
BYOT: Bring your own team - hepha1979
https://stripe.com/blog/bring-your-own-team
======
slackstation
There are already groups that function this way, they are called consultants.
If you are a high functioning team and want to keep working together, then
form a consultancy together. You will probably get paid more over time.

The idea that all will be hired or none will be hired is kinda odd as well.
You are ceeding your career to bunch of other people in a non-entrepreneurial
way. You are doing more work, giving more to Stripe than you are getting back.
You are lowering their risk and not being compensated for that. Neither as a
team nor as individuals.

It'd be interesting if you could collaborate and bid for your salaries as a
group and/or make sure everyone got at least a minimum. It would be a failure
if everyone in the group got the same amount.

The collective bargaining that would go on would be force multiplied in either
direction. Either people wouldn't negotiate and companies like Stripe would
get a great bargain of a team that already works together or they would get
reamed as the team realizes that together they are more valuable than what
they could bargain for individually.

Lastly, it's probably a risky move in that if a group leaves one company
together successfully, they are more likely to move on from the second company
together as well. If they are all working on the same project, you could have
a disastrous and instantaneous brain-drain.

It's like building in a massive artificial bus factor into your company.

If people took an adversarial or merely valued their small in-group more than
the company, they could get hired as a group, build an important system for
Stripe and then en-masse, quit to create a consultancy and have Stripe as
their first (reluctant) customer because they have knowledge of an important
subsystem. In fact, this would be an excellent way to launch a consultancy.

Stripe, you may have opened a can of worms with this move. Teams hopping from
startup to startup like individual employees do now would make startups even
more chaotic.

Maybe they are banking on the downturn and think they can get high quality
teams on the cheap. Seems like a way to open the business to alot of risk.

~~~
ctide
It's like you've never heard of an acquihire before.

Companies do this all the time.

~~~
onewaystreet
It's not really the same thing as an acquihire. In an acquihire a company
acquires another company and then chooses which employees to give job offers
to. In many cases only a handful of top employees are actually hired, the rest
are fired. Stripe is saying that it wants to try to hire whole teams.

~~~
dkopi
Acquihires of companies that only have 2-5 members usually involve the entire
team.

------
ff_
This is an amazing idea. Kudos to the Stripe team for putting it into action!

Personally I can feel this "flow", and I have some favorite pair programming
friends; it's hard to beat the feeling of having someone else that completes
your sentences or writes down in code the idea that you were thinking out
after just saying a couple of words or exchanging a single glance. The
probability of this happening on a new workplace with people that you don't
know doesn't seem so high to me, so this idea really makes sense.

Has any other company thought of this before?

~~~
eadz
There is a startup that specialises in recruiting teams rather than
individuals. [https://goelevator.com/](https://goelevator.com/)

I can't see many downsides - except for the poor companies that have whole
teams disappear on them.

~~~
bpchaps
Isn't that, uh.. a pretty big downside?

~~~
hibikir
If a team is even considering going somewhere else, and are willing to do
though the effort of interviewing like this, chances are you are already
losing any and all members of the team that you wanted to keep.

I've actually seen entire teams quit a few times in my career, but instead of
them all quitting the same day, they quit within month or so, and it's the one
that have the highest market value that go first.

If a company is afraid that an ENTIRE TEAM is going to quit on them, they have
to make sure they are paid market rate, and happy with what they are doing,
and who is managing them: There's no magic. Happy teams don't spend their time
interviewing for new jobs.

So the minute you are worried one of your teams will submit a job application
to Stripe, this means you know they are unhappy, and you aren't doing anything
about it: Don't worry about third parties and fix it!

~~~
shostack
I've seen this too. It is important to remember that these people are very
likely good friends outside of work, talk frequently and openly about work
issues, job prospects, etc., and have been through hell together and back.

If things are getting to the point where one person in the group has soured on
the company, you can bet they have all been griping about it for months over
beers. This in turn sours the rest of the group and then they inevitably start
dropping like flies once the first one leaves.

In the instance I saw that occur, I think they had their valid reasons, and it
wasn't anything horrible about the company they were at--just found something
better. But I started placing mental bets with myself on how soon it would be
until the rest of the group left--turns out I was more or less right, except
for one of them.

That said, the impact was definitely felt as they were all super talented
people I'd love to work with in the future. So for companies afraid of hiring
groups or several close referrals from a single person (which are essentially
the same thing), the best thing you can do outside of providing an awesome and
competitively compensated place to work is ensure there is solid documentation
for things, and when possible ensuring that critical business knowledge won't
be lost if someone leaves.

------
mathattack
Interesting. Seems like a cheaper alternative to acquihiring. :-)

Long term I'd love to see stats on this. My intuition is you'd wind up more
successful, similar to how referrals make better employees. There does seem
like some risk though - the team will likely succeed or fail as a group.

~~~
cperciva
_Seems like a cheaper alternative to acquihiring_

I was thinking exactly the same thing: This is like acquihiring except that it
skips the "spend a year on a proof-of-talent product which gets thrown away
after the acquisition".

Of course, the downside is that the team interview process isn't likely to be
anywhere near as effective a filtering tool as spending a year building a
product.

~~~
joncooper
It also skips the part where the team being hired gets a large signing bonus.

~~~
mbesto
I'd imagine any smart working team would negotiate this heavily. This setup
appeals heavily to someone like me (with 2 other people specifically), but I
would also be personally be asking for $300k+ salaries for each person +
signing bonus + RSUs. It would be a happy medium between a lengthy and pricey
acquihire and getting 3 developers/PM people who you know already will work
well together.

I'd recommend that anyone doing this that they negotiate their salaries very
heavily.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
What experience are you drawing on for that recommendation? Big companies
don't typically negotiate wildly on salary, as it's tied to a leveling system
that breaks too many things if your numbers don't fit. They would have to
negotiate on levels and make everyone VPs to meet your salary demands, which
would cause other problems. So, this might not be the best advice. Acquihirees
get a few knobs to turn, but salary is the least turnable.

~~~
mbesto
> * What experience are you drawing on for that recommendation?*

I work on tech M&A.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Is your experience different from mine then? You _do_ see companies
negotiating on salary?

------
galistoca
I don't know, to me it just sounds like a gimmicky way to get more people to
apply. That's what recruiters do. They try to get as many people to apply as
possible, and then filter the hell out of them. So just because a recruiter
"reached out" to you via linkedin or something, it doesn't mean they think
highly of you. Actually, you should assume that they don't care at all about
what you've achieved. You're just one of many fish they're trying to pass
through their funnel.

That's why I am genuinely curious what they plan to do once they hire teams.
Let's say you hire a team of a designer and a developer. It's not like they
will be always working together and with no one else in the company. Chances
are you won't be working as the tag team forever. That would be stupid both
for the company and for these people because you are being too closed minded
and won't learn much by only interacting with the other person when there are
so many other talented people in the company. I presume that isn't what they
plan to do. Then that leaves us with the option of just hiring them "as a
team" but once they're in, there's no guarantee that they will work as the
same team, just like how most acquisitions work--when they acquire a company
they say stuff like "Company A's expertise will be helpful in us developing
our such and such core features", but after the acquisition they all disperse
and get assigned to different teams after a while.

So... what's the point? Well that's why I think it's a gimmicky way to attract
attention and get more people to apply. Any counter argument?

~~~
vasilipupkin
there is really little downside. Imagine a team of 3 applies and one guy is
just brilliant and the other two are just average. First of all, average
people are worth it if you can get 1 brilliant guy or girl. Secondly, you can
always let the average people go few months later and keep the brilliant
person, if you so choose

~~~
leoedin
Which would almost certainly impact the brilliant guy's work. People aren't
robots - if you hire them as a team (presumably because they liked working
together) and then fire half the team within a few months, the ones left will
start looking for something else.

~~~
vasilipupkin
well, you would only fire half the team if that half was for some reason
performing really poorly. in which case, the brilliant guy would probably not
be too upset.

------
andrewstuart
I'm a recruiter (yeah, yeah, recruiters know nothing) and I'm going to call
this as a fail. It's INCREDIBLY hard to get even one person employed. The bar
is so high at most employers that almost every applicant gets rejected.

So the likelihood of all members of a given set of X people being employed is
almost zero.

What happens to the team dynamic when the employer wants to employ Jenny and
Steve but not Bill, Mike and Vivek?

This might sound good but it aint going to work.

~~~
andrewfong
That argument assumes the probability of Bill, Mike, and Vivek being hired is
independent of them applying with Jenny and Steve. Bill might do better in an
interview if Jenny is present. Or if Steve gets to vouch for him during the
process. And the quality of the people who apply as a team may be higher than
those who apply individually.

This is basically just acqui-hiring without the acquisition. And acqui-hires
are common enough -- not as common as straight up hiring, but enough to be
interesting.

~~~
maxxxxx
As far as I know acqui-hires hire the whole team. Here they may pick only some
team members.

~~~
detaro
from the article:

 _If we make an offer, we’ll make it to all of you, at the same time; you’d
all be free to accept or decline individually, but of course we’d hope you’d
all accept — and if you do, we’d work with all of you to find a place at
Stripe where you can all start off working together._

------
d--b
I have very big concerns about culture.

When you bring new people to a company, they tend to work the way they use to
in their previous occupation. More often than not, a new employee will start
his sentences with "What we used to do in this situation" or "that's why we
did it that way at X", trying to both build up on his past experience, and to
find an anchor of familiarity in an unfamiliar environment.

This is normal phase and usually wears off after a few weeks/months. But for
as long as it lasts, this behavior can be annoying for your current employees
as they have built up their own thing, and they don't necessarily want to be
reminded that there were other options that they didn't follow.

The risk that you take when bringing a team of 3 to 5 people is that they go
in their own corner, dismiss all the tools that already exist, recreate the
work environment they are used to, don't mix well at all with other employees,
etc.

And what you get from people being used to work together, you loose in
management pain. I think the usual way of hiring one person, who then can
refer to the good guys in his previous team is a much sounder approach, as it
lets time for the culture to adapt.

------
apapli
Great in theory, unworkable in practice.

The downside to this will be the negotiated rate, and that is the upside for
Stripe.... along with the lower risk hiring outcome they also receive.

When time is not on your side your negotiating ability is severely hampered.

There will always be an imperative for someone in a team to "hurry the
paperwork" along faster than someone else because they need the financial
security of a job etc etc. So unless the "team" is happy to delegate the
entire negotiating process to one person with complete authority this
situation will be unavoidable. And let's face it, not many people will blindly
put their faith in someone else to negotiate every aspect of their next full
time permanent position, including whether or not to accept it and give notice
at their current employer.

Money isn't everything of course, but this is a sure-fire approach to limiting
your income, thus don't think there will be many takers.

As someone else said in the comments here, the more practical alternative that
actually does work is called consulting.

~~~
ryandrake
Not to mention: If you believe you have the skills necessary to pass an
interview at Stripe individually, there's only down-side risk to doing a team
interview. Therefore only people who do not believe they are lock-ins
individually will choose this option. End result: Only teams of mediocre or
less-confident employees will use it.

~~~
potatoyogurt
Not necessarily true. If you're part of a team you really like, being able to
guarantee that you can work with people you like at a new job is a pretty big
upside. And if you're really good and are confident in your interviewing
skills, then you can afford for the team interview to not work out, because
you can probably find just as good a job somewhere else (or reapply as an
individual).

~~~
apapli
That's fine, money isn't everything. But this is definitely not the strategy
to employ if money is high on your priority list.

------
Falcon9
We had to do this the old fashioned way with my current team: One person gets
in the door at the new company, talks up the abilities of the old team members
and how they would slot in nicely with new company's needs and gets another
person in, then another until the old team is fully reunited in the new
company. We've been a very effective unit once we removed the road blocks in
the new company!

~~~
rhizome
I call this "getting the band back together," and is a thing that does not
always endear you to your coworkers.

~~~
Falcon9
Yeah, we slowly "outlasted" the coworkers and now it's just us over here.
Management is happy, we're happy, old coworkers have jobs elsewhere. Side
note: we only brought the good parts of the "gang" over, left the deadweight
behind.

------
pyb
Great idea ! But if they are going to be interviewing all team members
separately through the normal process, it seems unlikely that a team as a
whole would pass their bar.

~~~
mathattack
I think they'd judge the team as a whole, rather than individuals. So it would
be "Does the whole team average X?" as opposed to "Does the weakest individual
hit bar X?"

~~~
pyb
That's not what I understood from the post.

~~~
mathattack
Rereading, I think you're right.

 _If we make an offer, we’ll make it to all of you, at the same time; you’d
all be free to accept or decline individually, but of course we’d hope you’d
all accept_

This implies individual hiring criteria. It's interesting that they let the
group try and solve a problem as a team.

I wonder how this will impact compensation and offer acceptances.

------
Roritharr
Damn. I just talked with our CEO about that exact concept as our new
innovative hiring method. Now I look like a copycat. -_-

~~~
kbar13
well if he accuses you of being a copycat, you can bring your team to stripe.

~~~
Roritharr
Lol he doesn't, we just hired our second team and I just formalized the
process.

~~~
kbar13
hype, good job.

------
stegosaurus
I'm a bit confused as to how this works in an employment scenario where the
contractual terms aren't fixed.

How is salary negotiated? What happens over time - do you just become discrete
employees? What about internal promotion - does it just not happen?

I would find it incredibly difficult to get together with friends and decide
'right, i guess we're all worth X each then, let's go for that'.

~~~
desdiv
__

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
What if some members of the team are more senior than others? What if members
specialize in areas with differing market rates? It just feels somewhat
clumsy.

------
huangc10
This idea sounds excellent and definitely some outside of the box thinking!
However, if I had a team that I really work great with and trust, I'd probably
do a startup instead with said team. That's just me though.

I think this concept might attract fresh grads more and could be integrated
into a BYOT internship program.

~~~
jonwachob91
Not all engineers want to be entrepreneurs ;)

~~~
enjo
I for one am a big fan of getting paid. "Doing a startup" is no trivial task.
Just getting the funding in place to provide enough money to pay everyones
bills is more than almost any "startup" ever achieves.

This might be an interesting way to ensure that I work with people I'm
inspired by. I dig what they're doing.

~~~
overcast
You can "do a startup" while working at an existing company. People do it all
the time working nights and weekends on a project.

~~~
snuxoll
Not so easy once you have a family, I barely have time to mess with new tools
in my home lab, working a second job just sounds taxing (the only reason I
even have an LLC is legal shielding for the odd repair / small business IT job
I have on the side).

~~~
overcast
People with families create things all the time. Not an excuse.

------
bpchaps
Be very, very careful with this. I was once brought to a company where my boss
and her boss came from the same company essentially at the same time. My boss
was considered overly aggressive with wanting to make (good) changes and
"spoke too fast" (seriously, grown ass people made that complaint) this, but
her boss was pretty much universally hated. That attitude reflected
extensively downwards onto me and her. I couldn't handle it and had to leave
after four months.

~~~
HillaryBriss
Yeah. I think you've hit on another danger: group culture clashes.

It seems like an entire team would be more difficult to beat into submission,
I mean, acculturate, than just one single person.

~~~
bpchaps
The HR person at that same place told me that they often hired people knowing
that they'd quit sometime into their employment and hinted they were there for
only for political weight. So yeah, acculturation often runs deep and sharp.

------
dorfsmay
Pros for Stipe: hire a lot of people at once, hire a bunch of people who are
probably working well together.

Cons for stripe: risk of the team bringing not only their previous company
culture, but also their group micro culture. Risk of all of them leaving
Stripe all at once (they did it once).

Pros for the new team: I can't think of any, I've never been in a group where
I thought everybody was great (and beside I see meeting new people as a perk
of changing job).

------
LaurenceW1
But then how do you prevent your fate as an individual in the company from
being tied to the others? Do you get put on the same team? Do you get promoted
together?

~~~
jzwinck
The devil you know is better than the one you don't. You'll be joining a team
either way.

------
mikeyanderson
We started a company for exactly this purpose. It's called goElevator.com and
it allows you to make multiple teams of people you'd love to work with—we
present dozens of interesting companies with anonymized profiles and let you
know the potential opportunities before you ever have to interact with a
recruiter or hiring manager.

------
sumobob
Such a great Idea. I feel thers a lot of programmers out there who like to
work with certain people and personalities in any capacity, whether that means
at a startup or on side projects. Its rare to find programmers that you can
get in a pair programming "zone" with, once you do, you're reluctant to lose
them.

------
sbilstein
This definitely happens all the time formally and informally in SV. Sometimes
a manager is poached and brings a bunch of old employees along...sometimes a
small acquihire happens. Or after an acquisition event some portion of the
company decides they would rather be elsewhere and talk to execs at a larger
company.

------
lzecon
This is cool, but to really make this game changing they'd revamp their
interview process to interview all members together (or in pairs of 2-3) some
people just perform better with their partner and the interview process itself
should account for it (if they're assuming that's true).

~~~
biot
Didn't they already cover that in the article?

    
    
      "... we’ll make sure you hit the same stages of interviews at
       the same time, bring you all to the office on the same day..."
    

Or are you saying even the initial interview should be as a team rather than
starting with individual ones?

~~~
lzecon
It would be awesome if they could interview as a team instead of individually.

------
anaulin
An interesting idea. I'd like to see some numbers on how many teams does
Stripe get applying for jobs this way. (I'd love to also see measures on how
well the teams hired this way perform, and how well are employees retained,
but that seems hard to measure.)

I am somewhat skeptical that this will be a great success. Just because a team
performed well in one environment, it doesn't mean it will continue to do well
in new circumstances (unless they are hired as external or independent
consultants, as others have suggested in this thread).

As an individual looking for a job, I would also want to know if applying as a
team lowers or increases my chances of getting an offer.

------
bobwaycott
To whomever at Stripe: is this only for on-site teams, or are you open to
remote teams?

~~~
avibryant
We're open to remote or distributed teams within the US and Canada. All else
being equal, we'd prefer to hire people in SF, but for a sufficiently great
team, being elsewhere wouldn't be a showstopper. We're conscious of not
wanting to miss out on the diverse, talented set of people that happen to be
outside of the bay area.

(I may be biased here: I work for Stripe from a small community off the
Canadian coast).

~~~
wolfico
I have a mostly US based team that might be interested but we have one
employee in Mexico. Would that be a disqualifier? We'd be willing to transfer
the infrastructure for that (foreign subsidiary and payroll and all that which
is already in place.)

~~~
jorgeortiz85
You should apply anyway and describe your situation! Supporting additional
countries is challenging from several angles (payroll, international tax
structure, compliance, etc), but we can talk through your particular situation
individually.

------
Southworth
Totally fascinated to see how this plays out.

Been thinking about "crew hiring" as I've roughly termed it, cohorts of
flexible, ad-hoc, a-gamers who like to move around, groove on idea and commit
when it feels solid, interesting and a great fit for them.

Taking this further, we see companies becoming an "atelier/studio methodology
of multiple "teams" working within a collective space for a unified aim..

We can all easily see how this could degenerate as well as succeed.

It's a super fascinating idea, and I am genuinely fascinated to see what plays
out. I have yet to bet against Stripe.

~~~
stormbuilder
Also known as consultants, who get hired full time if the company likes them
and viceversa.

------
pwaring
I wonder how much litigation risk is involved with this. If you poach one key
employee, the original company is likely to be a bit grumpy but probably won't
do anything. If you poach an entire team, litigation may be worthwhile -
especially if that team is their entire development staff (I've seen this
happen in the UK insurance industry, cases go on for months and potentially
involve millions of pounds).

------
rajacombinator
Kudos for trying something outside the box.

------
bsimpson
I swear I read a blog post about a year ago where someone detailed their
experience applying somewhere as a team.

------
choward
That's a pretty creative way to get rid of referral bonuses. I suppose you
could refer a whole team though.

~~~
zindlerb
Stripe doesn't have referral bonuses.

------
k__
Sounds nice.

There are probably many people who want to work with their friends, especially
when they did OSS stuff together.

On the other hand, I have different opinions than other people about when to
leave a company, so I'm mostly on my own, even if I have worked with many good
people who I'd love to take with me, haha.

------
spullara
Even if they all get hired together any organization of size would have
problems keeping them together. I have seen many team acquihires that
immediately get broken up and they at least get a huge premium relative to
this offer.

------
samstave
Nice to see this idea starting to start up: I've founded a slack group of all
my Devops folks uber exactly this philosophy...

We are starting SVOPs (Silicon Valley ops) - we have built some shit... But
mostly we just wanted to start a consortium. Join us if you'd like...

SVOPs.slack.com - we are all actively looking for people or help - or even
jokes or learning or what not...

Silicon Valley needs much more community (not in the Facebook kind, but in the
"hey lets play DnD and drink and talk shit and be like OMG I heard about
___that_ __and dos you know also.... ") kind...

We have a culture - it's not evenly distributed but it's here and it drives a
lot of shit...

Come join. Where you are physically located doesn't matter: Sam@sstave.com

------
pyb
BTW, are there any London based companies reading this, who'd be interested in
a BYOT ? I might be interested in applying together with another developer.

------
mrfusion
Id love to do this with each person working 2.5 days and splitting the salary.
That way I could work part time and the company gets full time work.

~~~
jzwinck
BobTom, I had a long discussion with you on Monday about exactly how we could
solve this problem affecting our production systems. Now it's Thursday and
you're telling me you have no idea what we decided three days ago? You're
fired.

~~~
mrfusion
I imagine they share an email account. And have some overlap in their
schedules to debrief.

------
ekianjo
Yes, finally, a company that realizes that bringing a team is much better than
bringing one employee at a time.

------
dougdonohoe
If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find
them....maybe you can hire The A-Team.

------
qaq
Can we bring our own CTO & CEO :)?

~~~
jorgeortiz85
They can certainly apply as part of your team! Though you should give some
thought ahead of time as to what their roles would be at Stripe. We're not
currently hiring for the roles of CEO or CTO ;).

------
newman8r
reminds me of the dual interview in Stepbrothers
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1DAJxwWv2E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1DAJxwWv2E)

------
morgante
Cool idea.

It's basically trying to cheaply scale the concept behind acquihires.

------
a_imho
meta. Interesting idea, and I like it very much, however the wording of this
metaphor is a bit offensive?

>the industry has always focused on hiring atoms; we’d like to try hiring
molecules.

~~~
clentaminator
What about this is offensive?

~~~
a_imho
non native so might be that, it just sounds weird comparing humans to atoms,
like saying to your future employee we will treat you as a cog in the machine.
OTOH, I think you are right, I was oversensitive.

~~~
clentaminator
Was just curious as I wasn't getting the same vibe from it myself. Plus, these
guys -
[http://www.mediamolecule.com/jobs/working_here](http://www.mediamolecule.com/jobs/working_here)
\- already have the whole "molecule" thing covered :)

------
curryhowardiso
Stripe changing the game again. Well done team Stripe!

