21 ms·

Kind of crazy how all these articles come out about what it's like working at Stripe and how to apply. Everyone I've talked to who has applied has not received

by _corym 6y ago

Kind of crazy how all these articles come out about what it's like working at Stripe and how to apply. Everyone I've talked to who has applied has not received a response from their application. Even in my most recent experience I wrote a cover letter, reached out to multiple Stripe recruiters. Most of them either ignored me, or said that they were not working on that role and said my status is still "pending". I imagine that Stripe's recruiting team is overwhelmed but it was unfortunate that they weren't able to get back to me. I ended up accepting an engineering manager position over payments at another company.

saagarjha 6y ago
At almost every large, successful company there is a huge disconnect between what hiring is screening for and what corporate blog posts might suggest, to the point of engineers themselves being unaware of how the experience is for most applicants (after all, they are self-selected…) Usually this boils down to "you don't seem to have enough experience" or "you don't know anyone on the team who can vouch for you to get through the initial resume screen". A real shame, since it leaves a number of qualified applicants in a poor position, but presumably Stripe has enough people applying that they can afford passing up people.
pc 6y ago
I'm sorry to hear this and apologize. We're definitely still a comparatively small team wishing we had more efficient ways to handle our inbound funnel. (We do have some ideas here.) But this is good feedback and we should absolutely have provided a better experience.
- ditonal 6y ago
  Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad candidate experience is a lack of resources.
  - ss3000 6y ago
    Exactly, it's clearly not a lack of resources, but explicitly not prioritizating candidate experience for candidates you're not actively pursuing. Which, by the way I think is a totally valid decision to make, but let's not kid around and make it sound like your hands were tied.
    - pc 6y ago
      There are two somewhat separate issues, I think. (1) The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people. We'll do the best we can to identify promising people but a lot of people will get something somewhat functionally equivalent to a form rejection. You could argue that this is merely a prioritization decision -- we could keep hiring recruiters until everyone could be individually assessed -- but doing so would require a recruiting team of comparable magnitude to the rest of the Stripe organization and so the current state is an unfortunate compromise given the current constraints and given the decision to have an open application form (which is, I think, on net better for everyone). (2) Cases where people at Stripe mishandled the process. I know for a fact that some of the anecdotes shared in the thread are from many years ago, and I know that our process has improved since then (we have empirical data to this effect), but we're also acutely aware that we continue to make mistakes -- recruiting is a high-stakes and complex process with a lot of fallible moving parts. For whatever it's worth, we issue CSAT surveys to every candidate who interviews (about 6,000 onsite interviews in 2019), and track the results both at the aggregate Stripe level and at the individual recruiter level. And I get why some people here sound so annoyed -- what might be "another entry in a database" to a recruiter or hiring manager is "the future of my career" to someone on the other side. While it's always hard to know what to make of a set of anecdotes, and while our referral rate among Stripe employees is very high today, I'm nonetheless bothered by the number of cases shared here, and we're going to be digging in. (Specific anecdotes with more concrete dates or data are welcome at patrick@stripe.com.)
      - gault8121 6y ago
        Couldn't you "pen test" your own hiring process? Have some folks stage applications and see the process failures first hand. You might get better data from running these experiments yourself rather than through a survey.
- sigstoat 6y ago
  what sort of ideas are required besides sending an email to your IT folks and telling them to set up a JIRA project for tracking job applications? you could, in an afternoon, ensure that no applications are ever mysteriously forgotten about.
  - polote 6y ago
    All that is already included in any ATS (applicant tracking system) on the market
- defen 6y ago
  Crazy suggestion: figure out a way to dogfood your hiring process. Have an engineer with a few years experience at Stripe try to get through the application process and see what kind of feedback they bring back. Kind of like secret shoppers but for hiring.
  - mjayhn 6y ago
    Don't forget to send often marginalized people through as well!
- rochester46 6y ago
  This is such an insulting excuse. Ironically, this is almost the exact same attitude I got in my poor experience interviewing with Stripe. Interviewers were constantly late to our calls and mixed up who would be interviewing me more than once. Despite that, I still was told I was going to receive an offer... only to be ghosted for weeks. Once the recruiter finally reached back out, they said the position had been cancelled but they would find me another position. Spoiler: I never heard back from them, and they ignored all of my further communications. Throughout all of this, I was apologized to several times (credit is due there, I guess) and each time the excuse was "ha ha sorry things are such a mess, that's just how things are when you work at a start up!" First of all, "haha we're a startup" is not a valid excuse for being late to meetings and ignoring communication. Second: you're a company worth tens of billions of dollars, have thousands of employees in offices around the globe, and were founded a decade ago. You are not a startup. You are not a "small team". Stop using it as an excuse.
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    > each time the excuse was "ha ha sorry things are such a mess, that's just how things are when you work at a start up!" First of all, "haha we're a startup" is not a valid excuse for being late to meetings and ignoring communication. Pretending to act like a startup has become a cover for being sloppy at big companies. People want to pick and choose what it means to work like a startup, and usually they choose the aspects that give them flimsy excuses for bad behavior. In reality, my experience with actual small startups has been that people are better at arriving to meetings on time and following through with commitments because small teams mean everyone knows each other. If you don't show up to the meeting, we can see you across the small office and hold you accountable. It's the big companies where accountability starts to disintegrate. People know they can get away with dropping balls all over the place as long as they get their OKRs finished for quarterly review. Things start to slip through the cracks because that person you're dealing with is just another e-mail address, not your close coworker who sits on the other side of the room.
- lowiqengineer 6y ago
  Does your funnel explicitly exclude people from state schools or lower tier FAANGs? Seems like it does casually browsing LinkedIn.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- meowsnow 6y ago
  My college classmate put in a referral for a specific role a couple of weeks ago, and no word. Not even an email acknowledgement that my job application is in the system.
polote 6y ago
Well I don't know for Stripe but subconsciously recruiters will always consider people who apply to be needy compared to people who are 'hunted' via Linkedin. When you do that kind of blog posts, you try to improve the image of the company externally so that more people want to work there. It could help with more people applying but also increase the acceptance rate of the offers. When you have a lot of people applying then you just cherry pick the best ones
OliverGilan 6y ago
I applied for a new grad position two months ago, did the coding challenge and passed all test cases with clean code and time to spare and haven't heard a peep from them since. It's a shame considering how I only hear good things about the company and the recruiting process but almost all the big companies I've applied to have at least had the decency to let me know they aren't moving forward
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  what an amazing industry we work in! denying top talent every day because people aren't motivated enough to check emails, make phone calls, click buttons to schedule things.
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    Stripe likely has pick of the cream for open positions. It has been public knowledge for a while that they're a rocket ship, and that attracts top talent by definition (in addition to sharks and wolves [0] I'd presume). [0] https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-story-from-steve-yegge.html https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-story-from-s...
    - varjag 6y ago
      Overwhelmed or not, ghosting after coding challenge/technical interview is unacceptable.
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        Correct. Never responding after an application? Par for the course. But asking someone to complete a coding challenge or even an interview and then ghosting is downright unprofessional and should be unacceptable.
      - lioeters 6y ago
        Totally agree. From what we can see in this thread, when a recruiter / hiring manager / HR department makes it a regular practice to ghost interviewed candidates, it has a significant effect on the company's reputation - that they lack common decency and respect. It does not seem worth it for whatever time/effort they might have saved by such behavior. To put it another way, it seems it'd be worth spending time and effort to improve the process and experience, to improve such a reputation.
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ryanSrich 6y ago
Oh man. I have a juicy Stripe story from a friend, but I'd rather not share all of the details in case anyone from Stripe is here listening. The gist is that I had a friend apply, go through a few interviews, and then just get completely ghosted. After several emails and attempts to reach out, the hiring manager replied to his email with a two word reply when my friend asked about his application status. That reply was "no thanks".
- wbronitsky 6y ago
  In my experience, stories like this are par for the course. While at Stripe, a few of my close friends and former co-workers were treated so poorly during the application process that I stopped referring anyone over a year before I left.
  - slumpt_ 6y ago
    Yeah. I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of these blog posts are just astroturfing. Well designed astroturfing, nonetheless. Edit: Astroturfing is the wrong word, perhaps. What I mean to say is vocalized better in the replies. These all should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. A rock of salt?
    - wbronitsky 6y ago
      I don't see how that would be possible. If you say you like working someplace, we know that you work there. You couldn't possibly be hiding who is paying you. I don't think that is a fair accusation. I think it would be much better said that we should take with a grain of salt anyone's assessment of their current job.
      - slumpt_ 6y ago
        Fair. Wrong word choice. The point just being that there could be a lot of company... encouragement... to be vocal about what you think of working at the org. And of course, to the point you raise, we must always take that with a grain of salt. Nobody is going to come to the table with complete honesty about the problems at a company with their name right next to it. Within reason, at least.
dangrover 6y ago
This happened to a friend too, got totally ghosted by Stripe. This is generally how our industry works, though, which is that it's not worth it to go through loop for a job unless you were referred by someone on the inside.
deleted 6y ago
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mgraczyk 6y ago
I interviewed in March, thought I did really well in the interviews, had great conversations with the hiring manager etc. After Covid hit they told me they were postponing hiring decisions and I never heard anything since. Sort of a weird way to manage things but I suppose the lockdowns have added quite a bit of chaos.
znull 6y ago
I'm surprised to hear so many in this thread had negative experiences. My experience as an applicant at Stripe was stellar from beginning to end, probably the most professional and well-executed interview process I've seen in my career. I can say that without bias because I ended up choosing another offer, but it was really difficult to turn down Stripe's after that.
- OliverGilan 6y ago
  When did you go through this process? I imagine they get a lot more applications nowadays
superfrank 6y ago
I do mainly frontend work and am just shy of 10 years experience. My resume is solid and I can at least get my foot in the door at well known companies including FAANG. I'm not saying I'm going to get the job, but I feel like I can at least get a response. I was job hunting earlier this year due to my last company (a fintech start up) shutting down and Stripe was the only company that just handed me an immediate "No" without even a recruiter call. I know one other engineer who is more mid level and she said she had applied and never even got a response. I harbor no ill will toward them, but I'm really curious what their hiring criteria is and why it seems so different that most of the other major companies out there.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  I'm tangentially familiar with the process, so let me paint a picture. Imagine you have enough high-quality candidates such that you could have every single employee interviewing candidates all day every day, doing no other work. What do you do? In the real world, most engineers top out at one or two phone screens a week, and/or one or two on-site interviews a week. Sometimes more. Each is 45 minutes at least, usually an hour. Each involves writing deliberate, thoughtful feedback and a professional assessment. Candidates that do well lead to decision meetings that take more time for all the interviewers to discuss -- candidates that do poorly can circuit-break. Then there is scheduling! Is there physical space available for the candidate to interview? Can we get all the necessary interviewers? What if one or more of them can't make it (sick, etc.)? What if the candidate needs to reschedule? Time zones? Holidays? Imagine Stripe has 100 recruiters (this is at least accurate within an order of magnitude). What does the back-of-the-napkin math look like for their maximum interviewing bandwidth? Hiring is a really hard problem, even for well-equipped organizations. Even the best in the world do it badly sometimes. And the anecdote cases tend to shout the loudest. Maybe you had a typo on your resume. Maybe other candidates looked better. Maybe there is a nasty rumor about you. Maybe the recruiter was having a bad day. Or maybe you were just unlucky and arbitrarily cut.

by _corym 6y ago

saagarjha 6y ago

At almost every large, successful company there is a huge disconnect between what hiring is screening for and what corporate blog posts might suggest, to the point of engineers themselves being unaware of how the experience is for most applicants (after all, they are self-selected…) Usually this boils down to "you don't seem to have enough experience" or "you don't know anyone on the team who can vouch for you to get through the initial resume screen". A real shame, since it leaves a number of qualified applicants in a poor position, but presumably Stripe has enough people applying that they can afford passing up people.

pc 6y ago

I'm sorry to hear this and apologize. We're definitely still a comparatively small team wishing we had more efficient ways to handle our inbound funnel. (We do have some ideas here.) But this is good feedback and we should absolutely have provided a better experience.

ditonal 6y ago
Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad candidate experience is a lack of resources.
- ss3000 6y ago
  Exactly, it's clearly not a lack of resources, but explicitly not prioritizating candidate experience for candidates you're not actively pursuing. Which, by the way I think is a totally valid decision to make, but let's not kid around and make it sound like your hands were tied.
  - pc 6y ago
    There are two somewhat separate issues, I think. (1) The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people. We'll do the best we can to identify promising people but a lot of people will get something somewhat functionally equivalent to a form rejection. You could argue that this is merely a prioritization decision -- we could keep hiring recruiters until everyone could be individually assessed -- but doing so would require a recruiting team of comparable magnitude to the rest of the Stripe organization and so the current state is an unfortunate compromise given the current constraints and given the decision to have an open application form (which is, I think, on net better for everyone). (2) Cases where people at Stripe mishandled the process. I know for a fact that some of the anecdotes shared in the thread are from many years ago, and I know that our process has improved since then (we have empirical data to this effect), but we're also acutely aware that we continue to make mistakes -- recruiting is a high-stakes and complex process with a lot of fallible moving parts. For whatever it's worth, we issue CSAT surveys to every candidate who interviews (about 6,000 onsite interviews in 2019), and track the results both at the aggregate Stripe level and at the individual recruiter level. And I get why some people here sound so annoyed -- what might be "another entry in a database" to a recruiter or hiring manager is "the future of my career" to someone on the other side. While it's always hard to know what to make of a set of anecdotes, and while our referral rate among Stripe employees is very high today, I'm nonetheless bothered by the number of cases shared here, and we're going to be digging in. (Specific anecdotes with more concrete dates or data are welcome at patrick@stripe.com.)
    - gault8121 6y ago
      Couldn't you "pen test" your own hiring process? Have some folks stage applications and see the process failures first hand. You might get better data from running these experiments yourself rather than through a survey.
sigstoat 6y ago
what sort of ideas are required besides sending an email to your IT folks and telling them to set up a JIRA project for tracking job applications? you could, in an afternoon, ensure that no applications are ever mysteriously forgotten about.
- polote 6y ago
  All that is already included in any ATS (applicant tracking system) on the market
defen 6y ago
Crazy suggestion: figure out a way to dogfood your hiring process. Have an engineer with a few years experience at Stripe try to get through the application process and see what kind of feedback they bring back. Kind of like secret shoppers but for hiring.
- mjayhn 6y ago
  Don't forget to send often marginalized people through as well!
rochester46 6y ago
This is such an insulting excuse. Ironically, this is almost the exact same attitude I got in my poor experience interviewing with Stripe. Interviewers were constantly late to our calls and mixed up who would be interviewing me more than once. Despite that, I still was told I was going to receive an offer... only to be ghosted for weeks. Once the recruiter finally reached back out, they said the position had been cancelled but they would find me another position. Spoiler: I never heard back from them, and they ignored all of my further communications. Throughout all of this, I was apologized to several times (credit is due there, I guess) and each time the excuse was "ha ha sorry things are such a mess, that's just how things are when you work at a start up!" First of all, "haha we're a startup" is not a valid excuse for being late to meetings and ignoring communication. Second: you're a company worth tens of billions of dollars, have thousands of employees in offices around the globe, and were founded a decade ago. You are not a startup. You are not a "small team". Stop using it as an excuse.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > each time the excuse was "ha ha sorry things are such a mess, that's just how things are when you work at a start up!" First of all, "haha we're a startup" is not a valid excuse for being late to meetings and ignoring communication. Pretending to act like a startup has become a cover for being sloppy at big companies. People want to pick and choose what it means to work like a startup, and usually they choose the aspects that give them flimsy excuses for bad behavior. In reality, my experience with actual small startups has been that people are better at arriving to meetings on time and following through with commitments because small teams mean everyone knows each other. If you don't show up to the meeting, we can see you across the small office and hold you accountable. It's the big companies where accountability starts to disintegrate. People know they can get away with dropping balls all over the place as long as they get their OKRs finished for quarterly review. Things start to slip through the cracks because that person you're dealing with is just another e-mail address, not your close coworker who sits on the other side of the room.
lowiqengineer 6y ago
Does your funnel explicitly exclude people from state schools or lower tier FAANGs? Seems like it does casually browsing LinkedIn.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
meowsnow 6y ago
My college classmate put in a referral for a specific role a couple of weeks ago, and no word. Not even an email acknowledgement that my job application is in the system.

polote 6y ago

Well I don't know for Stripe but subconsciously recruiters will always consider people who apply to be needy compared to people who are 'hunted' via Linkedin. When you do that kind of blog posts, you try to improve the image of the company externally so that more people want to work there. It could help with more people applying but also increase the acceptance rate of the offers. When you have a lot of people applying then you just cherry pick the best ones

OliverGilan 6y ago

I applied for a new grad position two months ago, did the coding challenge and passed all test cases with clean code and time to spare and haven't heard a peep from them since. It's a shame considering how I only hear good things about the company and the recruiting process but almost all the big companies I've applied to have at least had the decency to let me know they aren't moving forward

sushshshsh 6y ago
what an amazing industry we work in! denying top talent every day because people aren't motivated enough to check emails, make phone calls, click buttons to schedule things.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  Stripe likely has pick of the cream for open positions. It has been public knowledge for a while that they're a rocket ship, and that attracts top talent by definition (in addition to sharks and wolves [0] I'd presume). [0] https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-story-from-steve-yegge.html https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-story-from-s...
  - varjag 6y ago
    Overwhelmed or not, ghosting after coding challenge/technical interview is unacceptable.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      Correct. Never responding after an application? Par for the course. But asking someone to complete a coding challenge or even an interview and then ghosting is downright unprofessional and should be unacceptable.
    - lioeters 6y ago
      Totally agree. From what we can see in this thread, when a recruiter / hiring manager / HR department makes it a regular practice to ghost interviewed candidates, it has a significant effect on the company's reputation - that they lack common decency and respect. It does not seem worth it for whatever time/effort they might have saved by such behavior. To put it another way, it seems it'd be worth spending time and effort to improve the process and experience, to improve such a reputation.

deleted 6y ago

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deleted 6y ago

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ryanSrich 6y ago

Oh man. I have a juicy Stripe story from a friend, but I'd rather not share all of the details in case anyone from Stripe is here listening. The gist is that I had a friend apply, go through a few interviews, and then just get completely ghosted. After several emails and attempts to reach out, the hiring manager replied to his email with a two word reply when my friend asked about his application status. That reply was "no thanks".

wbronitsky 6y ago
In my experience, stories like this are par for the course. While at Stripe, a few of my close friends and former co-workers were treated so poorly during the application process that I stopped referring anyone over a year before I left.
- slumpt_ 6y ago
  Yeah. I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of these blog posts are just astroturfing. Well designed astroturfing, nonetheless. Edit: Astroturfing is the wrong word, perhaps. What I mean to say is vocalized better in the replies. These all should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. A rock of salt?
  - wbronitsky 6y ago
    I don't see how that would be possible. If you say you like working someplace, we know that you work there. You couldn't possibly be hiding who is paying you. I don't think that is a fair accusation. I think it would be much better said that we should take with a grain of salt anyone's assessment of their current job.
    - slumpt_ 6y ago
      Fair. Wrong word choice. The point just being that there could be a lot of company... encouragement... to be vocal about what you think of working at the org. And of course, to the point you raise, we must always take that with a grain of salt. Nobody is going to come to the table with complete honesty about the problems at a company with their name right next to it. Within reason, at least.

dangrover 6y ago

This happened to a friend too, got totally ghosted by Stripe. This is generally how our industry works, though, which is that it's not worth it to go through loop for a job unless you were referred by someone on the inside.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mgraczyk 6y ago

I interviewed in March, thought I did really well in the interviews, had great conversations with the hiring manager etc. After Covid hit they told me they were postponing hiring decisions and I never heard anything since. Sort of a weird way to manage things but I suppose the lockdowns have added quite a bit of chaos.

znull 6y ago

I'm surprised to hear so many in this thread had negative experiences. My experience as an applicant at Stripe was stellar from beginning to end, probably the most professional and well-executed interview process I've seen in my career. I can say that without bias because I ended up choosing another offer, but it was really difficult to turn down Stripe's after that.

OliverGilan 6y ago
When did you go through this process? I imagine they get a lot more applications nowadays

superfrank 6y ago

I do mainly frontend work and am just shy of 10 years experience. My resume is solid and I can at least get my foot in the door at well known companies including FAANG. I'm not saying I'm going to get the job, but I feel like I can at least get a response. I was job hunting earlier this year due to my last company (a fintech start up) shutting down and Stripe was the only company that just handed me an immediate "No" without even a recruiter call. I know one other engineer who is more mid level and she said she had applied and never even got a response. I harbor no ill will toward them, but I'm really curious what their hiring criteria is and why it seems so different that most of the other major companies out there.

xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
I'm tangentially familiar with the process, so let me paint a picture. Imagine you have enough high-quality candidates such that you could have every single employee interviewing candidates all day every day, doing no other work. What do you do? In the real world, most engineers top out at one or two phone screens a week, and/or one or two on-site interviews a week. Sometimes more. Each is 45 minutes at least, usually an hour. Each involves writing deliberate, thoughtful feedback and a professional assessment. Candidates that do well lead to decision meetings that take more time for all the interviewers to discuss -- candidates that do poorly can circuit-break. Then there is scheduling! Is there physical space available for the candidate to interview? Can we get all the necessary interviewers? What if one or more of them can't make it (sick, etc.)? What if the candidate needs to reschedule? Time zones? Holidays? Imagine Stripe has 100 recruiters (this is at least accurate within an order of magnitude). What does the back-of-the-napkin math look like for their maximum interviewing bandwidth? Hiring is a really hard problem, even for well-equipped organizations. Even the best in the world do it badly sometimes. And the anecdote cases tend to shout the loudest. Maybe you had a typo on your resume. Maybe other candidates looked better. Maybe there is a nasty rumor about you. Maybe the recruiter was having a bad day. Or maybe you were just unlucky and arbitrarily cut.