?” Engineering involves critical thinking. You should have a firm belief that what you wish to create can be created. However, that is simply a foundation upon which to throw as many "why will it fail?" permutations as you can generate. This isn't pessimism, it's the culling of error, like a sculpture from a block of marble.

olau 7y ago
There's a context-dependent trade-off between analyzing, using the currently available information and what can be reasonably be deduced from that, and experimenting.
elliotf 7y ago
The difference being having a more positive/helpful/constructive mindset. With "how might it work" you're proposing solutions to the potential "why will it fail" problems rather than dumping more obstacles in the way. "this will work if we do X because it will fail if Y" vs "this isn't going to work because Y" I think the prior would be a more pleasant experience.
yawboakye 7y ago
Some clarification on the "why will it fail?" question. It's different and less constructive than "how will it fail?" which asks for failure modes and mitigations. It's a superior discussion to "why will it fail?" That said, "why will it fail?" is also inferior to the pre-mortem discussion starter: "why did it fail?"
pjmorris 7y ago
Agreed. I recently read Fernando Corbato's Turing Award speech, "On Building Systems That Will Fail" [0] Corbato drove development of Multics and its predecessor, CTSS, laying the foundation for much of current operating systems practice. He states his main thesis as 'the question to ask when designing such systems is not: "if something will go wrong, but when will it?"' I do not think he asks this in a defeatist sense (look at what he built!), but in a realist sense. He claims that, for a sufficiently complicated system built on new ideas, that neither rigor in design nor thoroughness in testing is sufficient to account for all of the unintended consequences of the system's design. Without considering the negative consequences of new designs, one is apt to learn them by hard experience. [0] http://larch-www.lcs.mit.edu:8001/~corbato/turing91/ http://larch-www.lcs.mit.edu:8001/~corbato/turing91/

deedubaya 7y ago

It's interesting to hear an internal perspective of how "great" Stripe's recruiting processes is. As an external applicant, I would say it was better than most, but still an internal recruiter shit-show. Week-long windows between email responses, dropped balls, and even no-shows for scheduled calls. Seeing this contrast makes me wonder if Stripe employees are just high on their own supply? Recruiting is hard. I can only imagine it gets harder at scale. I'd bet that Stripe's best recruiting is done through employee referrals... and that is probably building a mono-culture.

noirbot 7y ago
Obviously anecdotal, but when I interviewed with Stripe earlier this year I saw both sides of this - I had a recruiter ghost me for almost a month and a number of times important information about interviews got lost in an email chain. It was about as messy as I would expect from any company that size trying to arrange interviews. That said, the interview process itself, once it was set up, was one of the best interview processes that I've participated in. The PDF they send about the questions and scope of each interview helped me know how to prepare. Each interview had a specific goal and angle on determining if I was a good engineer, and at the end of the day, I felt like we all had a good idea of each other. I ultimately didn't get the offer, but because the process was robust, I didn't have a regret of "I could have done better" or "These questions were unfair and I should have gotten the job". I was confident that Stripe had a good measure of my skills and mindset, and that they'd simply decided I wasn't a good fit. It's hard to really ask for more than than from the process itself. I can't say if it's effective for them, but at least to me, it seemed like Stripe had thought more about the interview process than most companies I've ever been with or interviewed with. There's obviously going to be implementation issues and problems around the specific people who have to implement it, but the plan itself seems well conceived.
- decebalus1 7y ago
  I had an engineer leave my team (regrettable attrition, one of the best engineers I worked with) and accept a position at Stripe. I'm reading your description and impression of the interview process and it 100% matches what he told me about his experience. He managed to convince me to consider Stripe as my next career move.

bgentry 7y ago

I had the pleasure of working with Mark for ~3.5 years at Heroku just prior to him joining Stripe. Since leaving Stripe, he’s been working on research projects at Ink & Switch, one of which they recently chose to focus on as a stand-alone business: https://museapp.com/ https://museapp.com/

pliao39 7y ago

I'm impressed that Stripe has been able to maintain it's culture over the years, as it grows in headcount and size. I recall reading this blog from 2012 (although I read it in 2014): https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes-culture https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes-culture And the consistency between then and now is fairly impressive. Ambition and Optimism seem like codified values that have emerged over time. But the one thread that is consistent is their thoughtfulness on hiring. It should be no surprise to anyone here though, given that their interviewing doesn't consist of the standard 4-5 leetcode questions, but rather much more thoughtful rounds like a bug squash, architecture, and lots of hands on coding - algorithm rounds exist, but kept to a minimum. Not to say that this is good and should be the new standard - just that it is extremely thoughtful and was going against the grain. Wish more companies would think about their hiring practices from first principles and didn't just copy Google

tempsy 7y ago
Unless you actually work there, how are you so confident that Stripe's actual culture has been "maintained" outside of reading company sanctioned blog posts/think pieces...? Or that the actual culture has ever even closely mirrored the one that has been outwardly portrayed? Glassdoor is not perfect, but I think I get more insight into the reality on the ground looking through recent reviews than a blog post, and at least from what I can see recent reviews over the last few months are extremely mixed.

leowoo91 7y ago

Most values and keeping the team healthy, reflects the vision of founders I suppose.

docker_up 7y ago

One criticism I've heard from former Stripe employees is that many of the people in high positions are Stripe are young with no management training, especially in the non-engineering parts of the company. So it sets up for a lot of problems, and cultural problems because they don't know how to manage people or large organizations well.

disgruntledphd2 7y ago
Sounds like basically every successful startup in Silicon Valley. Certainly I heard the same from friends at FB and Google back in the day.

SaveClyde 7y ago

I recently had my onsite for Engineering Manager role at Stripe. Stripe interview process is lengthy, I met 14-15 people. There's a mini onsite (3 45 minute interviews) if you cleaer that one there will be a full day onsite which consists 1:1 Management Roleplay, Technical Roleplay, Technical Discussion, 3 behavioral interviews there is a lot of overlap between mini onsite and full day onsite. After meeting so many folks and spending so much time, the feedback you get is minimal. In my case the recruiter informed that everything was great but the team did not feel the spark.

achow 7y ago
Wow! I wonder how much of interview overhead it would be for Sr Enggrs and Managers. Multiple rounds of interviews like this is overkill.
- klenwell 7y ago
  No kidding. When I hear about long grueling hiring processes like this, I wonder what the hiring company is finding out in the 8th hour of interviews that they didn't in the 7th. Or in the case of one job my sister applied to: the 8th interview! In this case, maybe that one person, at the end of a long day, who didn't feel the spark?
- robocat 7y ago
  Maybe to get internal buyin? It's not so easy to flip the bozo-bit and write someone off if you were involved with the interview process to hire someone.
ticmasta 7y ago
>> everything was great but the team did not feel the spark. That's a really poor response. I can understand that many of us would have that same implicit gut feeling, but recruitment, and especially supposedly exemplar recruiters like Stripe, have an obligation to articulate their reasons for decisions in a much more grounded framework. When I say obligation I mean primarily to their internal stakeholders (to candidates would be nice, but let's be realistic here); the team's primary objective is to define & put process around finding, assessing and hiring people, not optimize for efficiently applying bias and "gut feeling" quickly to large pools of people.

tempsy 7y ago

Stripe's Glassdoor profile consistently perplexes me. For a company that large that has been around as long as it has to only have 81 reviews is very strange. There is no easy way with Glassdoor to get a true measure of # reviews per total active FTEs per year but it feels much lower than other companies that are both younger and smaller.

novok 7y ago
With a staff level under a few hundred, it isn't that strange. People only tend to complain more about negative experiences vs. positive and the internet lurker rule (%99 lurk, %1 write content) explains the rest of the numbers.

starptech 7y ago

... and why have you left stripe ??? :/

iliekcomputers 7y ago
You can feel good about a workplace and still leave (need a change, better opportunities elsewhere etc)

kbyatnal 7y ago

The point about optimism is very interesting and I completely agree re: ambition - hard problems are more feasible than easy ones. However, I don't agree with the point about ad clicks. > "Ambitious problems for Stripe look like enabling more internet businesses and supporting entrepreneurs in more countries, not getting more ad clicks." I used to have a similar mindset until I actually ended up working on Ads at Google. There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of small business merchants, mom and pop stores, etc that rely on ads (be that Google, Facebook, Instagram, whatever) to run their businesses. In fact, these are the vast majority of ad buyers! The huge multi-billion dollar corporations are far and few between. That's what drove many of the engineers (including myself). A small increase in conversion ratio (be that through better ranking, filtering, query interpretation, etc) meant a huge deal to these merchants and in some cases, could be the difference between life and death for some of these small companies. And at the scale Google operates at, very small incremental changes = huge impact. The engineers and projects, at least in my team, were driven by exactly the same goals mentioned here - to "enable more businesses" and "support entrepreneurs" all across the world. It's easy to get sucked into the hype and blanket statements of "ads are bad" (I was guilty of that too). I've since left Google, but that experience really internalized for me that things like this are never so black and white.

Allower 7y ago
I don't believe this for a second. You done been duped son
ace_of_spades 7y ago
thanks for this interesting perspective, I haven’t really thought about ads from this point of view before. However, does the desire of advertisement buyers to convert justify the profiling and tracking of peoples behaviors to the extent that it is happening? You don’t seem to provide any reasonable justification beyond that not only big but also small companies profit from this state of affairs. This doesn’t make the power and behavior of google any less creepy or undesirable.
- awillen 7y ago

rossdavidh 7y ago

I have seen a lot more problems come from an excess of optimism, than an dearth of it. You should not be so optimistic that you don't think about how to roll back changes if they turn out to be a bad idea, for example. Backups and rollback plans and code reviews and etc. are all fundamentally pessimistic. An excess of optimism can lead to no plan B. Every startup pivot relied upon NOT having so much optimism that you will not believe a pivot is required. Not to say that optimism is all bad, but it's not all good either, and in the U.S. corporate world I see a lot more problems from an excess of optimism than from the reverse.

kamyarg 7y ago

Optimism I believe does have a very positive effect on both productivity of the people and how much they love working in a place. But in my experience overdoing it might make your employees start developing this "This does not make sense at all, why are these people living in dreams?" mindset. From chats I had, I could feel some of my colleagues also had a hesitation towards the goals etc. It was interesting to see people become frustrated especially if they have been used to being slightly pessimistic and cautious due to their background(title(Finance background), nationality(mostly non-US and UK people) etc.) Overall very nice article though, I do believe moving fast in hiring is the most yield/effort you can do to hire great people. Best companies I worked for(above one included) moved extremely fast in hiring, worst take 2-3 weeks just to reply to an email let alone scheduling an onsite. Wish decision makers in recruiting knew this. p.s. love the Stripe Docs and Technical blog posts, this one specifically was very informative: https://stripe.com/en-de/blog/api-versioning https://stripe.com/en-de/blog/api-versioning