When I was working at startups in Cambridge, there was a company there that had a similar reputation called "JumpTap". They were in the same building as us and their people complained a lot a the nearby bar. Long hours, long weeks, no recognition, even guys on the same team sabotaging each other's projects to chase promotions. When I saw that comment "getting a lot of advice from JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon," I remembered that JumpTap was founded by a former Morgan banker.
At the time I knew some people at investment banks and they basically report the exact same environment. Right around then my friend went to JumpTap and lasted about 5 weeks before he walked out, reporting the exact same thing. So when they called to recruit me I knew it would be wasting my time to even explain to them I thought that they should fix their rep as an employer first - rapacious and exploitative is the only environment they know how to run. It works for Morgan's and Goldman and the rest of Wall Street so they bring it with them into tech. It seems to me that only about 5% of engineers are suited for it, that suitability doesn't correlate with actual technical talent, they don't really gain anything in the long run for the extra time they put in (JumpTap's never gonna have a big stock pop, and Square employees will never see a Google kind of IPO payout), so for pretty much everyone it's best to steer clear.
Is [rapidly growing and successful startup x] a pleasant place to work?
FUCK NO
You're growing fast. Everyone's overwhelmed and strained to their limits. People get bitchy and burn out. Systems fail. Corners are cut. Employees do the math on options and come up short.
Not pleasant. Pleasant and fast growth don't have a lot of overlap. Is it worth the ride? Everyone has to figure that out for themselves.
I disagree -- plenty of fast growing teams and companies treat employees well, even during hyper-growth. Sure, it's a lot less stable than an established company, but what people are talking about in this Quora question doesn't seem to be related to growth.
I know a fair number of people at Facebook during the 2006-2010 period (and some from 2005+), and they paid people well, didn't measure productivity by butt-in-seat hours, etc. Facebook was growing at least as fast as Square.
In 2006 facebook was already more than 150 people from what i can tell... square pushed through that boundary much more recently -- that's the really painful bit
I have not spent much time thinking about this, but do you think, possibly, that the reason why a minor screw-up from an engineer is looked at as a huge mistake (and ultimately the engineers feel like crap day-in-day-out), is because of the industry in which Square operates?
A minor error could practically take a company alike this down.
None of the behaviors ascribed to Square seem like the kind of things which contribute to Quality (in the measurable/repeatable process sense). In fact, most of the issues raised on Quora (whimsical firing, excessively long hours, incompetent HR and management, etc.) are directly counter to any decent Quality program.
Yes, a financial company needs more focus on test, quality, etc. than a social network or game, but you don't really get those things by terrorizing employees.
If you look at the organizations producing the best, most bug-free code, they're generally 9-5 shops with very experienced people, probably way more qualified than a startup employee for the same role, and for roles where the requirements and performance metrics are pretty well established.
Trying to avoid all defects is kind of the opposite end of a spectrum from rapid innovation. You can have low defects in production through great test and rapidly catching/fixing bugs, but at a certain point, you do need to accept higher overhead and slower development speed to deliver very low defect products.
I'm not sure if anything has changed, but in 2010 and early 2011, Square had one of the most effective recruiting efforts in Silicon Valley -- they were able to recruit away from startups, Facebook, etc. (Palantir was the other one, with Facebook being the "big company" who had no problems recruiting otherwise).
At the time I knew some people at investment banks and they basically report the exact same environment. Right around then my friend went to JumpTap and lasted about 5 weeks before he walked out, reporting the exact same thing. So when they called to recruit me I knew it would be wasting my time to even explain to them I thought that they should fix their rep as an employer first - rapacious and exploitative is the only environment they know how to run. It works for Morgan's and Goldman and the rest of Wall Street so they bring it with them into tech. It seems to me that only about 5% of engineers are suited for it, that suitability doesn't correlate with actual technical talent, they don't really gain anything in the long run for the extra time they put in (JumpTap's never gonna have a big stock pop, and Square employees will never see a Google kind of IPO payout), so for pretty much everyone it's best to steer clear.