
What Working at Stripe Has Been Like - troydavis
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/
======
spudlyo
I left Stripe a little over 6 months ago to join an exciting startup with a
number of my friends. What I miss most about working there is the culture of
shipping. There are a number of 'shipped' email lists at Stripe where people
can tout their accomplishments large and small. These lists are widely read
and commented on, and folks put in a fair amount of effort making their
"shipped" emails informative and entertaining.

That feeling you get when you finish a challenging project, write a great
shipped email, and get a bunch of feedback from folks throughout the company
is pretty amazing. Once I was invited to convert one of my shipped emails into
a presentation for a company all-hands meeting. I had a less than a week to
get it done, which was pretty hectic, but in the end it turned out great and
it was perhaps my favorite memory of my time at Stripe.

I enjoy my current job, and those little dopamine hits I get from checking
things off my list as well as the bigger ones from finishing projects, but now
only my boss and some teammates notice when I finish something. One thing I
learned about myself, is that I really do care about what other people think
about my work.

~~~
cyberferret
If Stripe's HR department is reading this thread, I think they can pinpoint
one crucial interview question that will determine culture fit in their
organisation for future hiring - and that is "do you like talking about your
accomplishments with the rest of your team?".

Seems to be a very polarising thing to be asked to do, judging by the replies
on this particular comment.

EDIT: Curious about the downvotes? This is a real thing. I am sure they don't
want to hire people that would hate to write shipped emails and publish them
to the list if they actively hated writing them. It is simply not good culture
fit, and I am sure they would want to identify that early on in the
recruitment process.

~~~
andrewingram
Possibly that such a recruitment filter would exclude a lot of people with
depression or anxiety-related mental illness.

To clarify, I _hate_ talking about my accomplishments, it makes me feel deeply
anxious and uncomfortable, and will say as much if asked. But I’ll also do it
if that’s what’s required of me.

~~~
ascar
And there are many companies that value humbleness.

I love sharing my accomplishments. I know what's socially expected from me,
but not sharing feels really bad to me. It feels as all the work I've done and
that cool accomplishment don't matter at all. Therefore I mostly share with
friends, though most of them lack the necessary tech-knowledge to really
understand it.

I also love hearing about others accomplishments in an easy to digest way.
These shipped emails seem like great way to spread knowledge and a positive
attitude of getting stuff done.

What I, and the comment you replied to want to say, everyone is different. Let
me work at a company that encourages sharing accomplishments and go work for
one that values humbleness. But at least please don't take it away from me,
just because you don't like it, especially if it's optional.

~~~
andrewingram
To clarify, I’m not criticising the idea of sharing accomplishments. I’m
referring to having to _like_ doing it being a criteria for recruitment.

I was proposing a possible reason as to why the comment I was replying to was
receiving downvotes.

------
gringoDan
Reading this post made me think that while many companies advertise an
entrepreneurial environment and the ability to do impactful work, the true
test of this culture is 1) the ability to hire former founders and 2) those
former founders loving their work.

Plenty of blue-chip startups have future founders working for them...yet it
seems to me that having past founders is much more rare. An incredibly strong
company endorsement.

~~~
ztratar
As a former founder who now works at Stripe...

I am glad to see we are now explicitly mentioning the aspects of Stripe
culture that make it founder friendly.

\- Huge transparency \- Management optimizes for autonomy & distributed
decision-making \- Upwards review processes > downwards decision-making \-
Level obfuscation \- Shipping culture \- People who are of the quality you'd
normally only find by hiring them yourself (and frequently better)

My 3rd week at Stripe (around 7 months ago) Patrick just sat down next to me
at lunch, knew my name, and started talking about what my team was working on
in great detail. Asked me many direct, important questions and really
listened.

As a former CEO of a VC-backed company, I knew he was 100% on his game -- and
around you at work you can see that pretty much everyone trusts the execs to
be insanely competent, because they are. My only wish is that they don't take
as many solo plane rides, haha. :)

~~~
agf
Can you expand on level obfuscation?

~~~
bernatfp
I think he means role titles don't include seniority level

~~~
agf
Yeah, but what does that have to do with being founder friendly?

------
xrd
The most fascinating part of this article is the idea that Stripe is spending
time thinking about unlocking potential in Internet businesses in Japan. A
tough nut to crack. The revolution is happening in all these countries, but if
Stripe can move the needle in Brazil and Japan and other places where
entrepreneurship currently requires more grease/graft, that'll really be
interesting.

~~~
alexcnwy
I’m in Tokyo right now for work (my startup NumberBoost won an innovation
competition with NTT Japan) and it’s so wild how simultaneously forward and
backward things are here.

On the one hand, there are so many things they do here that make me feel like
they’re in the future. On the other hand, every fifth person has a flip phone,
the WiFi sucks, you can’t buy a travel SIM card at the mall, and there are
CD/DVD stores everywhere.

I can’t help but feel part of their problem is how unwilling most local
Japanese people I’ve met here are to break the rules.

~~~
alexcnwy
For example good luck getting mayonnaise with your fries at any of the fast
food chains here. They have mayonnaise and they put it on burgers but they
“CANNOT” give (or sell) it to you in a separate container for your fries.

~~~
mistrial9
mayonnaise has special properties regarding food spoilage, it can be
legitimately poisonous when it turns bad.. which in food services, is a
constant.

~~~
culturestate
This isn’t the reason you can’t get mayo with fries in Japan, though. It’s a
cultural barrier against deviating from the “rules,” no matter how small. Mayo
isn’t on the menu as a condiment; sorry!

Example: I once had to fill out a form (as a designated corporate
representative) authorizing myself to access our racks in an NTT data center
and then fax it to the DC manager (who I knew personally) before he would let
me in. _During this entire process we were standing in the same room._

It used to annoy me when I first moved to Tokyo, but you eventually learn to
live with it.

------
blizkreeg
Patrick, I love Stripe's offering, but I have to pull teeth within my startup
to justify _why we use Stripe_ to non-technical people. In fact, when I put on
my Product person's hat, I can see everything they tell me clearly.

Stripe just does not look or function like a credit card processor. It is
nearly impossible for non-engineer folk to grasp - to the point of it not
being a viable platform. The almost hermit-like reporting interfaces (the best
that can be done is a bunch of paginated tables??), the lack of visibility
into how charges break down at an aggregate level (how much do we pay Stripe
in fees has to be pulled from a _shudder_ export of all transactions),
handling of disputes, no ability to generate monthly statements (for Connect
accounts), no direct line access to an account manager etc etc - the list goes
on unfortunately.

I love the simplicity, but I can tell you that Stripe is lagging far behind in
functionality and ease of platform use for SMB and enterprise SaaS companies
(specifically, in our case, a platform/service provider that runs payments for
a bunch of small businesses). We're small, but not tiny, and growing - so the
noise around the problems we face just keeps amplifying by the day. The moment
we crossed a dozen customers and 100-200K in monthly processing, it’s as if
Stripe just stopped working for us.

Stripe's clearly an extraordinary engineering-driven company, but solving for
real business use-cases is key. From the outside, it feels like Stripe is
solving all the back-end problems and optimizing it, but doing nothing about
the _front-end_ , metaphorically speaking.

I'm now having to get on calls with old-school card processing providers since
Stripe just doesn't "scale" for us from a business use-case perspective. It's
too catered to the devs.

Hope this falls on the right ear. I'm happy to chat more and provide my 2c of
feedback if someone wants to listen.

~~~
countryqt30
I 100% agree with this. Stripe is fun for startups with <100'000 / year
revenue, but then it gets ugly. The reporting can't be configured at all and
is highly cumbersome, especially if you need something slightly different than
they offer for comparability (e.g. last 7 days, last 28 vs last 30 days), and
Stripe is not transparent about their fees at all in the back-end.

~~~
icelancer
I'll add my 2c and say I disagree entirely. We ship mid-seven figures through
Stripe yearly and I enjoy the back-end still to this day - have been using it
right after it was /dev/payments and still kicking all these years on my main
small business and small projects alike.

I don't see the need for "reporting" from the Stripe website as I think most
businesses should be doing it on their own in their own tooling, but in the
cases I want to quickly look things up, Stripe's back-end has been just fine
as well.

~~~
LIV2
And what is the business case and cost for "we should develop software to fill
in the missing features of payment provider x instead of simply going with y"?

------
afarrell
> One of the things I enjoy most about Stripe’s work culture is the notion
> that “nothing is Not My Job.” I’m very eager to know: If you want to be
> successful in such a culture, what mental habits/skills can you develop
> which let you know with confidence where to direct your attention?

How did patio11 develop these?

———

EDIT: How do you know that what you are working on is not a distraction?

~~~
chapium
If everything is your job, how can you be measured by what _is_ your job
fairly?

~~~
rarecoil
I don't think that's the point of the statement.

Facebook culture makes a similar statement: "Nothing at Facebook is someone
else's problem." I don't take it to mean that you are supposed to be the Atlas
of the organization, but rather that when you see problems and issues that
might arise, you don't ignore them because it's "not my job" or "not my
problem" \- you embrace it, escalate or forward it to the correct people, and
then go back to what else you have to do.

This type of thinking stops issues from being buried when they're noticed by
someone, even if it's something outside of what they _are_ judged on in their
responsibilities (and performance reviews). A good hypothetical example of
this is a crash condition you may trigger as an engineer. You might not quite
know what is going on but you have a reproducible testcase of a crash
condition in someone else's stack, and saying it's not your job means the bug
doesn't get fixed or reported. Had you submitted that crash condition and made
it temporarily your problem, you could have indirectly helped patch a
deserialization bug that could've led to code execution on that tier with a
more malicious testcase (i.e. exploit).

In smaller companies, I think everything technical kind of ends up being your
job, so your job becomes what you make of it at that moment. Do what needs to
be done to ship the thing.

~~~
jklinger410
>I don't take it to mean that you are supposed to be the Atlas of the
organization, but rather that when you see problems and issues that might
arise, you don't ignore them because it's "not my job" or "not my problem" \-
you embrace it, escalate or forward it to the correct people, and then go back
to what else you have to do.

Trying to really educate around this at my workplace.

I call it "throwing your hands up." If you run into a problem, or notice that
something isn't working, what-have-you, if you throw your hands up instead of
working to fix it, or find the person who should fix it, you are on my shit
list.

It's hard to explain this part of ownership. But it's very obvious when you
see someone doing it. Their first response is often to say something like "not
my job," and they often think that Extreme Ownership or Question Behind the
Question mentality covers it, but after it all shakes out in the wash, it's
actually the opposite.

Maybe people need to do a better job of explaining ownership up front, or
choose different words. IDK

~~~
afarrell
> on my shit list

What would you tell a junior engineer who feels so overwhelmed with the tasks
he is supposed to be focused on that he decides not to switch task to solving
this other thing that may-or-may-not be a real problem?

Also, are the phrases “Extreme Ownership” and “Question Behind the Question”
from a US Navy SEAL book by Willink and Babin? Would you generally recommend
that book?

~~~
matwood
I’ll second the Jocko book recommendation. His podcast is also good. Pick out
the QA episodes if you want mostly leadership questions.

------
Uhhrrr
> I also wrote a non-trivial amount of code because, fun fact, stripe.com
> spells CMS e-r-b, which didn’t optimize for writers’ ability to ship new
> words

Could someone explain the "CMS e-r-b" joke to me?

~~~
karanke
Their CMS
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system))
is a set of flat ERB
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERuby](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERuby))
files, no WordPress etc.

------
cyberferret
> _The parts of the job which I enjoyed the most were not my actual job
> (writing and selling software, filing taxes in a timely fashion, etc) but
> helping other software entrepreneurs optimize their businesses or engineers
> navigate career challenges._

This bit in the post about the author having previously been a founder of a
business intrigued me.

As a founder myself, I know that there are bits of the business that don't fit
into my natural skillset but _have_ to be done. That is accepted as part and
parcel of running a business.

The second point intrigues me though. In my decades of running my own software
business, I have had a _lot_ of staff come through as employees, get skilled
up, then leave to start their own businesses using the skills they learned
while at my company.

This actually gives me a great deal of pleasure and pride. I LOVE seeing
people's career pathways take off, and I love it more if I had contributed in
some way.

------
pololee
I was in a small company working on payments team as fullstack engineer. Given
the big volume, stripe would be too expensive for us. So we built our own
credit card processing service. We integrated with FirstData directly. While I
was working on payments, I kept following news about stripe. I love their
design and appreciate the deep care they put in their product, even the
documentation. I like Patrick and John's inspiring stories and love watching
their interviews. After 3 years, I was looking for a new opportunity. Stripe
is my dream company. I was lucky to get a phone interview. The conversation
went fine. The coding problem was easy. But I could tell the interviewer was
not impressed. I couldn't figure out what and why. I was depressed when I got
the rejection email. I'll definitely want to try again. Anyone advice or
suggestions Stripe folks could offer would be greatly appreciated!

~~~
yitchelle
Did they give a plausible reason for their rejection? I am just interested if
the trend for job rejection reasons is moving towards a more transparent
model. In the past and present, it is extremely difficult/frustrating to get
the real answers for being rejected.

~~~
pololee
They didn't give me any specific reasons. The recruiter called me one day
after my video interview. She only told me they didn't think I was a good fit.
In the interview, I finished the coding questions in 30 mins. Then I just had
a chat with the interviewer. The conversation went fine. He told me he was
full-stack eng and worked on frontend. I asked him whether he worked with
Benjamin De Cock, a stripe designer I admire and if he could share some
stories. He said yes but didn't want to share stories.

------
benatkin
I like the remote coffee at the end. I'm remote and I want it to feel more
like I'm having coffee when I'm talking to people I work with. Any suggestions
on how to make remote conversations more like getting a cup of coffee?

~~~
martin_
At Twilio we use Donut. The TLDR is with our configuration every third Monday
members of a slack channel (#soc-donut in our case) get randomly paired via
DM. I've met people from offices around the world which I wouldn't have done
otherwise, which has definitely been of personal and professional benefit to
me

[0] [https://www.donut.com/](https://www.donut.com/)

------
bgentry
@patio11 could you elaborate on the internal communications structure at
Stripe? I’m curious how employees these days balance the use of different
communication tools, especially as Stripe has grown and begun embracing
distributed work.

I heard [0] for a long time it was all about long form posts to a massive
number of Google Groups mailing lists with custom tooling to manage
subscriptions (bc the Groups UI is poor). I understand these lists range from
general to hyper specific.

But then I’ve also heard much of the communication has shifted to Slack or
other tools. Slack tends to degrade into chaos at a certain size, and at
Stripe’s scale I’m curious if this is a big pain point or how you mitigate it.

[https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-
transparency](https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency)

~~~
rattray
I am not patio11, but I do work at Stripe. Both are true; we use a lot of
email, typically with lists, and a lot of Slack.

Other tools, like a wiki, an issue tracker, Home[0], and a culture of "run"
rotations (like on-call but for helping folks on other teams) help keep chaos
manageable.

It might be interesting for us to write up another update on this, since many
folks are curious...

[0] [https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home](https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home)

------
OliverJones
As a Stripe customer processing about USD600K a year through them, I have to
say they're an excellent outfit.

Their documentation is very clear. Their email and irc support is smart and
responsive, with nary a "I can help you with that today" script recited by an
agent to waste my time.

They set and meet expectations about the financial stuff, like how long it
takes for transactions to hit the bank, and what happens with disputes and
chargebacks and other parts of the world of serving real paying people.

It's not hard to guess that the things in this article are all true.

~~~
icelancer
I like a lot of things about Stripe but this is by far the best part:

> Their documentation is very clear.

In a world where no one gives a shit about cleanly documenting processes -
especially ones that are versioned or change - I really appreciate Stripe's
dedication to this.

------
js2
> (An example which is just a boggling fact about the world: what’s your
> finger-to-a-wind guesstimate about what percentage of credit card payments
> fail with error code I Don’t Know Sometimes Things Fail In Credit Card Land?
> Hint: it’s higher than you think. Those failed payments cost conversions at
> the margin. When Stripe fights that number down by a basis point, that
> creates value across our entire portfolio, forever.)

I have no idea what the percentage is but I recently had a decline I think may
have been from Stripe itself.

A few months back I’d dropped my car off at the shop and tried to Lyft home.
I’m a very infrequent Lyft/Uber user. Lyft refused to accept my payment. Tried
with two different cards (Chase, AmEx) both directly, via Apple Pay and via
PayPal. Couldn’t hail a car.

So then I try with Uber. Same thing! Payment rejected, no car for you.

I wrote to both Lyft and Uber customer support. Never heard back from Uber.
Lyft claimed my card was denied (“It appears that the card is not working due
to a decline from your bank. Because the information we receive about bank
declines is very limited, you’ll need to reach out to your bank directly for
more information as to why the transaction was denied.”) I contact both my
card companies - they tell me there are no blocks on my card nor anything that
would cause the payment to be rejected.

The only thing I could find Lyft/Uber had in common was they both used Stripe.

(But that doesn’t explain not being able to pay via Apple Pay/PayPal unless
those somehow route through Stripe.)

Never did figure out what it was (“Jay, I had checked and verified that the
last four of the card that you have provided is already added on this account.
There shouldn't be any issues in requesting for a ride. If you had any issues
with your Lyft request. Please kindly send a screen shot so that we will be
able to see and rectify the issue.”) and haven’t had cause to use Lyft/Uber
since.

This incident is the only time I can recall payments being rejected like that.
I think Chase once temporarily blocked an Internet payment, sent me a
notification immediately, I indicated the charge was legitimate, tried again
and it went through.

Oh well. (I ended up getting a ride home in the shop’s customer service van.)

~~~
ikeboy
I'd guess half a percent? Can't imagine it being much higher?

~~~
epa
Bank declines are 10-20% of total card volume, depending on industry.

~~~
ikeboy
Most of those are going to be straightforward insufficient funds or fraud
though, I'd assume?

~~~
penagwin
Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with these specific numbers.

Anecdotally I've had my own cards denied because I've reported my card missing
and had to get new numbers. This is fairly common from what I've seen, many
people I know have had issues because of this (late fees, etc.). Just another
case I thought I'd add, as we sufficient funds and it wasn't fraud.

~~~
ikeboy
If you report your card missing then it's no longer a valid number.

~~~
js2
Except for recurring payments, at least with AmEx.

------
onion2k
This is a great post. I already thought highly of Stripe, but knowing a little
more about the way people work there makes me all the more impressed.

------
chair6
For more insight re. Stripe, [https://fs.blog/2018/05/patrick-
collison/](https://fs.blog/2018/05/patrick-collison/) was an excellent
Knowledge Project episode talking to CEO & co-founder Patrick Collison.

~~~
misiti3780
i just discovered the knowledge project this weekend, seems pretty awesome.

------
aboutruby
> It also felt like it was constraining the absolute amount of impact I had
> for the world.

It's refreshing to see people thinking like this. Maximizing impact is
undervalued. For instance a lot of companies restrict themselves to one
country thus dramatically reducing the maximum impact.

~~~
blotter_paper
Due to differences in regulation I would expect there to be instances where
focusing on one country would have more of an impact than spreading your
resources over multiple jurisdictions. I would even guess that this is true
for most companies below a certain scale. Reduction/standardisation of
regulation should reduce the value of scale for which this is true, though
other factors such as geography would still play a role.

------
dandigangi
This was such a good read. I am going to try that Remote Coffee tomorrow.

------
fyfy18
After reading all of that and thinking "Stripe sounds like a really cool place
to work", I'm a bit disappointed that they don't have an office in my country
and "remote" means "remote in North America".

Oh well, I'll keep working with them to build cool stuff for my clients :-)

~~~
sieabahlpark
They probably have laws restricting access to their credit card says. Possibly
hiring or contractual with Enterprise

------
fulafel
For anyone else wondering what Stripe Atlas is,

> Stripe Atlas, a seamless way to start your company in the U.S.

Apparently it's a filing-paperwork-etc-as-a-service

------
mychael
File this blog post under "Humble Brag"

------
devmunchies
Are there a lot of remote workers at Stripe or is Patrick an exception to the
rule?

~~~
patio11
There are many (tens of percent of engineering, etc); we are taking steps to
materially increase the number.

~~~
retromario
I checked out the list of remote engineering jobs after reading your
(fascinating) article but unfortunately they all seem to be restricted to
North America. Is this a time zone issue or a legal issue? Are there plans to
expand remote jobs to other regions (like Europe)?

~~~
patio11
As time goes to infinity we plan on having Stripes building products very
close to as many of our customers as possible, which is (much) more widely
distributed than the status quo, which is (much) more widely distributed than
open recs on any given Monday. There will be more on this subject coming
later.

~~~
aboutruby
I'm not sure what open recs means in this context:

\- open requirements

\- open recommendations

\- open requisites

\- open offers

I'm not really expecting an answer so I asked on stackexchange:
[https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/490404/what-
does...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/490404/what-does-open-
recs-means)

~~~
patio11
It's industry jargon for "each allocation for a single person which appears on
a planned set of hires."

~~~
aboutruby
Thanks a lot!

------
triangleman
So, are you ever going to open source stockfighter?

------
dvduval
Definitely not my favorite credit card processor. For starters, I will not
earn any money if I refer my customers to stripe. It's already a non-starter
at that point.

~~~
ztratar
I'm a Stripe employee & would like to know more about your POV here.

What other processors pay you for referring your customers, and whom are your
customers?

Very curious. Since processing is a low-margin business, it's really rare to
see referral bonuses, especially the type you're describing. If we do have
room to open up a program like this, I could mention it internally.

------
ghostbrainalpha
This may seem petty but as a former designer, Stripes logo not really having a
stripe in it has always really bothered me.

Like... how could they not try harder to make that a focus of their branding?

~~~
travisjungroth
Amazon doesn't have a river in their logo.

~~~
lstamour
Well actually... [https://www.freelogodesign.org/blog/2018/09/10/the-amazon-
lo...](https://www.freelogodesign.org/blog/2018/09/10/the-amazon-logo-story)

~~~
benatkin
That has an interesting error in it:

"This is a good example of why it is import to have a logo that is versatile."

I wonder if the author was considering using the phrase "of import" [1] and
decided to be less clever.

1:
[https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/import](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/import)
third definition, _import noun (IMPORTANCE)_

