

What it’s like to work for Stripe - relation
http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes-culture

======
mindcrime
There's a post below, which is [dead], but which raises an issue I was curious
about. Is the daily group lunch treated as required, or is it totally OK to
skip it? And even if it's not _officially_ required, is there any sort of
peer-pressure thing / shunning of people who don't participate?

IF it's optional and truly treated that way, it sounds like a great idea to
me. Otherwise, I'd consider it downright toxic. At every job I've ever had, I
treat my lunchtime as, well, mine. If I need to go run errands, or just want
to be alone, or want to go sit at Starbucks and answer emails for the startup
I'm working on on the side, whatever, I do it over lunch. Or sometimes I just
plain feel like skipping lunch for some random reason. If I had that freedom
denied to me, I'd be miserable.

~~~
gdb
Answer: I am currently skipping group lunch :).

~~~
mindcrime
Cool. Do most people pretty much do group lunch most days, or is it common for
individuals, or small groups, to go off and do their own thing?

Just legitimately curious... not knocking the idea. Like I said, if it's not
mandatory, I'm all for it. Just wondering how the culture has evolved around
that.

~~~
gdb
I'd say probably 80% of the company is at lunch on any given day. Sometimes
people will go and grab food from food trucks or restaurants in the area,
though they'll also often bring it back and eat with everyone else.

------
shanecleveland
Participating in support, as the author mentions, is an incredible learning
experience. I handle all incoming emails for the manufacturing business I work
at. Even though I end up filtering and passing on most emails, I get to see
what customers are saying, asking, wanting, etc. If something needs to be
handled by a higher-up, they often include me on the following interaction
with the customer. This has taught me a lot about the philosophies and
decision-making process that has made the business successful. I am now at a
point where I am handling more emails than I am passing on. I can't think of
any way I could have learned as much as I have and had it make sense and
really sink in.

------
silverbax88
"Every single engineer does support, on a bi-weekly rotation. Even the
founders John and Patrick. We provide support over an IRC channel, email, and
through Stripe answers."

This is one of the worst policies I've ever encountered. Companies that I've
been involved with often do this at first, because at first, everyone SHOULD
do support. After a few years, it's horribly unproductive. It creates a long
term crisis culture that is reactive rather than proactive. Many days the
entire development team will not be working on their individual development
tasks and instead be ganging up on some perceived production crisis.

You need to introduce the concept of triage, not gang-support and no rotating
support. Rotating support isn't just bad for your developers, it's a horrible
way to support your customers. One week you have a problem that gets resolved
quickly because the guy on support actually wrote the code that you are having
a problem with. The next week, the same support call takes three days because
the guy on support has no idea where that code even lives and has to learn the
process. You might say 'oh, but that's how we cross train', to which I, as a
customer, point out that those three days I had to wait for an answer were
unacceptable, and you should have a better plan on cross training than 'wait
til something breaks and throw completely clueless resources at it'.

------
latortuga
> When you hire great people, you can afford to give them a lot of autonomy.

I think you have this completely backwards: in order to be great, autonomy is
required. There's much written about motivations and what makes people happy
in the workplace but micromanagement is one of the most easily recognizable
anti-habits of a bad work environment. It breeds resentment and engenders an
atmosphere of distrust. Bring out the best in people by giving them autonomy.

~~~
scottilee
It's probably some measure of both, but from my experience there are some
people you can't afford to give autonomy.

~~~
jonathanwallace
Then you can't afford to keep them around either, right?

~~~
robryan
Depends who you are and how big you are. Not every company can have the very
best employees in the industry.

~~~
justincormack
Read the OP. Its not about the best it is about giving all people autonomy.

------
OmarIsmail
I love the part about email transparency. That's been my ideal as well, so
it's great to see that it actually works in practice.

One big question I have though is around compensation. How transparent are you
guys with compensation, and what lessons have you learned there?

~~~
pc
It's a tough question. We consider compensation to be confidential to both
employees and the company -- in general, it's not our information to share.

Within the constraints of that, though, we try to be as open as possible. In
particular, we share some information about current salaries at Stripe with
new hires, and we share full details about all of Stripe's investment and the
terms on which it was taken.

~~~
jazzymorning
In considering doing something similar with my company, I'm wondering if there
is an override for the auto CC that should be available to certain accounts?

~~~
tlrobinson
I could be wrong but it doesn't sound like it's an "auto CC", but rather a
"convention" as Alex said in another comment.

------
xianshou
The truly interesting challenge will be how effectively they transition these
policies as they scale. For example, the flood-of-email with filters works
incredibly well for transparency at 40 people, but becomes an unmanageable
deluge much past 100. The Capture the Flag runs, though, look like an idea
that's both awesome and sustainable.

~~~
nostrademons
FWIW, Google also does the flood-of-email with filters thing, and it still
works at 30,000 employees. People don't subscribe to every single mailing list
anymore, but most e-mails are CC'd to at least a team mailing list, as are
(usually) every code review and every bug.

I get about 300 emails a day, several of which are mailing list digests with
25 emails apiece. I actually skim them all; I'm one of two people I know who
doesn't use filters, and I think the other one gave up recently. For someone
who's an informationavore like me, though, it's paradise, and a great way of
keeping up the illusion of knowing everything.

~~~
robryan
It is probably good to have someone in this role, if everyone were doing it it
would probably be a productivity drain. But as the only one doing it you may
be able to spot issues that no one else has the same total oversight to catch.

------
justinmk
> every email at Stripe is CC-ed to lists that go to either the entire company
> or to any particular team. This includes internal person-to-person
> correspondence

I recently watched an 1990 Steve Jobs interview[1] in which he gushed about
this very idea as being a workflow of the future. Since the "desktop
revolution" was old news, he was moving on to the "business process
revolution" (something like that), enabled by networked computers. Companies
would love it because it removed the friction of traditional employee work
roles/titles and geography, and allowed managers to observe communication and
measure stuff. It's interesting to see a company actually doing pretty much
exactly what Jobs described in the video.

Although obviously, open source has used that model with great success.

[1] <http://video.pbs.org/video/2151510911/>

------
unohoo
A lot of these awesome things (weekly standups, together lunches, socials
etc.) are feasible when the team is still small. As the team scales, this
starts getting more and more difficult and ultimately, silos form among the
different functions (sales/support/eng etc.). Probably this might not be felt
to such an extent given that stripe is (and will be) engineering heavy (I
presume). But I've witnessed this first hand at the startup where I work.
Things were awesome when the team size was about 20-25. As we grew to ~150
folks over the last 2 years, a lot of the things start to break.

~~~
alttag
I enjoy the occasional social as much as they next guy, but as I get older, my
family becomes more important. Is it the case that the majority of employees
have fewer external social attachments? Do you (OP, or anyone else here) think
the idea of socials, which long term might have a tendency to become de facto
mandatory, is sustainable as the workforce ages (and starts families)?

~~~
collision
A number of people at Stripe have families or have other social attachments.
We try hard to ensure we're not making lifestyle assumptions when we hold
social things. Some of this involves giving good advance notice, other times
it's around timing. Trivial example: recently, we moved an internal talk
series from dinner time to 4pm, so that people who don't stay for dinner
aren't excluded. I think explicitly keeping things like that in mind helps.

~~~
eps
But this would eventually converge to the 9-5 frame of things, wouldn't it?
This is the only time of day that everyone is absolutely certain to have no
other commitments other than working.

Also, the fact that you had the talk initially set for the dinner time
basically means that your culture is already incompatible with the lifestyle
of those who value family over work. I am _not_ saying it's a bad thing, I
used to actually sleep at work when I was younger, but it is an indication of
problems you'll face once your team gets over a certain size. Diversity has a
smaller common overlap.

------
brown9-2
Love the idea of a paper reading group. In case anyone missed the link in the
article, they've put a bunch of the recently read papers up at
<https://github.com/gdb/stripe-prg/wiki/Papers>

~~~
jergason
I have been trying to get a group of people together once a month to read a
paper. We have a google group at
[https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/papers-
in...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/papers-in-computer-
science), and meet over Hangouts. Anyone interested should join up and suggest
papers!

~~~
reledi
This is a neat idea. I think I'll sign up :).

------
jt2190
From the article, emphasis mine:

    
    
      > None of this would matter if Stripe didn’t have 
      > fantastic people. Hiring well is the key to all of this,   
      > and people are the foundation of any company’s culture.
      > Frankly, I’ve never seen a team like Stripe’s; *** we 
      > have the best people in the industry ***.
    

Stripe's current success allows them to be very selective about who they hire,
which allows them to be fussy about all of the qualities that _they_ think
makes a great employee.

There are a number of factors that could "flip" the company's hiring from very
selective to less selective. For example:

    
    
      * Parts of their culture might not scale indefinitely.
      * They might start running short of cash, and have to
        settle for less expensive hires, or cut some of the
        office luxuries.
      * They might have to start hiring so fast that they can't
        be as selective about their hires.
      * Their tech stack will grow old, and unappealing to 
        energetic self-starters who want to work with the hot
        new thing.
      * Their current employees will get older, start families,
        and have other equally (if not more) important things
        than work.
    

Clearly, Stripe cares about their culture, and I'm sure that they'll do
everything they can keep their workplace experience great, however, cultures
are as much an art as they are a science, and what works well for a small
group doesn't necessarily work for a large one.

(edit: formatting)

------
scottilee
Everything in the post seems positive. Is there anything that is not so great
about working at Stripe or could be improved? Alex may be too new to answer
but it would be great if other Stripe employees could weigh in.

------
tzaman
You just _had_ to make the rest of us jealous, didn't you.

~~~
jeremyjh
Yes, I read this sort of thing, then look back at the desk I am chained to,
and want to weep.

~~~
jurre
I think they're hiring!

------
camwest
I'm curious about hours of operation. Are you folks 9-5? How flexible is it?

------
K2h
All the communication channels may seem like information overload, but I would
welcome it. I really like the part of open email (no more elite side bar
conversations between people that don't know as much as they thought they did)

The best part is the IRC channel for chat that has a bot to log my status
report (optional) and record for posterity and put it on the shared dashboard
as encouragement, recognition and engagement.

sigh... I need coworkers that know what IRC is..

------
TimJRobinson
I'd really like to learn more about your usage of irc and how the bots were
set up. Did someone create the bots for different tasks by hand or are there
good libraries for setting them up? Does everyone have irc open all day? And
if so isn't it incredibly distracting?

------
swampthing
Huge fan of Stripe and love the part about email transparency - we have
similar practices here as well.

I'm curious to hear if people at Stripe have given thought to just having all
emails sucked into a searchable CRM versus having to manually add cc's each
time?

~~~
nirajr
We have a good way of doing that with our product GrexIt (<http://grexit.com>)
- GrexIt helps you share Gmail labels. So you can just address an email to who
you want it to address it to, and add a Gmail label to it to share it with a
set of people. They get the email in their inboxes cleanly filed under the
corresponding label.

------
scott_karana
Thanks for the article! Gives me hope :D

------
gingerlime
... all I wonder though is what it's like to _use_ Stripe (no, we are not in
the US).

~~~
logn
Use it? You spend 30 minutes integrating it and then move on with your life =)

~~~
gingerlime
\+ years waiting for it if your company is in Europe... We are still in the
waiting phase.

------
njx
some people have knack of building great teams.

------
lucian303
All emails CC'd.

IRC!

Wow, that must be a pretty shitty job. Not to mention the time wasted with
Allhands meetings.

------
lazyjones
Enjoy it while you can, it will all go downhill when you start hiring
sales/marketing people ... ;-)

~~~
pc
[Disclaimer: Stripe cofounder.]

I know you probably mean this at least in part in jest, but I've found this to
be a pretty common perception in the tech industry. It's probably worth
addressing directly.

We want to work with the best engineers, but it's arrogant to assume that
that's all that we'll need, or that hiring non-engineering people will cause
our culture to deteriorate.

That's not to say that that doesn't happen at some companies (obviously). If
you view sales/marketing people as second class, and don't put the same
thought into that part of the culture, it'll inevitably be worse. Without a
lot of care, it's very easy to build a bad engineering culture too.

While building great software is at the very core of what we do, we won't be
able to do everything that we want to accomplish by _just_ hiring engineers.
We need people who like talking to users, and people who can describe what
Stripe is doing to the world at large, and people who'll help build the
countless parts of Stripe that aren't purely about code.

If companies choose to ignore sales, marketing, partnerships, support, and
everything else, they should be pretty explicit about the compromise: they're
trading off success for narrow-minded solipsism.

We've hired people who aren't full-time engineers, and we'll hire lots more.
We want people who can craft both kernel exploits and memorable prose. Those
who spend their days working with people instead of code are just as important
as anyone else, and their contributions are just as large.

~~~
pixelmonkey
At Parse.ly, we find an easy way of making sales and product teams co-exist
nicely is to encourage actual collaboration. For example, some of our
engineers built the sales team an engagement dashboard that allows them to
track customer usage analytics unified across many of our tracking systems.
This makes it clear that the teams have a shared goal and that we can leverage
each other's skills to the fullest.

