The bar for "recruiting" is laughably low in this industry. Many companies seriously consider "have a clueless tech sourcer 2 years out of an econ degree telema

The bar for "recruiting" is laughably low in this industry. Many companies seriously consider "have a clueless tech sourcer 2 years out of an econ degree telemarket job openings with aggressive email spam funnel right into a hazing-style round of phone interviews and on-sites" to be "recruiting." It's very tough to take seriously the bemoaning about engineering hiring difficulty from the likes of pg and others when this is the case. To the extent companies are investing in the process, it seems to be look for more ways at how to reject people. Now companies want some technical project phone screen AND an algorithms on site AND a "design" review AND some sort of weird personality thing where they grill you on working with past managers and whether you mentored people. Find 99 reasons to ding you. By the way, the design review is usually run by someone 2 years out of school who works on their Jenkins configs and thinks the most important thing is that you magically read their mind and know the right "questions" to ask them. It's just barely tangentially related to actually working in the industry, which has the result it's actually biased against senior engineers, because ironically the standard for being hired as a senior engineer is actually being better at these interview games that juniors have more recently spent time preparing for. A lot of companies quite frankly look at what Google did, think "we're just as good as Google", and more or less copy what they do except add even more junk. These companies don't spend much of any time getting to know candidates, they will run some "events" that appeal to people with excessive free time, again mostly juniors. They haven't invested a hundredth of the massive PR push that Google has (Google literally got a box-office movie with Owen Wilson made to recruit), and they CERTAINLY don't want to offer Google-style RSU compensation packages. After all this "we have the best people" crap, "we have this rube golderberg style interview to filter out all the riff-raff" crap, they want to offer market salaries and some weak ISO package you will have zero chance of valuing accurately and leave 18 windows open for VCs to screw you. So, given all this, should you waste your time interviewing at companies like Stripe?