8 ms·

> I've got no horse in this, it's not my industry and I'm just a spectator. But two days ago I thought of Stripe as a top notch company, with top notch leadersh

> I've got no horse in this, it's not my industry and I'm just a spectator. But two days ago I thought of Stripe as a top notch company, with top notch leadership. No dog in the fight either here, but that's exactly what those who posted these stories recently are trying to do. You saw some bit of news and then totally changed your perception. That's how this thing works. Those tiny bits of negative news just stick in your mind. What were your priors? Stripe pays well, has a great product, leadership is great, hires top-tier developers, is a great place to work, etc. (making stuff up here idk what your priors were) but all of that is erased because you saw a random article about two people having offers rescinded and you don't even know if it's true? What if all of the above priors were true and it was also true that two people had offers rescinded? Do they not have top-notch leadership because two people had offers rescinded? Is that enough to sway your opinion? Best course of action here IMO is to wait and see more evidence. If you had a weak opinion either way why have one. If you had a strong opinion is this strong evidence to change all of your priors? Plenty of companies rescind offers, they just aren't making it to the front page (Google, AirBnB, etc.).

achow 5y ago
> .. you saw a random article.. you don't even know if it's true? That way nothing is true until it happens to you.
whimsicalism 5y ago
Rescinding accepted offers ever is a pretty big impact on my priors. Uber did it during the recession and that has still impact my priors around working there. I keep careful track of companies that do this and I will never stop interviewing if I get an offer from a company that does. That is bad because it means I'm more likely to renege on their offers last minute.
munificent 5y ago
> Those tiny bits of negative news just stick in your mind. There's an interesting psychological process here that I don't think I've seen described before. You would expect that the higher the reputation something has, the more resilient that regard is. As if good reputation means the thing has a large number of "reputation points" and can thus afford to lose some while still retaining a large quantity of remaining rep points. But the perceived effect is the opposite. The higher the reputation the more fragile it is to bad news. When a middling reputation thing gets some bad news, we consider it not particularly newsworthy and its reputation is unchanged. But when a highly regarded thing gets tainted, the pristine edifice comes tumbling down. I can understand why our brains would work that way: we are incentivized through our evolutionary history to be highly attuned to detect deceipt—actors that are not what they appear to be. So bad news about a good person is read as vital information that causes us to re-evaluate everything we knew about them in that light. But it's not clear to me that that model logically scales to an entire organization. Organizations are not monolithic entities and when an otherwise great org makes a misstep, that doesn't necessarily mean it's rotten to the core.
- smallnamespace 5y ago
  Your opinion of something and the strength with which you hold that opinion can vary independently. You seem to think that very positive opinions can only be strongly held opinions, but GP had a generic positive opinion, weakly held due to lack of direct experience. If the strength of your prior is held fixed, then a negative piece of news should change a highly positive opinion more.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  That seems more of a media effect than a brain effect. A negative thing about a high reputation company gets published in "serious" outlets or upvoted on social media. A negative thing about a middling reputation company is buried on page 7. I'd say it's the "Wow, this was on the front page of the BBC" effect that triggers the brain response, moreso than the fact that it exists at all. (Coupled with the fact that you probably won't see much of what's on the proverbial page 7, ever)
- drusenko 5y ago
  This is a pretty well known effect in the Marketing/Comms/PR world though it is generally attributed to a narrative effect rather than detection of deceit. The way the thinking goes is that humans are wired to tell stories and there are certain stories we are predisposed to. We like to root for “the little guy” and love to cheer on startups, especially those with sympathetic stories, founders, high competence, etc. We also tend to dislike entities at the very top and in extreme positions of power (eg billionaires, governments, large evil corporations) for a variety of reasons. At some point in your company’s growth your narrative arc flips and you become the bad guy. The best thing you can do as the company is to try your best to postpone the flip as long as possible, but it is inevitable. When it happens, you are on the downslope and “in the dog house” as far as the media and public perception is concerned and there’s just not much you can do about it. Sometimes the harder you try to explain yourself and fight against it, the worse it gets. You’ll also notice founders of these companies are often totally caught by surprise when this flip happens. They’ve gotten so used to a sympathetic public and a certain mode of behavior to maintain good public perception - transparent, relatable, “aww shucks” style - and when it flips it can be confusing because this doesn’t work anymore. The perception of them has shifted from “that smart/competent startup person I am rooting for” to “the powerful billionaire CEO that crushes the little people with the raise of a finger” and so the behaviors that come naturally to them take on a different tone entirely from a perception perspective. When this happens it’s probably time to batten down the hatches and shift PR strategies. The old way isn’t likely to work anymore; the straw has finally broken the camel’s back. I’m no expert at what it takes to reverse this. My best guess is that you need to spend your time in the penalty box while drawing minimum attention to let the steam blow off faster and not accelerate the roller coaster ride down. Then when you come back after 6-12 months or so, do so with a changed communications strategy that implicitly takes into account the changed public perceptions around power dynamics. You’re not a beloved startup anymore but you can still be “one of the good ones” as far as big companies and billionaire CEOs.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> What were your priors? The better question is: Where did your priors come from? Every big tech company invests a lot of time and money into projecting a good reputation on the internet. It's basically table stakes for competitive hiring these days. This includes everything from making a founder a celebrity in tech circles or on Twitter, to posting fake Glassdoor reviews (and getting negative reviews removed). The worst company I worked for would periodically send e-mails to everyone reminding us about the NDAs we signed and implying that they'd sue anyone who talked to the press or wrote negative things about the company online. If you're making judgements based on the frequency of good versus bad posts, your opinions are going to be dominated by companies pushing positive PR for themselves. The strangest thing about the negative Stripe posts is that I haven't seen many Stripe employees (other than executives) show up and say that these anecdotes are surprising. I have, however, seen several anecdotes in this thread and others noting that Stripe's hiring process is notoriously chaotic and flawed. I don't really know the truth. I'd lean toward assuming these are abnormal experiences, but I wouldn't discard them entirely just because they're not what you expected to hear. What you expect to hear about a big company is largely a function of deliberate PR pushes these days.
- rp1 5y ago
  Re. employees not showing up to defend the company: I always find it weird when people do that. There are only downsides to speaking about your company publicly.
  - ljm 5y ago
    It's enough to just have execs stepping in IMO, since they are pretty much top of the ladder. The only thing I'll learn from random Stripe employees is commentary in the vein of "works on my machine!" Disgruntled ex-employees will leave bad feedback, people who have invested a lot of themselves in the company will leave good feedback (and perhaps not even see some of the problems others see).
  - antoniuschan99 5y ago
    Since there were throwaway accounts speaking negatively about the company, I was looking for the opposite, throwaway accounts (from employees) speaking positively about the company. Not sure if they ended up posting but when I was reading the thread there weren't any.
smilebot 5y ago
> Those tiny bits of negative news just stick in your mind. This is a big reason why most of us are terrible at "investing" in the stock market. You have a good thesis on why a company is good and it checks all boxes. With a small bad news about the CEO or something without evidence gets out and you suddenly forget your checklist and panic.
sombremesa 5y ago
> No dog in the fight either here, but that's exactly what those who posted these stories recently are trying to do. Why? Do they have nothing better to do with their time? Maybe you can ask this person directly why they are lying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29405734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29405734
lordnacho 5y ago
It's not just this article, right? There was a whole thread yesterday where some throwaways claimed that maybe the twins are not so nice guys. Now I know very little about them, but I do know that they spend a lot of time polishing their image. You don't have to be interviewed in the newspaper if you don't want, but if you do, you're going to get all the coaching you can for it. They really do seem like smart people to me, but I've spent all of 20 minutes doing due diligence on them. We have this world where things in the public space are highly polished and curated. If you have a look at some historical interviews from say 50 years ago, you'd sometimes get some person who kinda seemed like a kid in school giving his first speech. It would be clumsy, but like in school you could adjust for the presentation, maybe give them the benefit of the doubt. In the modern world, everything is presented in the most positive light possible. Someone has sat before every public statement or interview and written down all the positives and negatives, and they've already worked out what is good to focus on, and what needs to be spun. They take an active interest in monitoring the public space for what is said about them, and they already have the rebuttals in place. It's actually quite predictable: apologize and say it was a one-off, claim that the bad thing has been dealt with, point out that the information may be wrong, and point out the ulterior motives of the person making the claim. In light of this, it's simply hard for me to give the benefit of the doubt, and it's very similar with any other spin-heavy communications. It's a bummer, because in my ideal world people would just put stuff out like they see it and listeners wouldn't have to try to un-spin what they'd been told. I'm sure a lot of dishonest communicators hide among the honest, which is their whole game. > What were your priors? Stripe pays well, has a great product, leadership is great, hires top-tier developers, is a great place to work, etc. (making stuff up here idk what your priors were) but all of that is erased because you saw a random article about two people having offers rescinded and you don't even know if it's true? Unfortunately, it's like when some person gets outed for being a creep, in the genre of MeToo. One or two independent allegations, I tend to think "hmm gotta see both sides". Somewhere like 4 or 5, I certify the creep status and laminate a card for them. Granted a business is not a single person, so those numbers may need adjustment, but you really don't need much to ruin a reputation.
friedman23 5y ago
I've been hearing things on Blind as well, it's not just two data points. Additionally their change to the way they compensate developers is a massive red flag to me and screams to me that they have a penny pinching culture. Given the market for software developers as it exists today, I don't feel any need to work for companies that aren't extremely generous with their compensation. I do have a friend that worked there until relatively recently (quit about a year and a half ago) and said things were good pre pandemic. He also told me that I should never consider working there with their new comp structure.
threatofrain 5y ago
These anecdotes are disturbing to me because they are institutional moves, meaning they are done in a formal and documented way.

achow 5y ago

> .. you saw a random article.. you don't even know if it's true? That way nothing is true until it happens to you.

whimsicalism 5y ago

Rescinding accepted offers ever is a pretty big impact on my priors. Uber did it during the recession and that has still impact my priors around working there. I keep careful track of companies that do this and I will never stop interviewing if I get an offer from a company that does. That is bad because it means I'm more likely to renege on their offers last minute.

munificent 5y ago

> Those tiny bits of negative news just stick in your mind. There's an interesting psychological process here that I don't think I've seen described before. You would expect that the higher the reputation something has, the more resilient that regard is. As if good reputation means the thing has a large number of "reputation points" and can thus afford to lose some while still retaining a large quantity of remaining rep points. But the perceived effect is the opposite. The higher the reputation the more fragile it is to bad news. When a middling reputation thing gets some bad news, we consider it not particularly newsworthy and its reputation is unchanged. But when a highly regarded thing gets tainted, the pristine edifice comes tumbling down. I can understand why our brains would work that way: we are incentivized through our evolutionary history to be highly attuned to detect deceipt—actors that are not what they appear to be. So bad news about a good person is read as vital information that causes us to re-evaluate everything we knew about them in that light. But it's not clear to me that that model logically scales to an entire organization. Organizations are not monolithic entities and when an otherwise great org makes a misstep, that doesn't necessarily mean it's rotten to the core.

smallnamespace 5y ago
Your opinion of something and the strength with which you hold that opinion can vary independently. You seem to think that very positive opinions can only be strongly held opinions, but GP had a generic positive opinion, weakly held due to lack of direct experience. If the strength of your prior is held fixed, then a negative piece of news should change a highly positive opinion more.
ethbr0 5y ago
That seems more of a media effect than a brain effect. A negative thing about a high reputation company gets published in "serious" outlets or upvoted on social media. A negative thing about a middling reputation company is buried on page 7. I'd say it's the "Wow, this was on the front page of the BBC" effect that triggers the brain response, moreso than the fact that it exists at all. (Coupled with the fact that you probably won't see much of what's on the proverbial page 7, ever)
drusenko 5y ago
This is a pretty well known effect in the Marketing/Comms/PR world though it is generally attributed to a narrative effect rather than detection of deceit. The way the thinking goes is that humans are wired to tell stories and there are certain stories we are predisposed to. We like to root for “the little guy” and love to cheer on startups, especially those with sympathetic stories, founders, high competence, etc. We also tend to dislike entities at the very top and in extreme positions of power (eg billionaires, governments, large evil corporations) for a variety of reasons. At some point in your company’s growth your narrative arc flips and you become the bad guy. The best thing you can do as the company is to try your best to postpone the flip as long as possible, but it is inevitable. When it happens, you are on the downslope and “in the dog house” as far as the media and public perception is concerned and there’s just not much you can do about it. Sometimes the harder you try to explain yourself and fight against it, the worse it gets. You’ll also notice founders of these companies are often totally caught by surprise when this flip happens. They’ve gotten so used to a sympathetic public and a certain mode of behavior to maintain good public perception - transparent, relatable, “aww shucks” style - and when it flips it can be confusing because this doesn’t work anymore. The perception of them has shifted from “that smart/competent startup person I am rooting for” to “the powerful billionaire CEO that crushes the little people with the raise of a finger” and so the behaviors that come naturally to them take on a different tone entirely from a perception perspective. When this happens it’s probably time to batten down the hatches and shift PR strategies. The old way isn’t likely to work anymore; the straw has finally broken the camel’s back. I’m no expert at what it takes to reverse this. My best guess is that you need to spend your time in the penalty box while drawing minimum attention to let the steam blow off faster and not accelerate the roller coaster ride down. Then when you come back after 6-12 months or so, do so with a changed communications strategy that implicitly takes into account the changed public perceptions around power dynamics. You’re not a beloved startup anymore but you can still be “one of the good ones” as far as big companies and billionaire CEOs.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> What were your priors? The better question is: Where did your priors come from? Every big tech company invests a lot of time and money into projecting a good reputation on the internet. It's basically table stakes for competitive hiring these days. This includes everything from making a founder a celebrity in tech circles or on Twitter, to posting fake Glassdoor reviews (and getting negative reviews removed). The worst company I worked for would periodically send e-mails to everyone reminding us about the NDAs we signed and implying that they'd sue anyone who talked to the press or wrote negative things about the company online. If you're making judgements based on the frequency of good versus bad posts, your opinions are going to be dominated by companies pushing positive PR for themselves. The strangest thing about the negative Stripe posts is that I haven't seen many Stripe employees (other than executives) show up and say that these anecdotes are surprising. I have, however, seen several anecdotes in this thread and others noting that Stripe's hiring process is notoriously chaotic and flawed. I don't really know the truth. I'd lean toward assuming these are abnormal experiences, but I wouldn't discard them entirely just because they're not what you expected to hear. What you expect to hear about a big company is largely a function of deliberate PR pushes these days.

rp1 5y ago
Re. employees not showing up to defend the company: I always find it weird when people do that. There are only downsides to speaking about your company publicly.
- ljm 5y ago
  It's enough to just have execs stepping in IMO, since they are pretty much top of the ladder. The only thing I'll learn from random Stripe employees is commentary in the vein of "works on my machine!" Disgruntled ex-employees will leave bad feedback, people who have invested a lot of themselves in the company will leave good feedback (and perhaps not even see some of the problems others see).
- antoniuschan99 5y ago
  Since there were throwaway accounts speaking negatively about the company, I was looking for the opposite, throwaway accounts (from employees) speaking positively about the company. Not sure if they ended up posting but when I was reading the thread there weren't any.

smilebot 5y ago

> Those tiny bits of negative news just stick in your mind. This is a big reason why most of us are terrible at "investing" in the stock market. You have a good thesis on why a company is good and it checks all boxes. With a small bad news about the CEO or something without evidence gets out and you suddenly forget your checklist and panic.

sombremesa 5y ago

> No dog in the fight either here, but that's exactly what those who posted these stories recently are trying to do. Why? Do they have nothing better to do with their time? Maybe you can ask this person directly why they are lying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29405734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29405734

lordnacho 5y ago

It's not just this article, right? There was a whole thread yesterday where some throwaways claimed that maybe the twins are not so nice guys. Now I know very little about them, but I do know that they spend a lot of time polishing their image. You don't have to be interviewed in the newspaper if you don't want, but if you do, you're going to get all the coaching you can for it. They really do seem like smart people to me, but I've spent all of 20 minutes doing due diligence on them. We have this world where things in the public space are highly polished and curated. If you have a look at some historical interviews from say 50 years ago, you'd sometimes get some person who kinda seemed like a kid in school giving his first speech. It would be clumsy, but like in school you could adjust for the presentation, maybe give them the benefit of the doubt. In the modern world, everything is presented in the most positive light possible. Someone has sat before every public statement or interview and written down all the positives and negatives, and they've already worked out what is good to focus on, and what needs to be spun. They take an active interest in monitoring the public space for what is said about them, and they already have the rebuttals in place. It's actually quite predictable: apologize and say it was a one-off, claim that the bad thing has been dealt with, point out that the information may be wrong, and point out the ulterior motives of the person making the claim. In light of this, it's simply hard for me to give the benefit of the doubt, and it's very similar with any other spin-heavy communications. It's a bummer, because in my ideal world people would just put stuff out like they see it and listeners wouldn't have to try to un-spin what they'd been told. I'm sure a lot of dishonest communicators hide among the honest, which is their whole game. > What were your priors? Stripe pays well, has a great product, leadership is great, hires top-tier developers, is a great place to work, etc. (making stuff up here idk what your priors were) but all of that is erased because you saw a random article about two people having offers rescinded and you don't even know if it's true? Unfortunately, it's like when some person gets outed for being a creep, in the genre of MeToo. One or two independent allegations, I tend to think "hmm gotta see both sides". Somewhere like 4 or 5, I certify the creep status and laminate a card for them. Granted a business is not a single person, so those numbers may need adjustment, but you really don't need much to ruin a reputation.

friedman23 5y ago

I've been hearing things on Blind as well, it's not just two data points. Additionally their change to the way they compensate developers is a massive red flag to me and screams to me that they have a penny pinching culture. Given the market for software developers as it exists today, I don't feel any need to work for companies that aren't extremely generous with their compensation. I do have a friend that worked there until relatively recently (quit about a year and a half ago) and said things were good pre pandemic. He also told me that I should never consider working there with their new comp structure.

threatofrain 5y ago

These anecdotes are disturbing to me because they are institutional moves, meaning they are done in a formal and documented way.