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All: there are several pages of comments in this thread - to read them you need to click the "X comments more..." links at the bottom of the page, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264&p=3
We sometimes prune top-heavy comments to balance the subthreads out, but not in cases like this, for obvious reasons.
For those who have worked around and at Stripe for the past decade, this is not a surprise. Stripe, and especially the founders, have a quite a poor reputation for screwing over people in and around their orbit.
Almost every fintech startup has the story of Patrick reaching out about an acquisition, mining them for information playing along and then ghosting - same thing for candidates. They leadership team, specifically Patrick and Will Gaybrick are extremely smart but have screwed over a ton of people - be very careful about trusting.
You don't hear anything about this online, they're incredibly effective at squashing hit pieces and have a huge amount of reporters and power brokers under their control. On HN and silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine. Patrick has almost direct control over YC and HN, you'll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.
With Patrick now living in Woodside, Will on permanent vacation in Malibu and John permanently in Ireland the company is definitely a bit in chaos mode internally. Their entire people team has turned over and they're having major retention issues - so I'm not super surprised that stuff like this is starting to leak out.
I run a $XB fintech, and am afraid to use my name given the backlash.
I'm also a founder of an $xB fintech (Coinbase!) and I have to say, this does not ring true to me at all.
I've known Patrick since 2013 or so, and I have found him to be nothing but the highest integrity. Same for John. We are semi-competitors (not a ton of overlap) so you might find it strange for me to stick up for him like this, but I just think this description is wildly inaccurate. As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).
He has direct control over reporters and YC? I'm sorry but this sounds like conspiracy theory.
People are living all over due to covid - so what. Remote is the future of work.
There are plenty of more reasonable Occam's razor explanations for some of what is being reported in this thread (and from the OP). You always have to assume ignorance over malice first. For example:
- companies often look at startups they may want to acquire, and decide to pass for various reasons (saying no more than yes is a good process), they then launch their own products (this is why they were looking at acquisitions in the first place), pretty normal
- any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences, I know for instance these happen in Coinbase periodically, and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly)
- most rational explanation for OPs issue is that references were checked and came back luke warm/negative, so more were done which delayed it etc (they may not tell you this was the reason to protect sources btw), this is one of many potential reasons, i'm guessing, but benign explanations are more likely
- also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer
Anyway - if people had negative experiences, then feedback is great. I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this. Patrick and John are great founders we can all learn from, and yes human like all of us (not perfect). Let's all help each other improve here, and assume positive intent.
This is the first time Iāve seen a post with anything negative about Patrick and having a Coinbase founder come out of the woodwork to make a post like this defending all of this with nothing more than conjecture sends a completely different message than you think.
this is such a key thing people in immense power forget, once youāre on the inside things start looking really different and you canāt see it
I bet Patrick will never have to deal with his Coinbase support tickets going unanswered for months. It was nice of Brian to take time out of his day to come here and defend his buddy, but I wish he'd invest some of that $xB into building a support team for his paying customers.
#BitcoinFixesThis
Bitcoin will never lock your funds, suspend your account, and since it works perfectly, you don't need support at all.
How will financial crime be prevented?
Seriously. I am a fan of some crypto coins because in contrast to bitcoin there is actually future-proof concepts, but this "you will never face any consequences" advertising is delusional and would only work in a perfect alternative reality where everone acts in the interest of society.
Also
https://xrpl.org/carbon-calculator.html
Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?
The point is not that they have direct control over YC or HN, it's that they have massive indirect control over the organization and have done a wizard's job of making themselves untouchable in the media.
Some context:
I'm a former (early) YC founder, and during my batch the YC team recommended that we spend time with the HN team. The HN team gave us edits on our posts, recommended the best times of day to submit, emailed us when stories about our companies hit the front page, and explained how the ranking algorithms worked (and thus we learned how to game them). And we are not the most valuable YC company ever -- so it's possible more was done for Stripe.
It's not direct influence, but rather indirect impact. So again I ask -- Did Patrick request that you write this post?
That sounds weird to me. There was no "HN team" before I started working on HN in October 2012 - just pg, and no one would have referred to him as "the HN team".
The HN team originates in April 2014, when I became public as a mod. (That's not early in YC btw.) In that case you're talking about me (and possibly Scott), and while I guess it's dangerous to make strong claims about some meeting I don't remember, there's no way we would have "explained how the ranking algorithms worked" in such a way that you could game HN. That's precisely what we would not have done. I've worked _way_ too hard on that shit to blab about it and see all that sand run through my fingers.
I also doubt that we'd have told you "the best times of day to submit"āpeople ask us that all the time and the stock answer is we have no idea, there are all sorts of dodgy analyses out there, and you can take your pick.
As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, yesāI do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.
I can confirm that dang is a massive help to non-YC founders posting on HN.
Heās helped me a couple of times to make my posts more appealing to readers, providing great insight into what HN readers are looking for.
Same here.
I launched a company that has grown into a mild success _because_ of dang giving it another chance and it making the front page.
Me too -- dang has given me valuable feedback about what kinds of things to post, and how to focus and frame posts so people will find them useful and interesting, how to save and respect people's time, and how not to overwhelm or tire people out so much. Much of that advice applies to writing and life in general, not just posting to HN! And he's even done kind favors like correcting an embarrassing typo I made in quote of a transcript that accidentally inverted the meaning of what the person was trying to say, when I only noticed it after the paint dried.
+1000 same here
dang rules
Perhaps it was just our batch, but there was a long discussion about how the algo worked amongst founders. Admittedly, you + Scott were not there. Some partners were and the discussion was seeded by them, but I don't remember how much they contributed vs. others in the group.
Edit: Apologies if this came off as accusatory. Was trying to make the point that they don't have control of the media, but instead are just flawless in their use of it.
In that case it was the blind leading the blind. The advice that founders give each other about how to game HN routinely backfires. Unfortunately, people are so conditioned to conflate "feels like it should work" with "actually works", that no matter how much we repeat the contrary it seems to have little effect.
Thanks for the reply - you had me wondering for a minute what the hell I wasn't remembering.
This is interesting. I have not done a launch or a Show HN post in some time but back in the day HN was pretty easy to game: three rapid upvotes from unrelated accounts and IPs got you to the bottom of the front page (I did not use sock puppets ever, instead just asking geographically diverse friends to upvote the post immediately after posting it). If the content was mildly interesting you got to see it spend some time at the top. Posting when the New page had a longer delta T between the top and bottom post was also helpful. I definitely got a lot of front page time for what I now consider fairly mediocre content.
Voting rings aren't allowed any more than sock puppets are.
> Unfortunately, people are so conditioned to conflate "feels like it should work" with "actually works", that no matter how much we repeat the contrary it seems to have little effect.
Thank you for this. This sentiment applies to so much online, especially in the field of online content, social media posting and conversion rates.
What feels like it should work is not the same as what actually works.
This site was posted on here at some point and it made me mad because everything the guy recommends _sounds_ awesome, but where is any proof that it actually improves sales?
https://examples.roastmylandingpage.com/
Humans are complex beasts and sometimes the exact opposite of the obvious is the right solution:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-11573666
That's not really the "HN team," though. What you're describing that the partners did is scummy, but makes sense when you realize that partners and dang have effectively an adversarial relationship when it comes to the quality of HN. People invested in you have strong reason to try and ensure your popularity here; they very well could have just tried throwing tips at you to get you to manipulate the site better.
Most people can't stare at the News source for an hour straight without getting a headache, let alone a rich investor type. They wouldn't find much of value in what's been publicly released of it, anyway (the released source is ancient and includes little as far as quality control goes).
If what you're saying is based in truth, you were probably just getting tips from someone with a strong financial incentive to have brute forced their way into understanding the site the manual way (throwing posts at it) rather than someone who had any genuine inside knowledge.
> As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.
Fact: dang's helped me a few times with this when I've goofed with my own comments, and as best as I can tell, I'm not a founder of any kind.
dang offered me to do the same thing for my, now closed, start-up.
that only makes it more likely they're helping more important people more frequently and to a greater degree.
By that logic, there's really nothing generous dang can do that isn't further proof of his perfidy.
Indeed once you understand that the moderators are helping people with brand management and suggestions at the very least, and the extent to which this occurs is hidden, they lose the ability to claim neutrality and open themselves up to lots of questions about what else they're doing
That's a result of actions taken not some kind of theoretical argument.
> open themselves up to lots of questions about what else they are doing
Is there a name for this pattern?
1. Observe that a human is taking some action to more effectively do their jobsā¦ but in a way that has some risk of being unevenly applied or also self-beneficial.
2. Conclude that this action is itself malfeasance.
3. Conclude that this person merits generalized distrust.
I see this all the time in comments on (for example) youtube. I struggle to see how social cohesion could survive in a world where more people do this: If you lose trust by doing your job well, then its harder to motivate yourself to maintain othersā trust that youāll do your job.
> Is there a name for this pattern?
What about "assume bad intentions"?
> Is there a name for this pattern?
See āFundamental Attribution Errorā
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
It depends what you think their job is I guess. I never imagined that forum moderation would include helping brand management for forum users - in fact I'd say those two behaviours are in direct conflict with each other.
If your job is forum moderation and you do that well great. But if the same people use those same accesses to give some forum users help over other forum users without any transparency then there is no illusion of neutral moderation and this whole forum just may be undisclosed pr/ brand management whole people are discussing companies/jobs/tech in a way that might bias others.
I haven't read anything on the site providing brand management to some users. Was that disclosed somewhere? How could you trust any post talking about a new company or having to do with companies in general if some are getting assistance to boost their reception and others aren't?
_I never imagined_
This is probably the crux of the problem, the scenario you're describing is based mostly on assumptions of your own - like 'brand management' (whatever that is) and 'secret'. See for instance
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29231229
As with any online thing made mostly of people, there are lot of not entirely obvious things about HN, both good and bad. It's not the Brand Management (whatever that is) Shadow Council you seem convinced it is.
I think their job is maintaining the health and ambient trust within the social system that is HN -- keeping HN a place people generally want to keep coming back to for thoughtful conversation. Assuming thats reasonably close, lets look at the activities we're talking about:
> As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.
So there are two categories:
1. Helping clarify each others messages.
2. Letting people know when something is happening that concerns them.
Why do they not disclose this? Suppose you have two friends Alice and Bob. Suppose Alice tells you that about something Bob said which really upset her. Would you:
A. Commiserate with Alice by telling her about something ambiguously untrustworthy that Bob said.
B. Reply to Alice by comparing Bob unfavourably to Frank.
C. Listen empathetically to Alice and then when she's vented, offer another more charitable interpretation of Bob's words.
D. Later, let Bob know that Alice is upset with him and he might want to chat with her.
I bet most folks would advocate options C and D. Yet that is is basically doing "undisclosed pr/brand management" on behalf of Bob. It is pretty much the same as what dang says he does for HN. I don't think HN discloses this for the same reason that they don't disclose a habit of holding doors open for people -- I assume they don't remark on it because it seems unremarkable to them.
----------------------------------------
Your words like "neutral", "give some forum users help over other forum users" imply a strict duty to avoid cooperative behaviour in favour of competitive behaviour. I don't think that duty is nearly so strict.
> I never imagined that forum moderation would include helping brand management for forum users
Me neither. That sounds like hell!
There are wheels within wheels in this village, and fires within fires! When Reverend Hale comes, you will proceed to look for signs of witchcraft here.
You mean he ought to spend his limited time picking random comments from unimportant people that noone wants to read and help edit those comments, so that the world becomes more fair and just?
Sounds like a recipe for a successful forum.
FWIW dang was extremely helpful when I had an issue. He worked with me to resolve it, rather than take arbitrary executive action. I donāt credit any accusation of dang playing favourites to YC founders. Basically, there is no level of assistance higher than what I received, therefore there is no way someone is getting preferential treatment. Thereās simply no more that couldāve been done.
Note: I wasnāt completely happy with the outcome at the time, but I respected the decision. I hindsight I agree with it too.
Dang. Please remove the shadowban from my account so I can post anonymously.
Are you planning to sell your Stripe equity at IPO next year, or wait a week for the IPO pop? I think I might actually wait a couple months
I don't have any Stripe equity, and it's not ok to attack other users on HNānot even a moderator.
I'm also a YC founder of a (smaller, but top ~100 in terms of valuation) YC company. I don't know what your experience was like with Stripe, but the notion that Patrick has some unduly amount of power to exercise over HN and YC immediately flags to me as untrue. I've been on the receiving end of a _lot_ of HN criticism, and I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to _not_ tip the scale in YC founders' favor.
Edits on your posts, recommending the best times of day to submit, explaining how HN algorithms work broadly, are accessible to everyone; these are discussed frequently on HN, and were all accessible to me even before I was a YC founder. I'm also certain the HN team wouldn't need to email Patrick about something like this being on the front page; when my company (~150 employees) is on the front page I get a bunch of messages about it from all sorts of different angles; certainly many of the thousands of Stripe employees use HN and would be capable of sending a Slack or text.
To me it seems the notion that Patrick has "indirect control" over parts of HN is a longer way of saying he has respect. I think Patrick _may_ be the most universally respected founder in Silicon Valley, and perhaps doubly so amongst engineers. I am not surprised at all that people upvote his comments, as he's both the person speaking from authority, and they're usually well reasoned - I use them as a model for how to respond well (something I have not always done).
I'm not saying you're being untrue about your experience (and I don't think OP was being untrue about theirs), but the notion that Patrick as at the helm of an evil empire stealing from companies and manipulating folks to keep it quiet just feels farcically different from reality across the dozens of Stripe and YC/HN touch points I have.
> I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.
Consider [1] which was flagged dead. It was ~10 years ago, so I could be wrong, but I believe there was a follow-up meta "Ask HN" where someone asked why it was flagged (I can't find it), and I __believe__ PG said something along the lines that he didn't find the original constructive, hence flagging it dead. Top comment on the non-constructive OP was from spolsky with some insightful information on job postings...
Definitely seemed like going above and beyond to tip the scale in YC founder's favor.
Edit: found the followup/meta [2] (I was wrong, no official explanation was given, sorry about that).
[1]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2703771
[2]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2707385
I think hn moderation has probably changed in the last 10 years. For one thing, the set of moderators has entirely changed since then.
> I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.
This [0] story criticising Gitlab resurfaced on a day of Gitlab IPO and quickly disappeared from the frontpage within an hour or so.
[0]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28857073
I'm assuming this occurred because HN's "flame detector" triggered (Think it has something to do with upvotes vs comments).
Lambda School must also not be an evil empire then huh?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
I think you might be getting conspiratorial about this. Here's my take on reading the comment thread. I am an outsider peering in - no connection to the companies etc.
1. Your single experience doesn't represent a pattern of behavior - and dang comment's certainly corrected some of your original inaccuracies in your comments. If you can attribute many cases of this happening then maybe it represents a pattern of behavior.
2. Patrick might have different relationships depending where you are on the power curve of importance to them (competitor, investor, partner, etc) - which could explain the discrepancy between your experience + barmstrong. There are also a host of other possibilities.
3. In terms of barmstrong's positive comments does he have an investment in square either personally or through his company, any partnership with the organization, or is personally friends with Patrick. Any of those would bias his comments in favor. He might have a great relationship with Patrick.
At the end of the day - I'm not sure where this goes. It comes across like a strong personal attack from a bad situation that is getting a lot of response on HN.
No he did not. We didnāt even discuss it.
I donāt think the question was whether you two actually talked but rather if there is any conflict of interest or other incentives that fueled the defense. Youāve had a particularly divisive approach towards people (e.g.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/10/08/60-emp...
) and so itās reasonable to assume any of your public statements might not be completely accurate or forthcoming or easy to take at face value. That of course might not be intentional though!
> Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?
Is a pretty direct question and barmstrong gave a direct answer. It's possible that temp7536 and barmstrong simply had different experiences with Patrick.
It seems to me that barmstrong wanted to share their experience.
> Youāve had a particularly divisive approach towards people (e.g.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/10/08/60-emp
... )
Unless you have more information than I do, I really don't understand how that is an example of divisiveness. Picking sides is a great way of being divisive.
If they picked a side, people would've also left the company because they disagreed with the side that was picked. Which would mean that the company culture will become that side. People who think differently will be discouraged to join the company because they don't want to work for a company with stand points they disagree with. A company like that will possibly end up blind to whatever the 'other side' thinks. That's how you end up with Juicero.
I don't think every organization should be apolitical by default. But there really is a point to being apolitical as an organization, especially in the Crypto market, since there are so many different reasons for people supporting Crypto, any political stand point might cause you to lose customers.
It looks like the question actually was whether they talked. It was asked two ways in the same comment:
- āDid Patrick request that you write this post?ā
- āDid Patrick message you to ask you to post this?ā
> And we are not the most valuable YC company ever -- so it's possible more was done for Stripe.
Ah yes, surely the reason you didn't create the most valuable YC company ever is because more was done for Stripe.
Iāve personally conducted business with Patrick, and integrity isnāt a term Iād associate with him. Most polite term I can think of would be āshrewdā.
I don't think integrity fits into any of the metrics that you have to report to YC.
At least they ask founders to be not _mean_ [0] and specifically be _nice_ [1] but do ask them to be _relentless_ [2] and _formidable_ [3], which may come off as shrewd?
[0]
http://paulgraham.com/mean.html
[1]
http://paulgraham.com/safe.html
[2]
http://paulgraham.com/relres.html
[3]
http://paulgraham.com/earnest.html
YC has pretty strong ethical guidelines for founders and people have been removed from YC for violating them, so I'm not sure where you're coming from with that, unless it's just a cheap shot.
Then its a pity, and an opportunity to improve or move aside for an organisation that does (and stronger ethics reputation for graduates thereof.)
Ouch.
It also may be a way how Irish do business. Had many interaction with CEOs from there, very poor experience I must say.
Props for attaching your name to your comment, something I wish the throwaway OP also did, though in the spirit of believing the victim, I can understand why they didn't.
That said, with threads like this, there's also value in letting people come forward with their experiences (positive or otherwise) to see if there's any sort of pattern; any such patterns can then inform future interactions with the people or companies involved.
My own personal experience over the last year as a manager of managers that may be relevant to both pc and barmstrong: seeing a surprising number of security resumes on the market from current Stripe talent suggests there may be a bit of impending brain drain (for reasons I can't put a finger on as I'm not inside). I've seen less of this with Coinbase talent.
"in the spirit of believing the victim"
The only kind of sense this could make is as a tautology. If the commenter is a "victim" then you've already decided to believe him or her. But what evidence do you have to support this belief?
worth noting that the parent comment was flagged to death 4 minutes after posting and vouched what, a half hour later?
Anyway, I sent this to the comment author via email, but the best I can do in public is link to
https://www.blackburncenter.org/post/on-believing-victims
Context: I run r/Relationship Advice.
Oh. I thought "hey, why are you not greyed out then?" but that would explain it.
I don't see the tautology. The point is, when someone claims they are a "victim" (I would agree the term is only a loose fit here), we believe them. The whole point of the statement is to not demand evidence.
Obviously we're not talking about the legal system here.
I do think this whole idea has minimal relevance to the thread as I really don't think the PC qualifies as a victim. Just wanted to clarify the idea of "believe the victim" as it's extremely important in potential cases of sexual assault (which, again, not relevant here).
And abused as well
there ABSOLUTELY is a pattern of Stripe doing this stuff.
Sure, but you run Coinbase. It wouldn't surprise me if people with less soft power than you had negative interactions.
Yeah, it is no wonder that a founder-CEO of a 70 billion dollar company is having very little negative interactions with about anyone.
Personally I have became from poor ass bootstrapping startup founder to rich and successful retired entrpreneur (now investor) and it is ridiculous how people will treat you wildly differently as you get wealthier. And at times the exactly same people.
> And at times the exactly same people.
I have seen this type of behavior before even though I am not rich or successful. These people act like they never behaved the way they did or simply pretend it never happened, while they continue to do it to others. Its disgusting how people can be so fake.
I'd guess this is Prisoner's Dilemma in practice:
If you don't expect repeat interactions with an agent, or expect the agent won't remember / weigh these past interactions strongly, you do what's best for you in the moment.
Which happens to be taking the counterparty's current situation into account ā including their wealth/power, AKA how much they can do for you. Entirely pragmatic, if selfish ("disgusting" in your words).
The way to combat this fake behaviour is to increase its cost, forcing the "fake" person to interact differently.
But I wouldn't hold my breath:
1) To "increase the cost" you need something of value in the first place. If you're poor and powerless, you areā¦ powerless. Your only strength is in numbers: social pressure, `ā little_power * lots_of_people`.
2) This "fake" personality is likely something learned in early childhood. A person would probably need to experience lots of negative feedback to readjust later in life.
3) Have you considered that their strategy ("fakeness", taking into account extrinsic factors like wealth or fame) may be superior to yours ("integrity", interacting based solely on a someone's intrinsic traits)? You know, it is not a physical law that being nice and consistent to people pays off. It's a pretty wild social dynamic, evolved only recently.
Regarding 3), how well someone's social strategies pay off is completely separate from their morality. It's irrelevant.
Just as a thought experiment: if there was little social cost to it, killing your competitors would probably be a very successful strategy. Would you go: "sure, he kills people, but it makes him very successful and we should give him kudos for that"?
Regarding your last statement, that "being nice and consistent" is a recent social norm, I call bullshit and citation needed.
Morality certainly has its merits ā after all, it's omnipresent across nearly all human groups (that survived to this day). So it has undoubtedly played a central role in advancing humankind.
But please note morality is an evolved collective strategy as well, a survivor in an extremely competitive landscape. It's not "above" evolution (unless you're into religious metaphysical arguments).
If all its proponents "were killed" ā your words; an unlikely proposition in my estimation ā then yes, that would be it for morality. Something else would take its / our place, but the world would still go round.
> But please note morality is an evolved collective strategy as well, a survivor in an extremely competitive landscape. It's not "above" evolution (unless you're into religious metaphysical arguments).
I don't fancy a debate right now, but I feel I should point out for observers that this is a minority position in the philosophy of ethics (for atheists and religious philosophers alike). At the very least it is possible (and common) to be a moral realist without making "religious" arguments.
Yes, psychopaths can be wildly successful people, I will start to act psychopath right away, sir. Thanks for your advice.
I have not revealed my preference, one way or another (I'm personally not a fan of fakeness, if you must know; which is precisely the reason why I think about such things and take time to reply on HN).
But seeing your visceral response, I'll offer one advice now: don't let your biases blind-side you.
> I have not revealed my preference, one way or another
You have revealed your preference of evaluating morality as a choice.
I think morality is a basic assumption for pretty much all human interaction. If someone chooses to be immoral, then why would I want to interact at all with that person? If being fake and untruthful is a choice for that person, I don't see how any interaction made sense. Just the only sensible choice is to run away from that person and if you have business going on just try to close them as quickly as possible. Even online discussions like these would be totally pointless with a person who has selected to be immoral/fake.
Thanks for your generous advice, sir. Greatly appreciated.
Exactly. It was at that moment I understand why most successful and rich people tends to be wary.
I wasn't even rich or successful, I only got promoted to a senior position, and their faces changed the next day. Those a-hole faces still makes me want to puke.
That was a long time ago. But I still have vivid memory of it.
Well some people are just not so nice until you know each other. Not like "you start to appreciate them" but "they get friendly".
Hello Sir, I adore your comment, could you swing a bit of dough my way?
Not to fuel the fire here, but from the startups perspective I'm not sure there's much functional difference between a company attempting to acquire a startup and then deciding to go it alone, and using the acquisition process for research on their future products other than intent.
No matter what if you do the DD process on an acquisition you'll certainly apply those learnings to your future efforts.
There's even a PG blogpost about it.
http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html
Side Note: I'm always amazed to find people that run large companies posting on hackernews. Doubly amazed that two companies I'm interviewing for are mentioned in the same post (about interviews no less.) :D
Small world.
I know so many people who have been screwed over by Coinbase, it's complete lack of customer support, and dark business practices (it's borderline criminal at this point). The fact that you're associated directly with Coinbase does not benefit your reputation nor does it add any weight to what you're saying - it in fact does the opposite.
This is biased because they are your acquaintance. Because they act a certain way in your circle doesnāt mean they arenāt being a bad actor in others.
Your post makes it clear youāre very out of touch with the reality of interviewing. Iāve had this same stuff pulled on me at Google, Amazon, and multiple other companies. Being offered a position and then getting surprise interview and then ghosted. Itās draining and demoralizing, and a major waste of my time.
I'm too am also a founder of an $xB fintech, and I have to say I disagree with your assessment. The initial poster was right on all counts.
I'm working on my SECOND $billion!
...I gave up on my first.
I figure at this point my easiest path to becoming a billionaire would be to develop a time machine, go back to when you could buy a bitcoin for a dollar, and plop down $20K or so. That feels more realistic than me actually building a valuable company.
> most rational explanation for OPs issue is that references were checked and came back luke warm/negative, so more were done which delayed it etc (they may not tell you this was the reason to protect sources btw), this is one of many potential reasons, i'm guessing, but benign explanations are more likely
> also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer
All reasonable things to happen, for sure. Would other HMs in the same building show interest after bad references? Debatable.
I accept all outcomes - all except ghosting.
> Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).
I used to get very frustrated at a previous job (realestate.com.au) that they would treat their main competitor in such a venomous way.
If the features looked similar then they 'copied' if they launched a feature first then denigrate it until you can launch the same feature. There are only so many ways you can do a real estate (car, job) ad portal. Especially if you're following best practice UI/UX guidelines.
I get being competitive, but you can be competitive and still be civil. Making the other company to be an arch-villain is such small-minded zero-sum thinking.
Sadly there were also many things where they could have worked on collaboratively to make everyone's lives better (e.g. Rental standards and processes), but this is impossible when you frame the competitor in such a negative way.
If the market isn't growing, it _is_ a zero-sum game so this behaviour isn't surprising.
This. It is important to remember not everyone works in Tech. Many commodity markets are zero-sum game. Which is often why Tech circle don't understand a thing about other market. You cant apply the same thinking to everything.
Have you considered that he might just avoid sharking out on people he considers friends, or people with too large a platform?
Genuine question.
I don't think Coinbase and Stripe are in the same business but...
> As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).
I'm not sure why this is positive or signals a high-integrity person. If he doesn't have to tell you, he probably shouldn't. He runs a private company and that's what he should care about.
Or maybe he did that, so that in the future you can kick back and write this comment?
Sometime one does favors in the hopes of being treated likewise in future. It is an investment, even though not guaranteed to pay-off; but when done to powerful people, that off-hand chance can pay-off handsomely and be worth it.
"I'm an $xB ceo and everyone you mentioned have been lovely to me" is a data point, but being successful means even your true friends are networking with you (because it's logical, not implying sneaky intentions)
> _any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences... and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly)_
Spot on. Nor should anyone expend disproportionate energy in bringing down _common causes_ of quality issues to _zero_.
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20161226
> _I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this._
You must be new here.
I agree with you but after being an employee of a dozen of companies and founded some, I started the Stripe's application processe and after a waterfall or red flags I decided myself to do not continue. I couldn't ignore my gut feeling clearly saying me that there is the place to have a good salary in a very miserable, unhealthy and unstable job.
PS: I don't know how they are managing to have such a good product.
I have never interviewed at Stripe, but I did interview at Coinbase in mid-2020 and it was among the best interviewing experiences I've had. The hiring manager for a TPM role (NM) was awesome, as was the entire loop. I didn't end up with an offer (I suspect that I flubbed one of the interviews) but left with a mostly positive experience (aside from what seemed like an implied offer from the recruiter, which I consider to just be miscommunication).
As opposed to K (another SF-based exchange), which took a month to set up the loop in the first place, had one-way video during interviews (candidates on, interviewers off), and took 3 weeks after the interview loop to send an offer which I declined for another company (65% of CB's pre-offer, not that it mattered based on the other stuff).
These experiences make a difference and really help sell the organization to a potential hire.
> There are plenty of more reasonable Occam's razor explanations (ā¦). You always have to assume ignorance over malice first.
Thatās Hanlonās razor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Funny that you think your endorsement works in their favor. Coinbase is not entirely kosher in the crypto industry so there's that.
Japan has a long tradition in coopetition. SV has adopted many Japanese traditions. Unfortunately some people seem to take competition too seriously, ruining the culture. It seems some are suggesting Patrick and John take competition too seriously. Whether the allegations are true or not, it can unfortunately be damaging.
Adam Smith, on his work on competition, took many ideas from the Muslim Caliphate. Where markets can only work on trust. That nobody will do business with someone they don't trust.
Trust is what underlies communities like this, even if people are competitors.
Well now we know who is your master.
You know the best you could have done is say nothing. People like this, best way to prove them wrong is to show there's nothing. Even a "oh it's true but we ll try to change" helps more than doing exactly what the OP did with his catch-22: if you defend here, he's proven right.
Newswire: Coinbase founder says Stripe founder is a good guy. People not convinced.
Patrick and John asked brian armstrong to run damage control for them lol.
Why would we ever listen to someone who runs a ponzi coin company?
You TWO could be the same person? Just a wild guess...
+1. Also a founder of an $XB fintech. Exact same story. Patrick + John dangled an acquisition to get a look inside, and ended up re-trading on the terms. Then proceeded to target 2 of our team members to recruit. Fast forward a few years, and now they have deployed a team to directly copy one of our products.
Amongst their L2 team, Patrick and Will are described as the "killers". I guess maybe a bit of duplicity is required to build a company of that size...
As much as the parent comment strained credibility, this double-down (posted exactly 10 minutes after the original) breaks it. Seriously, how many $XB fintech founders are out there, waiting to tell their salacious tales about one of the most transparent and accountable individuals on HN?
It's OK, come out $XB fintech founders, it's safe for your temp accounts here...at least until the moderators get here and start checking the IP addresses.
I mean considering blockchain I think itās a safe bet thereās a lot more $XB fintechs than you seem to think. Technically X can be 1, mind you
Note that I did not say whether this was a good or bad thing, I just think youāre overthinking billion dollar fintech startup scarcity given a single bitcoin is basically a billion dollars. Those folks are also more likely to identify themselves as fintech during an introduction in my experience, and Stripe undoubtedly plays in the crypto pool, so it fits
> Technically X can be 1
Why restrict ourselves to positive integers here? Hell everyone can be an $XB fintech founder!
I have always wanted to ask this: Is zero a positive number? And do we always round up?
- Possible owner of a mildly successful $xT company.
Usage varies, there are a few notations for specifying whether the set of natural numbers/positive integers includes zero when it matters.
'Always round up' sounds more like the ceiling function (or ceilā¢abs) - usually rounding means to the nearest integer, or whatever we're rounding to.
It's certainly non-negative. Enjoy your status.
Exactly, x tends to be a real number, if it were an integer or a natural number you'd use n.
I am the founder if an $ _i_ T startup.
better than $ i^2 T so dream on...
or even restrict to integers?
Then we can all be in the club!
Let's not get us integers into your fight, we're just watching, OK?
We can be in the club with integers. Consider 0 for example.
> Technically X can be 1, mind you
or 0.00001
It's not that surprising there are many founders lurking on HN. Many people who are famous in the tech world comment here once in a while. It's not a stretch to imagine that a lot of people from that demographic are active but silent users/consumers.
Two unrelated co-founders of multi-billion dollar fintech making anonymous accounts to comment here within 10 minutes of each other seems extremely unlikely to happen organically. Consider that the second one is a reply comment to the first. What would have to be true for this to be organic is:
1. The first person arrives organically, which is plausible.
2. The second person sees their comment within 10 minutes of it being posted.
3. Decides that they are going to respond, and respond anonymously.
4. Makes an anonymous account.
5. Writes the comment
All within 10 minutes. Consider further that if this were legit, and you were the founder of a multi billion dollar tech company, would you write _any_ comment like this that quickly? Wouldn't you spend a while reading exactly what it was you were saying to make sure you couldn't be identified, or didn't say the wrong thing? I certainly would.
It's not necessarily implausible that Patrick is secretly an asshole. But it is pretty implausible that these two comments were organic and independent.
I find it unlikely, but not extremely so given the environment (HN). It's very plausible to me that these comments are organic and independent.
We have already had Patrick Collison and Brian Armstrong comment on this post (That I know of). I'm sure that many other high profile people in tech have since seen it as well.
The timeframe is somewhat suss, but I don't find it unbelievable.
E: other people also corroborate somewhat similar stories
-
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389177
-
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389191
-
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389509
To be fair the others are also very low activity anonymous accounts created within the last 12 months.
This is not at all surprising given the dynamics of the internet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
.
Longstanding, commenting users are incredibly rare in the scheme of things.
E: active <-> commenting
Active users are disportionately represented amongst people actively commenting, however
I don't understand your point here... Active users being disproportionately represented by people commenting is probably correct, but it doesn't provide any useful information about the minority of users who don't comment often.
I'm saying that an account being mostly inactive (In terms of commenting) is not at all surprising.
Someone could have been actively browsing HN for months/years without commenting, so I don't think comment activity is a good indicator of credibility when lurking is the default behaviour for almost all users.
I wouldn't be surprised if the number of comments per user followed a power law distribution.
He's not saying its an indicator of credibility. He's speaking to the probability of two infrequent commenters commenting. The density of frequent commenters in all comments is very high.
It's not that unlikely - a lot of us in SV are on HN all of the time. It's the default 'waiting for something' site to check (along with Twitter). If you saw a negative story about a friend you'd be more likely to comment.
They may know each other? And have asked for support. If you run a large company, you know others.
If I get even remotely busy I forget all about HN. I can't imagine anyone trying to run a company wasting time here.
By that logic, couldn't you just undermine the credibility of all temp accounts by creating your own temp accounts to enthusiastically agree with them?
_> By that logic, couldn't you just undermine the credibility of all temp accounts by creating your own temp accounts to enthusiastically agree with them?_
False-flag sock-puppetry seems like an interesting combination. I'll have to remember that one.
That was one of the tricks used by Russian trolls throughout the 2016 election and Trump presidency.
Sock puppets obviously sock puppets agreeing with āthe other sideā so you would convince yourself whatever āsideā you were on was obviously correct if the other side needed sock puppets.
Could you point to some hard data/evidence on this?
Fintech is worth trillions. A trillion is a thousand billions. HN/YC is the de facto hub for those. These comments are doubtful (given the money and the strong emotions involved I wouldn't trust a single one of them, positive or otherwise), but this isn't the best arguments against them.
I do think it's a competitor too. Just screwing up Stripe.
I have always wondered why nothing humorous or fun appears/happens on HN in the comments. This post and subsequent comments are very telling.
I'm the real Satoshi, so I have you all beat.
Hi Craig!
Lovely to know. $XB fintech founders, swimming in the money, yet they still end up on social media towards the middle of the night (US based at least)
Hahaha. Or something like that.
Eh, founders of coin base and lambda school both posted, people legit post around midnight, even founders of $xb startups.
That's sad. Sorry that happened to you. I hope you guys are still moving forward and building.
This sounds like typical tech infighting, sadly. We shouldn't normalize this stuff, but we do. I really hope more companies hold their leaders to a governing, conscious culture that they actually follow themselves.
> typical tech infighting
> We shouldn't normalize this stuff
You literally normalized it in your comment.
Maybe they saying it's already the pattern and want to _not_ continue it? (Like, if we read the comment in best light like guidelines say). And, Stripe has lied to me as well but it was a small issue.
You read the correct message here. Thank you.
Umm.. No? I think you're inferring one thing when I meant another. I'm saying that this SHOULD NOT be "the typical". Read the entire sentence, please: "We shouldn't normalize this stuff, but we do."
And please don't write condescending, inflammatory remarks. It offers nothing.
Saying "typical" does not normalize something.
By example, if I walk through a maximum security prison with no power, holding ten pounds of cocaine, typically I will get murdered. This doesn't mean that murder is a thing we should consider to be normal.
Typical is about commonality. Normal is about evaluation of decency.
Consider most topics in a theater of war to see the stark difference between what is common and what is decent.
There are so many founders of $XB fintechs in this thread, I want to start one! Thanks for sharing.
X = 0.000001B$
Your side gig qualifies.
You were brain raped. Bill Gates was famous for this. There was even a Silicon Valley episode about the practice.
This sounds painful.
Good thing ideas aren't property. What a lame business landscape that world would have!
Yikes
+2. Founder of $XXB fintech. I had heard rumors about their shady practices, but I was young and dumb and was excited by the prospect of an acquisition (good thing it never materialized, in hindsight). Patrick has a proven history of using this ploy to just get more information on sensitive assets. After a couple months of talks with Patrick I found out my wife was having an affair with him. I've sent email after angry email asking him why, why he passed up my company and didn't have the decency to tell me he chose a better candidate, but have never gotten a response. I don't even want an apology, I just want Patrick to admit that he fucked my wife.
Gross. We've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I donāt think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith. (We obviously donāt control HN or YC or journalists. If or when my comments on HN are ever ranked highly, itās because theyāre upvoted. The internal claims about Stripe are also inconsistent with the data around things like retention. Etc.)
All of that said, Iād appreciate hearing from any founders who feel mistreated as part of an acquisition process. We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.
I'm sorry but no. Patrick, we met with you once, Gaybrick and Claire multiple times and opened up a data room to you all. I then emailed you (and the others) three followups over a couple weeks only to see them opened but never replied. Your team then sent targeted cold emails to multiple people on our team. I've validated this experience with multiple founders.
You also had Moritz and Sequoia renege on Finix's term sheet after they already had it signed and wired (I guess props to Sequoia for branding it as "giving it away")[1]. You've also had your team get diligence materials from Sequoia and nuke deals.
You've clearly crushed it in the business and developer brand space, hats off to you. You want feedback - I (and the broader founder community) just wish you stop the dance of pretending and just admit you all are sharks, and it works for you! Just own it.
But I will admit, the HN comment was a bit trolly and written in frustration. But you have to admit - you are documented as proofreading every one of PGs posts, are a huge LP in YC and are friends with a lot of people there. You can't believe that the conspiracy theories are purely in "bad faith"....
And yes - this is out of place in HN comments, I'm sorry. But sadly there aren't very many other options.
[1] -
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/09/sequoia-is-giving-away-21-...
I genuinely have no idea what situation youāre talking about (not saying we didnāt screw up, though ā I preemptively apologize assuming we did!), and a bunch of the narrow claims above arenāt true (we arenāt YC LPs, Sequoia made its own decisions without any suggestions from us on Finix, etc.), but I really would appreciate an email so I can figure out what happened.
From the TC article: "A spokesperson for Stripe who was asked whether Stripe and Sequoia discussed its investment in Finix at any point, also declined to comment."
Your comment about Finix seems deliberately crafted to convey you did not speak with Sequoia but at the same time not denying that you spoke (made decision without suggestions).
So to clarify, are you saying that Stripe did not speak with Sequoia about Finix?
Or that Sequoia "made their own decision", while they have spoken with Stripe about Finix?
Irrespective of whether you behaved badly or not (not for me to say, and unlikely to clearly emerge on a simple HN thread), I have always lauded your search for transparency here on HN.
Also, we I like to always keep in mind that sometimes resentment dominates the desire to share a certain story, and without knowing anything about the transaction referred above, I'd say it's quite clear that temp7536 has at least some resentment or envy over Stripe's success.
Final thought (not referring to Stripe nor Sequoia in particular): yes, most companies, and most VCs, are sharks. I was recently reminded of that twice, and probably lost large sums of money in the process (again: nothing to do with Stripe nor with Sequoia). I think it's a rule that have always applied to life, in general, and it won't stop being applied just because we have the internet.
I simply hope that things like the Panama Papers, Wikileaks, and such, will eventually bring more financial transparency to the world, and make it harder for these sharks to keep feasting on their prey.
This seems like a good place to plug "The Billion Dollar Code Ā©"
Same SV story, different decade.
> You also had Moritz and Sequoia renege on Finix's term sheet after they already had it signed and wired (I guess props to Sequoia for branding it as "giving it away")[1].
How is it reneging on a term sheet if they wire the money? That's fulfilling the terms of the term sheet (despite the fact that term sheets aren't binding), no?
It bears repeating that exactly 10 minutes after temp7536's accusations were initially posted (2:45:57 UTC), account temp3728 posted (at 2:55:47 UTC) a two paragraph affirmation of temp7536's salacious accusations.
Both of these comments were posted almost three hours after the initial post. So, in a 10 minute window 3 hours after the post, we are to believe a second commenter came to HN, saw temp7536's post (presumably after reading OP's narrative?), registered their own fake HN account, verified said account, and wrote a two paragraph post that almost exactly mirrored the original accusations of temp7536? Ok.
I have better things to do than Sherlock Holmes a case involving an individual (pc) who I have never met or spoken to, but there is much to be desired in the credibility dept for temp7536 and temp3728.
When youāre in top position on a Stripe-related post, that has nothing to do with your karma score. Itās because dang has a pin button that he usually uses for himself, but very often is used for exactly the situation you describe when it comes to YC portfolio or celebrities showing up or something (without visual feedback of such a pin, as every single other website with the capability provides). Itās pretty obvious if you keep an eye out for it
This can undoubtedly be spun as āHN just trying to bring the right voice to the top of the discussionā but the alternative take is just as valid. Itās not bad faith feedback, itās HN UX and practices confusing readers as usual
You got me curious to look at the data. pc has had the top comment in 41 threads since Sept 2007 (
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50377
). Of those, one was pinned to the top:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25073749
. I vaguely recall that had to do with wanting to correct the misleading impression left by an inaccurate headline. All the other cases got there via the usual ranking algorithm. I guess you guys can decide whether 1/41 is moderator overreach or not.
We mostly use that mechanism for tedious moderation announcements ("All: please don't bash each other with clubs, even if you feel strongly about $topic") and for cases where project creators/authors show up belatedly in threads to discuss their workāthose are extremely high-value comments that would otherwise get overlooked. Occasionally I use it if a thread is mostly aflame about some controversy and some commenter points out how the whole thing is inaccurate. We don't use it to systematically privilege high-karma users or YC founders relative to other usersāthat wouldn't be in the spirit of the site guidelines at all, and we take those pretty seriously.
> You got me curious to look at the data. pc has had the top comment in 41 threads since Sept 2007 (
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50377
). Of those, one was pinned to the top:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25073749
. I vaguely recall that had to do with wanting to correct the misleading impression left by an inaccurate headline. All the other cases got there via the usual ranking algorithm.
> We mostly use that mechanism for tedious moderation announcements ("All: please don't bash each other with clubs, even if you feel strongly about $topic") and for cases where project creators/authors show up belatedly in threads to discuss their workāthose are extremely high-value comments that would otherwise get overlooked. We don't use it to privilege high-karma users or YC founders relative to other users.
Do you have the denominator (with root-level comments) for the 41 top comments by any chance?
Thanks for the edit with added context. Any chance of an indicator that a comment is pinned so that people can transparently see when this is done? It's predictable that your moderation comments would be pinned, but even pinning a founder's comment to apparently contextualize a potentially misleading headline adds substantial mass to the claim that certain moderation actions might be done for the benefit of the company or companies involved in the thread.
Framed another way: if PC's context for the article was relevant, it would've achieved critical mass on its own. Helping it with a pin could be perceived as moving the needle for gain.
A simple "pin" icon (or emoji, or however you feel is best) may not resolve whether this is a "proper" use of moderation tools, but it will at least make it transparent when it happens, which adds credibility to the HN platform.
Denominator: 638 comments
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
root-level?
Looks like 102 root level comments.
interesting, that's better than 40% assuming that the 41 figure represents root level comments as well.
Thanks for digging into it; you didn't have to.
_> A simple "pin" icon _
That would be theatre - they can then add a new secret-pinning feature, afaik HN code is not open anyway.
Trust is hard to achieve and very easy to lose.
This is a great example of HN moderation fanning a flamewar.
It objectively is not. I'm baffled at how you arrive at that conclusion.
Chances are these founders are just permanently behind their computers and have an alert set up for whenever someone mentions the company/domain on HN.
That allows you to get in first on an awful amount of threads.
Are you talking about posts, or comments? Do HN celebs get comment boosted by virtue of that fact too? I would've thought it's only for posts.
They're talking about comments. I'm not sure what you mean by HN celebs but no, they don't get comment boosted.
Technically, you're a HN celeb who gets their comments boosted Daniel!
I downweight them sometimes too.
It's common to assume the masses are dumb and hiding moderation can make people do the right thing without being influenced by it. For example I imagine if the pin icon was visible there would be comments about it on every story it'd be used in, which you may want to avoid to focus on the topics at hand. With that put I think transparency beats this and a transparent system is more trustworthy and better understood by the users. Just 2c but keep doing the good work.
_I'm not sure what you mean by HN celebs_
I hope he means me.
> We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.
Isn't the comment about things you (purportedly) did personally? Have you "reached out about an acquisition, mined them for information playing along and then ghosted", or no? You clearly don't deny it but you object that you hadn't "heard" about bad things they claim... _you_ did? For things you're the subject of, shouldn't it be easy to confirm or deny them just based on your own memory? It's not only a bizarre defense on its own, but it's an especially poor one when the claim is that you ghost people, and your reply is that they never tried to talk to you about it! Wouldn't it make more sense to just reject it and say you did _not_ ghost people during acquisition talks, or fish for information under the guise of an acquisition, etc.?
Also:
> I donāt think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith.
"Some" leaves a lot to the reader's imagination. Which ones are the ones that _are_ true?
Iām trying to not overstate my certainty. I have no idea what situation OP could be describing, and I have no recollection of anything along those lines, but I donāt want to definitively state that nothing like it happened over our decade of operation without knowing more about whatās actually being alleged.
We obviously never intentionally ghost companies, āmine them for informationā, etc. The ecosystem is small and we wouldnāt be able to invest in and acquire companies if we didnāt have a reputation for good behavior. (And weāve invested in dozens.) But maybe some communication got dropped in some particular case or something? I donāt know.
Ah okay thanks for clarifying. It's a strong anonymous accusation, so being clear about it on your end helps a lot. I imagine it'll be hard for anyone here to know what happened.
I don't know anything about anything and am one of the very few people here who never founded a $xB fintech, but this strikes me as weak:
> _The ecosystem is small and we wouldnāt be able to invest in and acquire companies if we didnāt have a reputation for good behavior_
If you're in a position of power (and money), people will return your calls, regardless of rumors. This is true in all fields, from recruiting to publishing to VC deals, etc.
This is also a line of defense used by serial abusers who always (always!) claim that because they have had successful consensual relationships, there can't be cases where they abused the other party.
> _over our decade of operation_
Also weak. "We've done so many things. Seen so many people. It's been a long time. I don't recall. Things were different back then."
- - -
That said -- weak defense is just that -- it doesn't mean offense.
The challenge I see with some phrases like "mined them" and "ghosted" is that they can be very subjective statements. The person on the receiving end may perceive the actions as such, whereas the person on the giving end may seem them differently.
I don't know what happened, just trying to point out that it is possible that a person felt slighted by certain actions and the person doing them may have no idea the other felt slighted and the person hasn't told them directly. But maybe they did, I don't know in this specific case.
But in that case he could just deny them and _then_ mention that if it came across differently, he'd love for them to reach out. Not just skip to the second part!
Say if someone claims you stole their car (and the alternative could be that you borrowed it with someone else's permission, and they had no idea, so they felt it was stolen), would you reply with "Iād appreciate hearing from anyone who feels I stole their car", or would you first say "I never stole any car, please reach out to me if you know of any such incidents"? Wouldn't it be incredibly bizarre to ask them for a discussion session without first rejecting the premise?!
I think in the example of stealing a car is more binary: stole it or did not steal it. Maybe it could have been borrowed the car or something, but there would probably still be a more objective person in car event.
Whereas with ghosting, it could be not replying an email, could be not replying a text, could be some other thing the person missed and doesn't even know they missed. So it's hard to deny if the person isn't even aware they did it.
With mining, it could have been asking questions either live or in an email and not knowing the other person felt tricked into sharing more than they had wanted to.
I've taught a class called Emotional Self-Defense and one of the things I see the most is that the "attacker" often doesn't know they're attacking and the "victim" assumes it should be obvious the person is attacking.
What I'm saying is that he may not have any idea that his actions caused that much pain to the person. I had an ex girlfriend who said to me once, "and you don't respect my boundaries!" And I said what? And she said "yeah, 3 weeks ago when you were juggling the soccer ball and you kicked it to me, I said I didn't wanna play, and then a few minutes later you kicked it to me anyway." I was dumbstruck. I had no idea that she felt so angry/violated by me kicking the soccer ball with her the second time. If I had known, I almost certainly would have stopped. I just didn't receive the signal that strongly.
So I'm saying that may be the case here, too. It's also hard sometimes to tell someone in power that what they're doing is hurting or angering oneself.
I don't think ghosting and mining is so vage in this contex. It means engage in acquisition talks without actual intent to acquire, but instead to gain information. If you are the person doing this you will very clearly know what you are doing. Viewing in this context the comment is quite correct it is an odd denial, it sounds a bit like PR speak to me.
I'm imagining if this had been a comment from a spurned romantic partner. "He cheated on me and took advantage of me," posted anonymously to a web forum. If I were the person being accused, and assuming I had been romantically involved with many people, I may have no idea who is accusing me or which specific instance they meant. Maybe I'm aware that I cheated on one person, but I may not even know if that is the person making the accusation? If I've only been romantically involved with one, then it may be quite obvious to me who it is and maybe even the specific incident to which they are referring.
However, I imagine Stripe has interacted with many many companies regarding these things, but maybe not.
I think I've just been in too many conflicts where the other person thinks I intentionally hurt them and I didn't see it that way, or conversely, I think I did something to hurt someone, apologize, and they are confused because they didn't feel hurt at all.
But in your example if you never cheated on a partner you could easily sy "I've never cheated on someone". So if you're saying stripe has had so many interactions with companies they don't know if they "cheated" in this specific case, that implies they had least cheated in some cases, because otherwise they could simply deny that they ever cheated.
Because the accusation was more specific than "I felt taken advantage of" it was they engage engage in acquisition talks with the intent to gather confidential information, not the intent to acquire.
I think most accusations of intent are extrapolations of actions, which one side makes and the other side may not see the same way.
> engage in acquisition talks with the intent to gather confidential information, not the intent to acquire.
Going back to the dating analogy, if I go on 5 dates with someone and then we don't go on any more dates, that person may assume I had no intention to pursue a long-term relationship with them and was just using them, maybe for sex or company or whatever. However, perhaps I was trying to determine whether I could make a long-term relationship workāmaybe I initially didn't think it would work but only went on the next 4 dates because I really really wanted it to work.
All I'm saying is that people can glean different intentions from the same action and it can be really hard to know whether our actions have caused pain to people.
> that implies they had least cheated in some cases, because otherwise they could simply deny that they ever cheated.
Again, the tricky part is Stripe may _think_ they have cheated in one case but in that case, the other person may not have even seen it as cheating. Eg, maybe I'm in an exclusive relationship with someone and my ex comes into town and we get lunch. I feel tremendously guilty for doing it and confess and apologize to my current partner. And the my current partner looks confused and laughs saying they're grateful I went to hang out with my ex. A different partner could split the relationship with me immediately and say I'm evil for having that lunch.
To one side it may seem _obvious_ that a transgression was committed and to the other side, it may be _oblivious_.
I get what you're saying about it being blurry but I don't buy that it affects the ability to reject it. He can quire simply reject it and then explain it might be a misunderstanding or something. Or say it might have happened unintentionally. Or whatever. There are several options here, and refusing to deny the claims doesn't bolster his case.
And that's all kinda beside the point - note that the bad part isn't even the ghosting itself for us to quibble over, it's fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition, with or without ghosting. _That_ should be far less blurry and easy to deny head-on, whatever you think of the ghosting.
One other story (I feel bad for blitzing with replies and in a weird order, I hope that's ok)...
I ran a workshop with abut 35 people in the audience. For about 15 mins, I had them sit quietly as I asked them "how do you feel when you think about this? How do you feel when you think about that?" And so on, and had them reply in their heads.
At the end of the session, I opened up group reflection. One woman shot her hand up and said "I feel like you manipulated us." And i asked if others felt this way, and maybe 5 others raised their hands and started talking about how my questions manipulated them. And then this other guy raised his hand and said how for the first time in months, these questions helped him stop thinking about politics and the chaos in the world and quieted his mind and thanked me. A few others agreed with a similar feeling.
So my one action caused (at least) two very different responses in the same group and I would likely have had no idea if they didn't tell me how they had received it.
I wouldn't say "I never ghosted you" if I don't remember the interaction, because perhaps I did? Why would I make that bold claim without having more info about which situation it is?
> And note that the bad part isn't even the ghosting to quibble over, it's fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition.
Even "fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition" could be anything from sending one email with 3 questions to five intense 2-hr interviews over 3 months. One person who feels very secretive and protective of their business knowledge (even some people in startups who don't even have companies yet but just ideas) can feel very violated by one email with one question, whereas other people may not believe they were being fished for info after 3 months of interviews.
> I wouldn't say "I never ghosted you" if I don't remember the interaction, because perhaps I did? Why would I make that bold claim without having more info about which situation it is?
This whole discussion is about intent, which you can (and honestly, _must_) address separately from how you imagine your actions might have been perceived. See below.
> Even "fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition" could be anything from sending one email with 3 questions to five intense 2-hr interviews over 3 months.
This is irrelevant, the question is about intent. You should _not_ have a hard time making it crystal clear whether that was your intent or not, regardless of whether you spent 10 minutes on it or 10 days. The only reason you wouldn't be able to make your intents clear is if you're doing things so borderline deceptively that you honestly cannot tell if they're clearly ethical or not, in which case that fact would sufficiently speak for itself.
P.S. I see you're repeatedly leaving parallel replies, I don't know why you do that (can't you just edit your comment?) but they drown out mine and divert the conversation, so I'm not going to reply to them and have 3 parallel conversation tracks, sorry about that.
Ah, I think I had misunderstood what you were saying. I thought you were saying to deny the action: "I never ghosted you." But now I think what you actually meant was to deny the intention of the action: "I never intended to ghost you."
I would agree one could deny the intention first, yeah, I might actually do that. "I didn't meant to ghost you but perhaps that's what happened or how it landed for you. Maybe you think it should be obvious to me but I feel unclear, will you share more with me about it?"
*edit: I'm not trying to leave the parallel replies, I guess I'm more used to replying on Twitter where I just add another reply to my reply if I forgot something, instead of editing the previous reply, and HN was stopping me from replying to my own reply. So I'll try to edit here, I wasn't sure what the HN preferred way was to do this, so thank you for helping me adapt better.
You can certainly make "intended to" explicit, and it's obviously better to be clear, but it's unnecessary. Keep in mind the entire _point_ and _heart_ of the accusation is the malicious intent. The accusation is clearly not "you're a horrible person because my email fell off your inbox!!", but rather "you _saw_ and yet _deliberately ignored_ my emails because you were actually trying to _gain information_ while _pretending_ to want to acquire us".
As such, you rebutting with "I never ghosted you" would _not_ be equivalent in any shape or form to "I reply to every single email in your inbox" (or whatever) for you to feel you might somehow be accidentally telling a falsehood if you happened to miss some email in your inbox. "I never ghosted you" in this context would be a direct rejection of the purported _intent_āi.e. the accusation you were _purposefully ignoring_ someone's emails because you were actually trying to _fish information_ out of themābecause, absent the intent, that accusation wouldn't have been made to begin with. You can make the lack of intent explicit if you want, definitely, but it's already implicit in the accusation, and so would be in implied in the rejection of that accusation.
I think I just tend to err on the side of less certainty/conviction in how I speak. I'd probably say "I don't believe I ghosted you" or "I don't remember ghosting you" or "I'm pretty sure I didn't ghost you." And maybe that's me projecting the fear of it getting into a "you ghosted me" "I never ghosted you" "yes, you ghosted me!" back and forth.
Frankly, I'd love if someone were to extricate their accusation as you did, making it easier for me to parse the different actions and intentions. I really liked how you phrased it: "you saw and yet deliberately ignored my emails because you were actually trying to gain information while pretending to want to acquire us." I feel more confident in rebutting different parts of thatāe.g., "I saw the emails and deliberately did not reply to them but not because we were pretending to acquire you, but actually we were in a legal process where we couldn't share more at the time" or something like that.
Sometimes if someone accuses me of something, I'll even try to ask for clarification on what they mean by ghosted, or I'll rephrase it as you did, to try to gain more clarity. Maybe it should be obvious to people what ghosted and fishing means, but I find clarifying can at least help me and the other person know if we agree what the definition is and what we both think happened.
*edit: @dataflow, I really appreciate you going back and forth with me on this. I think I learned a lot, about how I try to pull out the intention from the action, and how others may see intention and action intertwined. I'm gonna let my brain digest this as I sleep, if you want to continue, I'd be glad to pick it up in the morning :-) Thank you!
*edit2: ohhh and for helping me get better at using the edit feature and not creating parallel threads, I'm not sure if what I'm doing now is more helpful, but I at least believe I'm being more helpful :-D
The important thing to note here is the point isn't how you word your reply. Nobody is saying you have to word it like I did. You can be as crystal-mathematically-pedantically-clear as you want in your reply about intents vs. actions vs. perceptions vs. whatever, that's beside the point.
The point is that your reply would need to address the lack of _ill intent_ no matter how you word it. I find "I never ghosted you" and "I never intended to ghost you" both adequate, and you can disagree on either of them, but that's not the point. The point is "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate. It comes across as a completely ridiculous reply that very obviously fails to deny what is clear to everyone to be the heart of the accusation: the ill intent. Which makes it hard to interpret an omission like that charitably.
Edit: Sleep well!
I looked back at the original post to which pc replied and it seemed to have many accusations in it and I think pc did do what you're talking about, in a roundabout way by saying "I donāt think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith." I think, in a way, that's a counterattack on the other person's statements or intentions, yet kinda says he doesn't believe he had ill intent.
I agree he didn't directly refute the ill intent on the ghosting/mining accusations, yet, I think he tried to cover some of them in the following:
> (We obviously donāt control HN or YC or journalists. If or when my comments on HN are ever ranked highly, itās because theyāre upvoted. The internal claims about Stripe are also inconsistent with the data around things like retention. Etc.)
> "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate. It comes across as a completely ridiculous reply that very obviously fails to deny what is clear to everyone to be the heart of the accusation: the ill intent. Which makes it hard to interpret an omission like that charitably.
But what if he legitimately had never heard such an accusation before? What if no one had previously told him, "I think you ghosted me and I think you were mining me for info and pretending to acquire my company"?
> I think pc did do what you're talking about, in a roundabout way
Or in other words... he didn't. Roundaboutness is literally how PR departments spin things to look like the exact opposite of the truth. "I don't think _some_ of your claims are true" is not something that defends you when there are very strong, pointed accusations against you.
>> "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate.
> But what if he legitimately had never heard such an accusation before?
So? The reply would be inadequate just the same. I'm not saying he can't _say_ that, I'm saying he can't say that and then _leave it at that_.
Btw I'm honestly tired of this back-and-forth at this point, so this'll be my last reply, sorry about that.
That's OK, and I appreciate you saying that so that I know what to expect. I appreciated the back and forth nonetheless, hope you have a wonderful Tuesday~
Actually, if it were me, I wouldn't deny it first if I truly didn't know what I did. Perhaps I did do something that I feel guilty about doing but just am not currently aware of. I'd probably ask as he did to figure out how the person is feeling and what they think I did to contribute to that and then see whether I feel guilty about that or not. I may actually feel really bad, hard to know without knowing more specifics.
This is a valid point. I've observed or been involved in a number of acquisitions at various distances over many years. There are any number of reasons an acquisition might not go ahead and, of course, as the potential acquirer you obviously learn some things that are useful, but I've never known a situation where there has been a deliberate plan to simply mine for knowledge or whatever.
The reality is some acquisitions are opportunistic, some are strategic, and even the opportunistic ones often have a strategic element. For a strategic acquisition, if it doesn't go ahead (comes down to ROI isn't perceived as being as good as potential alternatives), the almost inevitable outcome will often be (i) a different acquisition is eventually made, or (ii) the acquiring company decides to make an investment in that area themselves.
One of the ways to avoid getting "screwed over" as an acquiree is to ensure you've done the work beforehand to maximise the chances of compatibility with the acquirer: things like compliance, data protection, having a poor grasp of your numbers and financials, and other mundane matters (or combinations of them) can easily trip up the process.
When an acquisition does fall through for almost any reason it's pretty natural for the potential acquirees to feel rather bruised by the process: they've wasted their time, they've been screwed over, etc. Often that won't be the case although, I've no doubt, there are instances where it will be.
(Btw, in case it's not obvious, I know nothing about the activities of Stripe or its founders, good or bad.)
Say "Bloody Mary" ten times in the mirror at midnight and she will appear...
I honestly do not see your participation in this thread as good faith. You apologized to the candidate in publicā- good start, now do something of consequence in private. But any further involvement from you (especially trying to out the OP) is simply fanning the flamewar. Even HN moderation is helping fan the flames by adding stats and other commentary. This is why I find YC so utterly untrustworthy.
Hey Patrick, I hear you have an estate in Abbeyleix now, which means you have Notions and therefore are A Bad Man. Sorry! Those are just the facts :/
He tricked me into working for a month without a contract and then wouldnāt answer my calls when I asked him to sign the terms we agreed upon. I had to show up and sit on their couch until he showed up to write me a check to go away. Heās a slippery character.
I was also on that contract and can verify this. Hereās an odd wrinkle: just prior to that contract, Patrick wanted to purchase bitcoin from me (this was back in 2013) remotely, with me sending him the bitcoin first and him paying when he had time. He also wanted the terms to be that if the USD price of bitcoin went down before he paid me, that he would pay the lower price(!) and he would choose the time of repayment. I declined to do anything other than an in-person cash transaction. Later, I heard he had previously purchased some from another friend and then ghosted him for many (>6?) months despite persistent requests for payment.
> Patrick has almost direct control over YC and HN, you'll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.
This sounds like such BS. They are just very reactive around PR, and Stripe while it might be hated internally (based on what you say), it is loved by external developers, so of course developers on HN will tend to have a positive opinion of anything related to it and vote accordingly. And they are quite a lot.
I almost downvoted you for going with the conspiracy theory route, but I like the irony of this post being on the top 5 on the front page and your comment being the top comment of that post, while complaining about him having "almost direct control" of HN and the press.
Stripe is a YC company. If Stripe becomes a shit show, YC may lose money. How is it a conspiracy theory to suggest that both YC and Stripe might want to exert some control over bad PR?
Let's not forget that HN's primary function is to attract people with ideas for YC to turn into companies whose equity generates money for YC. And we're not talking chump change like a couple million. More like billions. What's a little push back on negative comments to save a couple billion dollars?
> _Let's not forget that HN's primary function is to attract people with ideas for YC to turn into companies whose equity generates money for YC_
I don't know about primary function but it's one of them, let's say. The interesting thing is that this has exactly the opposite consequence to what you say. Doing things to jeopardize the good faith of the community would not only be wrong, it would be catastrophically stupid. Therefore, not only do we not to do it, we place the highest priority on not doing it. That follows straightforwardly from the mixture of your premise with raw self-interest, so I'm not claiming anything hard to accept. Well, I guess I'm claiming we're not catastrophically stupid; maybe some find that hard to accept.
> _"How is it a conspiracy theory to suggest that both YC and Stripe might want to exert some control over bad PR?"_
Firstly, you have dramatically undersold what OP claimed, to the point of dishonesty.
Secondly, what OP claimed is a conspiracy theory because it has no actual evidence. If it had evidence it would be a conspiracy.
It isn't dang's fault that Patrick has a Google Alert or daemon running for his name (or just has a lot of employees who notify him whenever it comes up). It's not direct control of HN, it's Patrick being enterprising.
dang has done nothing to deserve bad faith, and while I don't like Patrick, either, it's best to keep the knocks on the right doors.
HN routinely shadowbans and apparently shadow-pins with at least some frequency per this very thread. It's not an organisation that warrants assuming good faith.
HN's hellbans aren't real shadowbans, because other users can see them. They just have to opt-in to seeing potentially offensive content (it's a setting in your profile). Other users can even make banned users' posts visible to everyone!
And when they pin comments, it's pretty obvious. dang often points it out:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
YC isn't trustworthy, sure, but HN is.
Believe me, the people who are phased out deserve to be. I've had the unlucky experience of using an HN client that showed all comments by default, and you wouldn't believe the amount of deranged, vile shit that gets posted here.
> Believe me, the people who are phased out deserve to be.
An excuse as old as censorship.
I was fortunate to work with pc/jc/will in ~2016-18, and my experience has been the opposite. They were super professional and in the time that I've worked with them seemed like genuinely good people. They can be tough negotiators which hey, sucks if you're on the other side of the table, but that's exactly what you want out of a good leadership team. And a lot of stuff slips through the cracks, but I'm not sure what else you'd expect from a company that went from 0 -> $100B in a decade.
I can see how the intersection of these two properties may sometimes look like what you're describing, but from everything I've seen (which isn't too much, but it's enough) your interpretation of the facts really doesn't seem accurate.
(As a disclaimer, I do have a horse in this race because I have some stock, but I'm pretty certain I'm being objective about this)
TL;DR: me and you are looking at the same screen but aren't watching the same movie.
Their recent 1yr equity periods to screw employees out of upside caused me to lose interest (even though that equity will still likely be very valuable). I really disliked how they tried to spin this as something good for employees.
Which is a shame because a lot of stuff they do is super cool, stripe press, increment (recently discontinued), blog posts, patio11 etc.
It seems like a great place in a lot of ways.
How did this screw people?
If you reprice equity comp each year then you lose most of the upside.
Compare the two following equity plans:
Example Year 1:
---
PLAN 1
FMV: $1
Strike: $1
Total #: 40k ISOs
Vesting: 4yrs
---
PLAN 2
FMV: $1
Strike: $1
Total #: 10k ISOs
Vesting: 1yr
---
In the second plan you get granted new equity per year targeting some total comp.
This means if the equity goes up in value a lot in the first year, when your new amount is recalculated it'll be _way_ less than 10k.
Example Year 2:
---
PLAN 1
FMV: $2
Strike: $1
Total #: 40k ISOs (10k vesting in year 2)
Vesting: 1yr into 4yr period
---
PLAN 2
FMV: $2
Strike: $2 (new grant)
Total #: 5k ISOs (The 10k from the first year, and now half that # determined by new FMV for a cumulative total of 15k instead of 20k ISOs).
Vesting: 1yr on new grant
---
This lets the company keep the majority of the upside, taking it away from employees. It also hurts employees that stay longer or have a longer term interest in the company from capturing the value they helped create.
And the more the company goes up in value, the worse the trade off becomes.
Iām guessing because the equity vests at 1 year, you canāt realize huge gains in stock prices
I can't comment on Stripe, but I had a similar experience with a B2B $XB company, but a bit worse. So I can sympathize going anon.
I agree that the public has a rosy view of a lot of these $XB founders, when in reality it's lies and back stabbing behind the scenes.
Honestly to be the kind of person who runs a company like Stripe you have to be a bit crazy.
To have the chance to be bought out for unfathomable sums at every step, and willingly go manage the headaches of a big and fast growing company (like this thread) instead?
OK I've saved the HTML of this page... just in case :-)
I am also a founder of a $XB fintech startup.
> have a huge amount of reporters and power brokers under their control
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all that... Can you list this 'huge amount of reporters' that Stripe has 'under their control'?
> On HN and silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine.
That's why we still need a thing like Gawker to come back. Almost all of SV hated on Thiel for standing behind Trump but when it came to him bringing down Gawker nobody left a finger in Gawker's defense, and so that here we are, a multi-trillion dollar industry with no internal means to self-regulate ourselves.
I'll stick to NYT and WSJ breaking real stories, thanks.
Gawker's issues were entirely of their own making. What was their big scoop? That Thiel was gay? At least Gizmodo did some coverage on a pre-release iPhone 4 before being exiled.
Gawker were scum. The worst of the worst in ājournalismā. Their whole business model was based on creating outrage and division. They donāt deserve an inch of sympathy.
I do miss Mike Arrington's Techcrunch, though
Gawker _did_ come back FWIW.
Not that I've heard a peep from them since they re-launched.
Specifically ValleyWag, Gawker is the conglomerate that owned it:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/r-i-p-valleywag-2006-2015-175041...
Big TIL for me, to be honest.
> Not that I've heard a peep from them since they re-launched.
That explains why I thought they were gone for good.
Could you elaborate what "$XB fintech" means? Couldn't google answer myself.
From this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389350
3 comma club
market cap or "valuation" company, x is a place holder so $1,2 or 3 billion
>"I run a $XB fintech, ..."
I've seen this term a couple of times no in this post. Might you are someone else explain what a "$XB fintech" is?
A billion dollar fintech company, the X being how many billions.
ā$X billion fintechā was my interpretation
Ex-Borg financial technology... Resistance is futile!
$XB is the symbol for a new cryptocurrency called XBitCoin, itās a fork of Bitcoin Cash.
Not everything in the world has to do with Bitcoin.
This one means a >unicorn
We are approaching this wrong. We should not look at ghosting as a personal attack. If you want a fiend to bring to yhe interview get a dog, comes to mind.
Also compare how a lowly cook handles interviews at a new dinning place. It's none of the entitled BS but oh a new adventure...lets see what happens.
Don't forget the female engineer they fired for calling Elon "a little shit" on twitter. I don't know if it would be worse if it turned out to be because Elon complained or because he is their hero.
Probably what parent is referring to:
https://nitter.net/isosteph/status/1171236137932771328
https://nitter.net/isosteph/status/1459566899151396867
Almost everyone at YC worships Elon, you can see it on Sam Altmanās face when he interviewed him on YouTube.
Sam Altman might actually believe that Elon is superior to him.
That's disgusting really, but looks like it's true.
Firing doesn't seem like a proportional response... But representing herself as a Stripe employee after flaming on the internet isn't a good look for their business.
I'm beginning to think that we should extend Godwin's Law to include Elon. Just about every online conversation nowadays eventually deteriorates into a discussion about how terrible Elon is.
Btw, I'm exaggerating, but still.
Elon is no angel, but I gotta say it would shock me if he was such a huge loser that he would complain about something like this
Well, he called a rescue diver a pedophile because said diver didn't like Elon's sub and had specifuc idea where Elon should put said submarine.
And more recently dismissed Bernie Sanders with "i legit thought you were dead".
I like and respect Bernie but that's just an internet burn, it's whatever
Oh, I totally forgot that one!
I am not going to stand up to Elon Musk or what he said. But, the response generated by Elon Musk was after the British rescue diver said this
> āHe can stick his submarine where it hurts,ā he told CNN. āIt had absolutely no chance of working. He had no conception of what the cave passage was like.
Somehow, this part gets left out from this discussion.
Yes, and? He is 100% correct. I lost the last shred of respect for Elon after his Thailand photo op.
Disgusting person.
And that makes calling him a pedophile somehow acceptable?
More acceptable than the absence of such a statement. It makes Elonās pedo comment look like immature reactionary school yard banter. Somebody said something mean to me so Iām going to say something mean back.
Immature is a kind of unacceptable.
Musk made specific accusations after the victim of his libel threatened to sue.[1] It wasn't school yard banter.
[1]
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-...
I specifically wrote in my comment "I am not going to stand up to Elon Musk or what he said." How did you come to the conclusion that I found it acceptable?
... except the comment you reply to references that.
Hereās an example of Elon going back to a multi-year old Twitter thread to reply, after blocking the person who started it so they canāt reply back:
https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/14646864235969454...
Thatās the worldās richest person demonstrating willingness to go to some lengths just to get the last word in against some random webcomic author. Yes, I can totally believe theyād be petty enough to complain about online snark to someoneās employer. Doesnāt mean it necessarily happened, but it wouldnāt be that far out of character if it did.
Huh? He does this type of thing all the time, it's a defining part of his personality. You only need to follow his Twitter so see how consistently and strongly he counters anything that makes him look bad. For the really nasty stuff he does behind the scenes you need to dig a little deeper.
A few examples off the top of my head:
- Called the employer of a lawyer in Wyoming to get him fired for criticizing him on Twitter.
- Tried to get the student who was exposing how the self-driving demos were faked expelled, then tried to sue him on false charges.
- Asked a reporter to investigate the cave diver on a baseless accusation of pedophilia because he made him look bad. When that didn't work, used his private security to try to plant the same stories in the UK.
Never mind the stuff he does to his own employees, especially whistleblowers.
In fact it would be contrary to his personality if he _didn't_ send an e-mail to the founders with a message like "Does this person work at Stripe?" with the tweet attached, making it clear what he wants done without explicitly saying it so he can pretend to have plausible deniability.
I am not sure about "HN code of conduct" here, but personally I dislike serious allegations posted anonymously and without any proof to back it up.
You may well be right, but posting these kinds of things this way is best way for HN to devolve to be unusable for any serious discussion on anything.
--
EDIT: (I can't answer any more because I am being throttled by HN for posting "low value content").
How hard do you think it is to create multiple fresh, throwaway HN accounts to post "corroborating" comments?
I dislike these comments not because I think they are incorrect but because if this is the discussion standard we accept it is basically open season for trolling.
Disagreed. Itās clear itās a throwaway and theyāre saying unsubstantiated things, but the readers can make their own minds up about what to believe in and what not to. I like HN to get the insider scoop, precisely this type of comment. Iām not gonna hate on stripe or PC, but now Iāll know to look a little more carefully at someone asking questions about my future company (lol) to see what their intentions maybe. Whatās wrong with that?
> I like HN to get the insider scoop, precisely this type of comment.
How can you treat it as "insider scoop" if there is no way to tell whether the facts are true or the person is what who they claim to be?
Would you accept that level of journalism? We can see what journalism does to society when you forgo any checks on the fact or the provenance. Just watch Fox News and come back to tell what you think about it.
If you are taking unsubstantiated, anonymous posts as facts you are just easy to manipulate.
Totally agree, it kind of sucks to have to do this. But this is sadly the world we live in. People like the Collison's and Stripe have immense power to ruin people and companies, and there are a lot of ruined bodies in their wake. So there is zero chance myself or anyone will do anything publicly.
Hard to give proof on this, so I understand how everything needs to get taken with a grain of salt. The only thing I can say is to talk (or just email) any fintech company founder in the states and I'm 100% sure they will privately agree with what I've posted.
There's many other ways for you to share some of your story, without revealing too much.
Because of the power dynamic they have to do this. It is sad, but having been in a similar situation with a billionaire, you can't say it with your name attached.
Proof could even include some examples of stories that were quashed, or other examples of abuse. I don't think they necessarily need to out themselves to make a stronger case.
Everybody can say that. Regardless of whether they are or are not leading a large company.
For all I know, one insider holding a grudge could be creating multiple accounts claiming to be leading large companies and thus not being able to divulge their names.
That sounds like a pretty fair position. It does seem difficult, on the other hand, because I don't think we really have mechanisms to protect whistleblowers as a society. The options seem like stay silent, speak out anonymously (clearly subject to abuse), or speak out publicly with the threat of retribution. None of these feel like great options.
This is a role that I think journalists have more traditionally played. Source is known to the journalist but anonymous to the public and the public then chooses whether to trust the named journalist who is representing the nameless source.
However, with forums, I'm not sure how that would work. Maybe having verified accounts reporting on behalf of anonymous accounts, because the current way, I just have to trust an anonymous account and with how easy it is to defame people anonymously because of no ultimate accountability, I tend to view anonymous posts skeptically. With the journalist way, there isn't anonymity but rather veiled identity, because it's ultimately traceable.
Having anybody be able to create a noise of slanderous comments seems like absolutely worst option to me.
I personally back my posts by my real name and I think this is fair. If I did not feel safe posting something important, I would make sure to include proofs. If I can't include either, I keep my mouth shut.
Well you're a stronger person than me!
I'm not trying to be slanderous or have a hit piece. They've clearly been immensely succesful (much more than me!). However, there is a veneer around Patrick and Stripe that needs to be broken. So many founders and employees look up to a false image that has been purposely crafted and is completely false. I'm not going to say that Patrick and John are bad people - but they're definitely not good, honest or kind. And they are definitely not who their online profiles, hn and the media would portray. Is an anonymous post the best way to show this - absolutely not, so down for other ideas.
Just today I was reading a post that said "Stripe is a startup no one seems to hate" [0]. No matter how you cut it, that's clearly incorrect based on the discussion here. So, I fully believe this is a PR engine in motion.
[0]
https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/11-big-things-the-35b-st...
Maybe speak to a prominent journalist anonymously?
Thatās a privileged stance that is not always practical. When youāre subjected to injustice (or just not-cool move) by a party with significant power imbalance, and known history of retaliation, what do you do? Just sit silently and take it?
Be it professional or social, many people are disadvantaged in their ability to express their opinions freely without retaliation, and any āyou have nothing to hide or youāre just a cowardā attitude only comes off as insensitive to others.
> If I did not feel safe posting something important
So far so good...
> I would make sure to include proofs.
Why do you imagine GP's comments could be made public under their own name if they included proof, given the concerns they have put forward? Their company could still be ruined by Stripe afterward, no amount of proof will change that. A court cannot force them to accept payment traffic as long as they pretend to refuse them for a different reason.
> If I can't include either, I keep my mouth shut.
This is how dictators and other perpetrators of abuse stay in power. In essence, you are colluding with them by keeping what they do a secret on purpose.
Actually, what you defend is how dictators work today. Throw unsubstantiated allegations around, make everything moot in deluge of conflicting information.
If this were a standard we stuck by any number of famous instances of gross misconduct would remain unknown to us.
Think about this: without any proof or name to back the claim, the only purpose the post serves is to (possibly) slander a person.
As a bystander you have no way of knowing who is right. There is a huge disparity between the person being slandered and the person trying to post slander.
The person being slandered can't defend themselves due to either volume of it or just impossibility of proving you haven't done something.
On the other hand person posting slander can quickly create multiple usernames and crate a lot of "content" looking like a discussion.
An exception could be a criminal case (when it might be ok to both stay anonymous and not have a proof, because of an important reason like public safety). But even in such case Police or whatever other official will try to confirm the claim in some way.
---
emodendroket: I can't respond because I am being throttled by HN (for apparently posting low value content).
Again: how do you know these are actually separate people? Without any real name on it there is no way for you to know.
Do you think trolls haven't thought about it?
It doesn't really matter _who_ you are, you could still be a paid shill.
Or do you have some way to definitively prove that you are not on pc's payroll?
Paranoia goes both ways, and I think it's sufficient to just have the reader use their best judgement...otherwise we'll just always be in an endless spiral of "no puppet no puppet you're the puppet."
How can I be a paid shill?
I am not giving any facts or creating impression I know any facts.
I am just discussing the general process of what is and what is not ok to post online anonymously.
Well, for starters, what if I wanted to discredit any negative opinions, so I paid a team to work on that for me? Wouldn't that team want people to also post arguments like you are, where in principle it sounds reasonable (because your position is) but the source and scale were not?
Like, I could see some merit in convincing people that they aren't "allowed" to post anonymous criticism as a means of quieting bad press.
Well, I am not saying you are, but it's not really that hard to imagine that someone would pay a "troll farm" to write facially reasonable concerns that cast doubt on what are actually true allegations of misconduct. It's no less plausible than a competitors paying a troll farm to post false allegations.
Another possibility is that many more people come forward, making it less and less plausible that it's baseless slander.
When everyone's pseudonymous, how much credibility do multiple allegations have?
It depends; if we started hearing from long-active community members I would be inclined to think the allegations are pretty strong.
Dislike? Sure. See the need for? Also true.
Especially considering these are corroborating messages (two of them), I am quite fine with this.
As a leader of a competing company, attaching your name to messages like those would be quite the bold and risky act (and likely not in line with duties to investors and shareholders, etc.)
Sorry but even if the anonymous OP allegations are all completely true, so what? I don't see anything there that Stripe did that was illegal - only aggressive/predatory along the lines of what happens daily in business. You could probably google up multiple examples without ever leaving the first page of results.
If I were a Stripe investor I would honestly be validated that the leadership is acting so boldly in the company's favor.
Had the opposite experience recently as an EM. Spent a few months trying to find a staff-level engineer. Found a great candidate who worked for a FAANG, worked to get our budget up to his expectations, sold him on the team, and he accepted our offer with a start date 6 weeks in the future so he could have time to wrap up his work. Fine, I'm just happy to have filled the role after an arduous search. A few weeks go by, and he hasn't responded to my "we're excited to have you join the team, etc" email or any HR emails about filling out his paperwork. I call and email, the recruiter calls and emails, nothing. We never hear from him again..
He's been active on social media so we know he's alive, and assume he parlayed our offer into a raise somewhere else. Ok, that happens, but to accept an offer and totally ghost? Jeez. I could have used those intervening weeks to interview more candidates had he just sent me a quick note, now I've got to backfill his position while also trying to fill the new ones that just opened... I guess hiring is a shitshow from both sides sometimes.
According to the papers, candidate ghosting has been happening more and more often. With such a senior, high-paid position as that, it doesn't really apply, but I can't help but feel a bit of schadenfreude at employers lamenting ghosting candidates, after themselves being the ghosting party so routinely.
Sometimes a recruiter or hiring manager leaves the company halfway through the hiring process, leaving the candidate in a limbo.
It'd be funny (in a sad way, I suppose) if the same becomes true on the other side..."sorry, my online assistant just quit so my resignation at the current firm never got filed."
At a company there's a reporting chain and an HR department to ensure that even in this situation, the candidate isn't left ghosted - offer to shop the candidate's resume around and switch teams, or at the very least inform them. There is no valid excuse for a company ghosting an accepted candidate.
this. I recently went through the job-hunting process, and employer's behaviour was terrible (on average, there were some good ones).
I don't think they understand that if they set the bar that low, then we'll all accept that and behave similarly badly.
Like loyalty - employers stopped being loyal to their employees, so employees stopped being loyal back. Every time I see an employer moan about how employees don't care any more, I feel schadenfreude.
We mirror the behaviour we see, because game theory.
I understand the sentiment but there is a difference between ghosting the during recruiting process and ghosting after committing to the job.
Agree. Having been ghosted in the past by potential employers I have zero qualms now about doing the same in return
You have been treated unethically in the past, now you have zero qualms acting unethically? That's not cool, its very easy NOT to ghost people it basically costs you nothing, you might want to seek some therapy.
It's standard operating procedure for the hiring process
I had a somewhat opposite experience: went through an interview process, accepted and then the company drug its feet about a start date which ended up taking weeks longer than expected after several delays for simple things like ordering equipment and other things which pointed to "we don't have our act together". I was committed and had already left my previous position and exited other interviewing pipelines.
I should have persisted and ghosted them, they ended up putting me in a different role than I had been offered and generally were extremely disorganized.
Honestly, I think going forward if you don't have me sign a contract and give me something in return (say, a signing bonus that is actually paid upon signing instead of weeks after I start), the deal isn't done until I start.
When you can't expect the other party to hold up to their side of the bargain because there are bad actors out there, it doesn't make sense to trust them or tell them what's going on until after everything is settled... and even then when litigation is such a concern...
Generally, no matter how amicable the relationship, if the terms arenāt in writing, then they are subject to change. Figured this out after a friend of mine who was renting a room in my apartment ghosted me for 3 months of rent heh.
Very sorry that you had this experience but yes NEVER consider a job offer finalized until a contract has been drafted and both parties sign. Until then it's all basically vaporware
Interesting tidbit, in Sweden an offer over email (or verbally IIRC) is legally binding. It's quite common that you will only receive /sign the actual contract on the first day of work. Obviously this leads to confusion when hiring people from outside of Sweden.
I'm the UK I've had multiple jobs where I don't even see the contract until 2 months into work.
Not sure of the legal frame work
The UK splits the legal stuff into an offer letter (_āprincipal statementā_) and the fine print (_āwider statementā_.) The latter is what most people informally call the contract, including the front page of these documents.
Employers must to provide you with the fine print within two months of your start date:
https://www.gov.uk/employment-contracts-and-conditions/writt...
Any incontrovertible evidence of an agreement of the job, verbal or written, counts as a contract. Everything else is just finalizing the terms and conditions, which either party can agree to amend at any later date and which many employers assert they can do unilaterally.
I'm guessing we might be in different sectors, but FWIW I've never seen this in my >20 years in the UK. To me the situation you're describing would ring all sorts of alarm bells.
P.S. Not doubting your experience, just comparing it with mine.
Signing a contract is normally worthless too, all of them tend to have very lenient notices so either side can just give the 1 week notice or whatever and that's it
Unless there's some consideration (i.e. money) changing hands, contracts like that are worth nothing but the paper they are on.
Simply not signing another work contract is consideration.
In the US in tech theyāre basically a meaningless formality.
> ... and give me something in return (say, a signing bonus that is actually paid upon signing instead of weeks after I start)
Is this common in the USA? In the UK I've never been offered or heard of anyone receiving a bonus for signing a contract. Does anyone have a different experience?
My personal experience has been that companies who give signing bonuses usually have retention issues and the bonus has to be paid back if you leave within a year. At least that was the experience when I graduated college. After becoming an experienced hire I havenāt been offered one.
It can vary by company and culture. Tech may be different, but in non-tech roles where equity isn't expected in most roles, signing bonuses can serve a function to nudge someone to leave a role they're comfortable in, or to make up for other aspects the candidate is losing out on by leaving at a certain time (e.g. annual bonus with 10a 10% of salary target pays out in March, but the new company wants you to start in January).
There are signing bonuses in the UK. I think you will be very unlikely to get it immediately on signing though - it's usually within the first couple of months of employment or with your first salary, something like that.
No, that's why the GP wanted it.
It 100% doesn't matter either way, as those bonuses always come with attrition requirements - you have to pay back all or part the bonus if you leave the company before some predetermined time period. If you don't agree to the payback terms then you simply don't get the bonus.
So a bonus paid before you start is more-or-less identical to a bonus paid with your first paycheck. You don't get to keep it if your offer is rescinded or you don't show up on your first day.
Thanks, but maybe I should have worded it better: is a bonus just for starting your job common? I've never heard of this in the UK applying myself or hiring. Only yearly bonuses for performance
Yes, theyāre not uncommon, across a wide range of job types. I recently got a signing bonus for a part time job as an EMT for instance. In tech especially they can be quite large to offset stock options or bonuses the employee is giving up by switching jobs. If Iām about to be poached right before my annual bonus of x thousand pays out, Iāll want a comparable signing bonus.
Not common but also not unheard of, it's simply just an advance on your paycheck.
I've seen them be offered in jobs/industries/companies where there is a labor shortage or the job is difficult to fill for some reason. They might be standard-ish in some jobs/industries.
like I said, you'd almost always be required to stay for X amount of time - like a year plus usually, or you gotta pay some or all of it back.
It's a much bigger deal for the other party tough. The employee is typically more dependent on having a job than the employer is dependent on having an engineer. Granted a staff level engineer is not quite the same, especially for a small firm.
What's lamentable is that ghosting has become part of our culture. People think it's the done thing, so they do it. Just as with dating, how hard is it really to keep track of who you owe a response and send them a short piece saying you're no longer interested? It's especially grating in your situation where you know there's no reason why they don't just tell you they have a better offer.
I think that's the key actually. People don't like the icky feeling of negotiating, where you often keep cards to yourself. When game ends and you get your desired outcome, you continue to feel bad about it. And you certainly don't want to be called out and have to defend yourself, even if picking a better offer is perfectly fair.
Think of the bullet you dodged.
A job applicant doesnāt have a hiring department with a codified process and team so itās not quite symmetric.
Ghosting is really the worst. And it doesn't matter if it's a romantic relationship, friendship or professional interaction. Why can't people see themselves on the other side of the line?
I have a third pov of this, I was interviewing for a large financial company in an SE role, everything went well, the team seemed really good and projects were interesting, good quality of interviews too.
It was through an employment agency and so I was negotiating via them. Recieved the offer and needed a few days just to review it and consider everything. I told the recruiter this. Then had a medical emergency which had me in hospital for 3 weeks, on the 3rd day in hospital however, I fired an email from my phone just to let the recruiter know what the situation was. Thought nothing of it.
When I got out of hospital after a serious surgery etc, was distracted in fairness. I had emails from the recruiter which bordered on threats about how I was completely unprofessional for not regularly updating him, and how the city is small and the company is big etc.
Needless to say I wasn't too bothered but it took me back a bit.
Were you not able to communicate every few days of the stay? 15-20 days with no contact is a long time and you put the recruiter in an unfortunate position as they must have been advocating for you. You canāt have known in advance that they would send rude emails in response to silence.
I'm sorry, but if I'm (not OP) in the hospital for something serious requiring operations and a multi-week stay, responding to emails is somewhere around last on my todo list.
No need to apologize. I'm sure you understand how that necessary deprioritization might still look like ghosting or insincerity to others, especially someone who had just exerted significant effort on your behalf. If I had the ability to send one email, I'd hope to at least be able to send a second regretfully declining the offer.
This is so satisfying to hear. Always happy to see management and recruitment types being used up and hung to dry.
You most all the time or at least most of the time!
I'm sorry; that's bad. Can you email me with details so that we can investigate what happened? (patrick@stripe.com; others welcome to do so too.)
More than 10,000 people have interviewed at Stripe so far this year, so "several sigma bad" still happens to an unfortunate number of people. That said, we want those who interact with Stripe to come away having been treated professionally and respectfully, and our recruiting team cares about fixing our process failures. On behalf of Stripe, I apologize.
hey danrocks, bear in mind if you discuss details of your experience with pc, you run the risk of outing the senior leader you consulted in step 10.
You may wish not to do this. As much as the feedback would probably help Stripe and possibly even yourself, given the post you've written, it sounds like it may put someone else's career on the line.
It sounds like it's a failure of coordination more than anything; a broken system not a person acting in a way that should lead to termination (unless they are unwilling to fix said system over time).
I think if they cared to look at their internal data they'd be able to figure out who he was without much trouble at all based on this thread and his recent post history here (named 'Dan', interviewed recently for manager-of-manager position, lives in ~~place~~, currently works for ~~someone~~).
Iām not convinced this several sigma explanation applies:
- 35% of interviewers did the 20 min thing. Why havenāt you said youāre going to investigate this specific issue yet? You should have enough data to now go back to the team and find out if this is a real issue, rather than waiting for opās email.
- this was a senior manager position and already in the offer stage. So you canāt compare that sample size to the top of the funnel.
Spot on. Patrick and Brian Armstrong are on PR damage control 101 and one of the multiple reasons I left this manipulative industry.
You caught Patrick on his false argument.
Patrick did not mention the number of Manager of Managers that interviewed at Stripe this year, did not address the "I will only need 20 minutes for this" culture and did not apologise for the ghosting.
The PR spin:
> professionally and respectfully, and our recruiting team cares about fixing our process failures
If Patrick is interested in fixing anything is up to him and he absolutely does not need an email from OP for this.
The fact Patrick is asking for OP to doxx Stripeās hiring managers should tell you anything you need to know about how Patrick operates.
Publicly, Patrick cannot afford Stripe to begin to develop the slightest trace of a bad place to work and a bad reputation for such a niche recruiting position as engineering Manager of Managers at Stripe is damaging.
Patrick is asking OP to doxx the senior leader in the office OP applied to.
> His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people"
Stripe recruiters were the worst I've dealth with in the past twelve months.
Extensive talk about a position. Then ghosted.
Then invited for an interview with the hiring manager, who then cancelled last minute. Invited to do an ad-hoc interview during one of my work meetings. Denied and asked for different time.
Ghosted.
Definitely dodged a bullet with these guys. Some companies think because they're growing they can do whatever.
I seriously doubt they're as bad as google recruiters. I had almost 3 job offers from them over a period of ~10 years, and I finally decided I will never interview there ever again.
Are you saying that you had 2 job offers and almost a third, or are you saying that on three separate occasions you almost got the offer but did not? Either way, what specifically did the recruiters do badly?
I got two written job offers, which I refused, and almost got a third.
Main issues:
- wrong level offered (e.g. sub-director vs director) despite initial agreement;
- lowball salary offer (~30% less of what I stated I wanted to even start interviewing for the job, and ~20% less of what I was making at my then-current job)
- confusing interview process (too many things to even list them here)
- lack of preparation for the interviewers (e.g. didn't read my resume, wasn't aware of who else interviewed me and on which topics, didn't ask me questions relevant to the position, etc)
The 2019 google recruitment process takes almost half a year and ends with a 4-day exploding offer for ~50% of market compensation.
Humans make mistakes, and Patrick apologized on the behalf of this experience.
While there may be opinions on whether or not this āmakes it rightā, apologies in todayās world should still carry some worth.
The most important part of an apology is, imo, sincerity. I think Patrick is chiming into this thread to perform damage control, not to sincerely apologize.
This, to me, is evident in the fact that OP interviewed for a specific, high level position, and named specific, repeated bad processes that go beyond Patrick's generic "We interview a lot of people so some people are going to have a bad time."
Patrick has more than enough information to start fixing things on a systemic level. Instead, he optimizes for the appearance of contrition without committing to fixing any of the specific problems mentioned.
Hey Patrick,
You might look to improve y'all's process by looking at datatdog's interview process. I have never felt more appreciated and well treated than interviewing there.
1) they always give feedback
2) they have more generic positions, get you in the door to some small filter interviews, and then shop you around to find the right team for you, instead of the reverse approach where people shotgun resumes across your company trying to get in the door. The problem with the recruiter and multiple HMs I talked to at stripe is they didn't seem to care about getting people to work at stripe, only getting people to work in their org which didn't have open positions for X.
3) incredibly quick and responsive through the process. My recruiter at stripe did this!
Love what you're doing for science,
Take care
Incredibly ironic comment - I interviewed at datadog for an engineering position and left feeling atrocious about it.
They gave me a large and complex take home assignment which I put a significant amount of time into, and which I felt I did a very excellent job with. They declined afterwards without a word. We didn't discuss it, no feedback was given. Just unmatched on the hiring platform we were using.
I am an experienced developer at a reasonably prominent company and I know I wrote the code well for that assignment. The fact that they would assign something so time consuming and then take no time to go over it at all and reject it so out of hand left me with a very very bad taste in my mouth.
Datadog gave me a take-home assignment, which I could have done sloppily in one day or done well in two days. They added "we respect your time, so don't spend more than 3 hours on it". Then they rejected my solution because I didn't guard for all kinds of invalid input that was never mentioned anywhere.
I had a funny experience with DataDog. I applied to a new grad position. Few months go by, and then I receive an email to schedule an onsite, well that seemed odd since I hadn't done any coding test, recruiter call or anything else. I scheduled an on-site and went there. I tried asking what the normal process is, and everyone just kept replying "you are on the last step". So I just ended up going through the interviews. Then couple days after received an email that someone had checked the paperwork and said that they had thought I was someone else lol
2 is such an obvious thing for a tech company to do. How can a candidate know the exact best team for them to apply to? This is the purpose of the recruiting team.
Even though I did not accept Datadogs offer, I can only confirm this - my interview experience at Datadog for a software engineer position was truly amazing. I could feel they care.
Can confirm, at least for France - the interviewing experience at Datadog was amazing. Everyone was very humane and very responsive. I accepted the offer.
Only some of this could be explained by "several sigma" of bad luck. The rest is either the candidate misunderstanding/distorting the process or a structural hiring problem.
I interview a lot of candidates. I just can't imagine to make a hiring decision for a dev, let alone a manager that manages other managers, based on 20 minute discussion.
I also hire a lot of people and I tend to agree with you. Itās hard to think that I misunderstood the process, however, when a start date was mentioned.
What size org do you manage? At some point your choice is to either talk to candidates for shorter times or delegate the entire decision to managers under you. While 20 min definitely isn't enough to fully evaluate a candidate it can be enough time to assess potential gaps you see based upon the feedback of the rest of your team. It can also be enough time to make an intro and make it clear to the candidate that someone very senior values their role.
Sorry this is BS and will lead to bad hires.
Regardless of the size of the org you need 45 mins to get good signal.
20 minutes might work for a āwhat questions do you haveā sell call.
But any company making hiring calls on this model, thatās a yellow flag right there
Op said that only 35% of interviewers stated 20min so approx 2 out of 5? 3 long rounds and 2 short 20-30 min rounds should be plenty to get a decent hiring signal.
> What size org do you manage?
At what size of org it stops being important who is going to be heading it?
> I interview a lot of candidates. I just can't imagine to make a hiring decision for a dev, let alone a manager that manages other managers, based on 20 minute discussion.
But what if others in their 20 minute discussions with the candidate ask the questions you would have asked if you had spent longer interviewing them?
If the hiring decision is based on the feedback from all the interviewers I could see having many of those interviews be short interviews where the interviewer just concentrates on finding out one important input for the group decision working, provided that there are enough interviews to cover all the important things and if there has been some planning on the part of the company to coordinate who covers what in the 20 minute interviews.
I have no idea if Stripe does the necessary coordination to make that work, but the fact that several of the interviewers started out mentioning they would only need 20 minutes suggests that it was some sort of organized thing.
You are hiring somebody who will be managing managers meaning they will probably have responsibility for at least dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of people.
As a manager/leader of that organisation they will have an important role that can mean difference between those hundreds of people bringing huge value or huge loss to the company.
So your responsibility is to figure out how much time to spend with the candidate. You can choose anywhere between "just hire first person to apply" and "spend a year grooming an employee to see if they can do the job".
And you want to tell me that 20 minutes is the right answer here? That out of entire continuum of possible choices you say that the optimal return (performance of manager) on investment (cost of conducting interviews) lands at approximately 20 minutes -- less time than you take to have a lunch?
I get that he had couple of these sessions but still... it sounds like giving the job to a first person that looks the part.
What I'm suggesting is that maybe what matters is the total set of questions asked by all the interviewers. Does it really matter if one person asks questions for 2 hours as opposed to 6 people asking questions for 20 minutes each if the same questions are asked?
The former gives more flexibility to alter the questioning on the fly, such as to delve more deeply into some area than had been planned. The latter gets more people to spend time with the candidate.
A mix of this could be the best of both worlds. Have several short interviews mixed with some long ones. If one of the short ones turns up something that seems worth going in depth on that can be handled in one of the long interviews.
Describing your recruiting process as a random variable...wut? Does the hiring manager make decisions randomly? Someone calls up, the hiring manager gets out the lucky 8-ball, and it comes out "give a 29th percentile recruiting interview", and the manager just straps on the Biggles goggles to bomb the candidate. Why even say that to someone who is pissed off with your recruiting process? Just don't say anything.
As you say, it is very hard to attribute a bad recruiting process to something that is non-structural...no matter how many thousands of people you hire.
>Describing your recruiting process as a random variable
Anyone who can do anything with zero variation should definitely drop what they are doing now and make it their new business.
I think what GP is trying to say is that your hiring process is within your control (_especially_ this far in the pipeline), so even the worst candidate experience should fall above some baseline. You don't get much sympathy if you say "that baseline turns out to be absolute gobshite at the first percentile, sorry."
The other reply explained this but imagine you bought a soda, and you drank it and it turned out to be rat piss. You call up the company: my soda was full of rat piss. Their reply: "Oh yes, we sell lots of sodas, you couldn't possibly understand how much soda we sell so rat piss soda is a seven sigma event...bye".
If you are in software, recruiting is your business. You have no other real assets. So categorising your hiring process as a random variable makes no sense. You should have processes in place that ensure non-randomness...again, is Coca-Cola out there selling tons of rat piss, and just saying: "Tough luck guys, this is a hard business"...no. If you don't have processes to ensure that outcomes in the core parts of your business are not random, you don't have a business (I used to work as an equity analyst, I have heard this kind of thing from CEOs over and over...I never recommended investing in such business, I have never seen a company that was run that way succeed).
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And thatās a bad thing? Iād do the same thing if I had a successful company that got referenced somewhat regularly on HN.
I assume plenty of other people do that, e.g. Steve Klabnik with rust articles. Unless theyāre just always on HNā¦
"several sigma bad" is really still not OK. As a founder, you earn vastly vastly outsized compensation because you're supposed to be able to build an amazing team with an amazing funnel. You deal with payments and fraud, so you know that "several sigma bad" is not acceptable. Your employees and investors deserve a refund.
I'm not defending Stripe here but this is a rediculous take. Perfection is unachievable.
_you're supposed to be able to build an amazing team with an amazing funnel._
I think it would be hard to scale a business to the size of Stripe _without_ those things. It's fair to say that, no matter what else you might believe, pc _has_ managed to do that. Ergo, by your own logic, he has earned his comp.
Talk about great HR support
I recently did a few interviews & was shocked at how often I would complete an entire loop (coffee chat, tech screen, full-day 'onsite') only to be completely ghosted. I'm totally fine with rejection, I don't think I've ever done better than 50/50 for an offer, but it's super unprofessional to just ghost someone who's given you 5+ hours.
It's not that hard to just send a "thanks but no thanks" email.
To name names: Flymachine.io, Boulevard, and Pepper.
Even an automated email is better than no reply. Past companies that I interviewed that ghosts me, I would never apply again in the future. Itās just basic manners. Having too many candidates is not an excuse. Especially if you want to hire senior programmers because we always remember. HR is usually the first impression candidates have with the company and itās a lasting one. This is also why HR and recruiters are viewed so poorly with many programmers.
Naming names, AWS ghosted me after a full day of interviews. Actually that entire process was a charlie foxtrot. Not that I think I earned an offer in that interview, but they didn't earn an acceptance either.
I had the same experience with Adidas in Europe. I went through 3 rounds of remote interviews, then went to Herzogenaurach for an onsite, two days, then nothing. I understand if they didn't like me or they liked someone more, but ghosting at that point makes you feel like shit.
I have a theory that companies do this when they don't trust their own hiring process. They're waiting for you to ring them and say, "Hey, I've got an offer from X? Are you guys going to get off the pot?"
More straightforward explanation is that the candidate is perfectly fine for the role so they don't want to send a rejection email, but then they have another candidate or idea for the role so they want to wait and see how that pans out first.
A month later, they've forgotten they've still got a candidate or two to say no to, or figure you're probably not waiting on tenterhooks for an answer.
I once followed up and the manager invited me onsite just to explain me in person that I get rejected... I took a day off for that.
hate to say it but I've been trained to assume it's a no unless I get a yes within a week.
Iāve only ever had positive responses with 24 hours (usually a lot less) or nothing at all. The nothings are usually not a surprise.
I always ask potential employers to walk me through the process they need to follow to make a decision on me (visualisation = realisation ?) and also ask for quick feedback (but not with any BS about competing offers).
I think this shows them you take their offer seriously and have plenty of experience of the hiring process, so maybe youāre less likely to get messed about ?
You're not wrong, same assumption I make too.
to name names - Microsoft, its been over a month and no response after onsite loop.
Thanks for sharing the company names, I respect that!
Never heard of any of those names, so you dodged a few turds!
There are hundreds of thousands of tech companies in the US. There are bound to be good companies many of us have never heard of. Name recognition seems like a poor filter function with numbers this large.
I'm posting this from a throwaway and not my regular account so not to incriminate myself. But my experience outlined below is 100% truthful.
Stripe is arrogant. I have many years of solid and proven experience. They called me out of the blue and I accepted to speak to the hiring manager. The recruiter sounded very arrogant in first conversation. She rushed me to schedule an interview but inexplicably postponed the interview with hiring manager by four weeks once I accepted.
When I reached out to an acquaintance of mine who had worked in Stripe in the interim, she said that they are simply in search of marquee brand names in your resume and it is a mess inside. As per her, the people who work there are simply too egotistic. Even people who just happened to have won the "lucky sperm/egg" lottery by joining a rocket ship early on considered themselves as geniuses.
In my experience in interviewing with them I felt the same. I sensed an undercurrent of arrogance, feeling of superiority, etc. They deserve praise for what they have accomplished so far and their valuation but it feels like it has gone to their head for many employees who work there now.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job. I'm not bitter but felt that they didn't treat me well in the process...
If you are interviewing there, beware.....
This is almost point-for-point identical (minus the offer talk) to the other Stripe interviewing stories I've heard lately. (Context: Management positions. Not sure about IC roles).
From the outside, I wonder if Stripe has reached the point of notoriety where they can get away with poor hiring and even workplace practices because nobody wants to admit getting rejected by Stripe. Every negative anecdote I've seen has been shared under anonymity or strict confidentiality. I assume Stripe knows they're a hot commodity and therefore can get away with negative interview practices.
The one named anecdote I've heard about Stripe was from someone who got fired because they said something negative about Elon Musk on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/isosteph/status/1459566899151396867
Sounds like nonsense to me. I donāt even understand the chain of events that could lead to that.
Wow
I applied at Stripe a couple of years ago through their website when I was looking to switch jobs. The position I applied for was on one of their backend teams. I had 5.5 years of work experience at a FAANG, excellent university grades if they care and 6 years experience with Java (which I believe was the primary language for the role) and within 30 seconds of applying I got a rejection email. Obviously an automated email because my resume didn't have a certain keyword or keywords their bot was looking for. Weird company... I don't feel entitled to an interview but you'd think at the bare minimum a human would look at it... (or at the very least add a sleep(time.hours(6)) to make it look like a human looked at it). Made all the more funny with a recruiter from the company contacting me around the same time on linkedin for positions.
Had that happen to me (other company). I would be less pissed if I hadn't to manually copy and paste my resume data into their shit RMS.
A couple of years ago I applied with a similar resume, and even wrote a cover letter because I was worried that I would be auto-rejected if I didnāt include it. I spent far too long on the cover letter, I probably spent 2 or 3 hours on it, normally Iād never do something like that but Stripe had such a great reputation on this site I figured it was a solid investment. I sent my application and heard nothing. Figured I had been ghosted and moved on. Applied, passed phone screens, passed interview loops, and received offers from other companies. The day I accepted one of those offers, some 1.5 or 2 months after I applied to Stripe, a Stripe recruiter reached out to me basically biting on the application.
How was it that 3 other companies were able to fit and entire interview cycle in in the time it took Stripe to get back to me about my application? I turned the recruiter down and wrote it off as a fluke or some sort of mixup. Iāve been ghosted before, Iāve been auto-rejected before, but Iāve never been pseudo-ghosted wherein the recruiting team effectively ghosts you by ignoring your application for 6 weeks and then reached out to you once you already had offers in hand. Weird company, for sure.
I had a pretty similar experience interviewing at Stripe for a (frontline) Manager position a couple of years ago.
I get scheduled for a screening call with the hiring manager. The hiring manager doesn't call me. Recruiter follows up and offers to bring me onsite (no apology offered) without need for screen.
I'm shared the interview loop which has about 5 people (including the hiring manager who ghosted me).
Interviews were not very technical, just casual chats about management stories.
When it came time for the hiring manager to interview me, I got stood up. Again. Sat 45 minutes in the interview room with no one to check on me or inform if the HM slot will be replaced. Recruiting coordinator was unreachable.
At the end of the last interview, I told the recruiting walking me out about the no-show. They shrugged (zero apology again.)
This was followed up by 2.5 weeks of radio silence despite me seeking for updates.
Ultimately they responded to my follow up e-mails with standard rejection template.
> When it came time for the hiring manager to interview me, I got stood up. Again. Sat 45 minutes in the interview room with no one to check on me or inform if the HM slot will be replaced. Recruiting coordinator was unreachable.
Hah! After 15 minutes of waiting, I'd get up, walk out of the interview room, and wander around the company, talking to random employees, trying to learn just how much of a shit show the place was, if only for morbid curiosity's sake.
Somehow this is even worse than what I went through. At least I didn't get stood up in person.
Wow..
I mean that Seems like typical big company behavior. Maybe you are so special that you usally get treated better but a typical non tech engineer gets that treatment in big companies
Uh, no.
You don't get left alone in a meeting room for 45 minutes and then when the recruiter comes back, you say "Uh, no-one showed up", and they say "oh well"?
That is not "typical" treatment.
Yeah Iāve been ghosted by Stripe twice after very positive āthis is great weāll set up next stepsā meetings.
One of which was a 1:1 with the CTO, really positive stuff. Few days later I emailed a thanks and āwould like to talk about next stepsā. Nothing. Sent another a couple weeks later. Nada.
Several months later, got a reach out from a team, said I was interested, and the HM said ok yeah Iāll get you set up. Nothing.
I know Iām not the only one, I know of others who have had similar experiences.
Itās just poor form.
> Itās just poor form.
This. This is what I meant with this post above. Poor form. Incompatible with the supposed criticality of the position at stake. I still think Stripe is a great company, was just disappointed at being ignored after all the festivities.
It happens. In the mid 90s I interviewed with a windowing pc operating system company in the pacific northwest. Next day the guy calls me, says they're really excited to have me on board, they're discussing the best team for me to join. Then nothing. Meanwhile I visit my friend who is working for a web browser start-up in Mountain View. He suggests I interview there. A couple months later after I'd started work at that place, the first guy calls me, says they're ready to rock and roll. I tell him it's been a while, and where I'm currently working. He doesn't see too happy. Worked out well for me though.
Stripe sucks so much as a company. For one, they classify all businesses catering to LGBTQIA+ clientele as 'Adult Services' and drop them as customers.
But even worse, they do so in a particularly destructive way. The accept the business as a customer at first, and then suddenly withdraw service without warning, leaving the business scrambling to find an alternate credit card processor.
yeah, well - true fact:
Stripe does ton of Adult Services shit - they just hide it by farming it out through shady payment services like
https://www.bankingcircle.com/
that proxy it for them so it "looks legit".
that way the various payment providers can claim legitimacy by saying "stripe is one of our biggest customers" and stripe can say "we dont do shady shit"
I had an analogous experience with Toyota's self-driving division, Woven Planet. Not nearly as bad, but some similarities. The recruiter had three calls with me first, asking rote questions that were clearly scripted. She asked the same questions multiple times. Afterward, she had me fill out a form with my experience, strengths, weaknesses, etc. She had me read the profiles of various people at the company, and insisted I read through the entire website as well.
After all this, she insisted that I sift through all the publicly listed positions and give her a sorted list of the ones I thought I was suited for, along with a checklist of how I matched each qualification. She then asked me to only select one, even though it wasn't clear what each group did or which role I was best qualified for or interested in. Then she asked for open slots to start doing interviews. Lastly she asked for a salary range. I let her know my FAANG salary, and she gasped and paused a bit. She quickly ended the discussion and said she'd call me in the next couple days with an interview schedule. Then she ghosted me for a month. She eventually mailed me and let me know they weren't ready to move forward.
By the way, the Woven Planet website is a mess, and the company probably is too. You'd never guess they are an automated driving division. They have all these ideas of a "future city" they are building and are paving over a section of land near Mt Fuji to build this "future city". They've hired Japanese speaking foreigners to do all these touchy-feely motivational videos that have nothing to do with self driving vehicles. Complete lack of focus. I lost a lot of respect for Toyota after this experience.
> You'd never guess they are an automated driving division.
Woven Planet's automated driving division was acquired from Lyft earlier this year [1]. They probably are still going through the integration.
[1]:
https://investor.lyft.com/news-and-events/news/news-details/...
If it makes you feel better, you dodged a bullet there not wasting time with Woven Planet [0].
[0]:
https://i.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/pi6mdk/psa_i_waste...
Yes, it does make me feel better. Thanks, that is a crazy story!
Here's my own little story. (not as bad as the OP)
About a year ago, I was reading Byrne Hobart's excellent newsletter on financial stuff (no affiliation, but it's well worth its money), and I see an ad where they're looking for a head of strategy.
To apply, you simply had to email John Collison (the youngest of the Collison brothers) with your idea about it.
I thought I had a shot, given my experiences, and decided to spend several hours to prepare a memo, that I shared with them.
Of course, I thought, after all this work, and considering that this candidature comes from a respected, still niche, newsletter, and given my resume and past experience (ex AWS - first hire in Europe in 2008 -, ex VMware, etc - I'm not trying to beat my chest here, just stating that I objectively had a good resume for a position like this), at least I should get one chance to interview, or worst case, a simple but kind "we saw your note, not interested, good luck".
Of course, as you can guess, I've never heard back. Reached out again after a couple of weeks, and still nothing from them.
Reached out to a friend who works at Stripe, asked him if he could help with my application. He says he will try, but then... nothing.
Ok, Stripe, I guess you won't have me.
Side note: compare that with how I got my job at Amazon Web Services, back in 2008 [1]. Completely different experience.
Eventually, after I gave up on this opportunity, I decided to make the memo into a blog post [0], omitting or tweaking a few minor details. It might be worth a read, and I would love to hear your thoughts on it.
[0]:
https://simon.medium.com/stripes-opportunity-reinventing-cus...
[1]:
https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...
So you just sent āa memoā for an ad you found on a newsletter and never heard back, and this is shocking somehow?
Not exactly. The newsletter is a paid, niche newsletter, and the author stated that you could apply to the job by directly emailing John Collison. It was somehow implied that applying that way was a more direct track than a cold email.
It's also stupid to pay for an ad in a "special" newsletter, mention how candidates can reach out to you, and:
1) Ignore the extra work done by someone to show high interest in the job
2) not even respond at all.
You might see things differently, of course. This is how I see it, and I think that Stripe didn't behave nicely in this particular stance. As stated at the beginning of my comment, this is not comparable to the OP story which, assuming it's completely true and unbiased, is certainly worse than mine.
Thanks for the extra context. Still, I would imagine that an employer would feel free to ghost any email or application from an unknown person unless it came with a specific recommendation from someone they know.
I went through the hiring loop recently when switching jobs.
Decided to do the right thing for once and make a serious effort at investigating my options.
I started out very sincere and honest, but two months of being fucked over by companies left and right in the interview process definitely changed me.
In the end I found a nice position working with honest and empathic people, but the path that lead there was a total disaster.
In your mind you imagine an HR professional planning your loop, interviewers that are genuinely interested in you, a hiring manager who's carefully read your resumƩ and has specific questions about your experience. You just (wasted|spent) five or six years and $200,000 on your four year degree. They better be interested, right?
Not.
In reality, a hiring manager clicked on your resume because an algorithm suggested it, told HR to setup a loop, and then promptly forgot you until the day you showed up.
If you're one of the lucky ones, your resume might have actually been read by a human.
The interviewers on the loop are probably not even on the team you'll join if hired.
There's a 90% chance they haven't even read the job requisition for the position you're applying for, if they could even find it. I've had to interview people blind without requisition or resume, and yes I did feel like an idiot both times, a rude one.
The person sitting across from you asking questions probably first learned of your very existence 15 minutes before it began; not because of disinterest, but because HR assigned the interview with that short of a window! re: x out sick, y in important meeting, etc.
All of this is true for at least 2 FAANGs and 1 MSFT in my experience as an interviewer and interviewee on over 50 loops over a decade.
What I'm saying is there is no spit or polish to the hiring process, not even at competitive companies, not even at the big ones, perhaps especially so because the assumption will be that you actually know what you're doing since you were bold enough to apply and even bolder to attend an interview loop at one of these "amazing" companies.
The musical chairs you experienced at Stripe, if explained at all, will be calendar conflicts, meeting overruns, sick employees, fire drills within, etc., all of those ambiguities that constantly interrupt IT. The show doesn't stop within because you're being interviewed on Wednesday. You are not the show. That $1000 suit you're wearing, the only suit you'll ever buy or ever wear ever again, bought you 60 minutes (or 20 at Stripe for Mgr of Mgrs).
The real explanation you will never know, but something as facile as the third guy on the loop not liking the fact that you have a full head of hair and he has none is actually sufficient, if you understand what I mean, that hiring is messy and opaque and human and, therefore, often ridiculous.
Would you believe one of these companies has had for decades now, as a core competency to hire for, āA tolerance for ambiguityā? I always loved that one.
Spot on. And even people that normally can be counted on to put in effort and keep their word, about 40% of those people have fallen apart as workers under covid.
Well it's seems like in 2021 with so much tech and automation resources available it should be possible to set up a process that does not ghost candidates.
You are implying this is intentional. That has not been established. For all we know, an essential person to the hiring process died from COVID, putting some real ghost in the ghosting.
The CEO responded. He doesn't agree that this is norm, but he can't, can he?
One person, one story, n equals one. 1 does not equal 10,000. Worse, hiring has x^n variables. He could have nailed the interview, astonished absolutely everybody into hiring him, only to be outcompete the very next day by the guy who wrote the book on managing managers at financial institutions.
The attempt to amplify this as something oft-repeated at Stripe lacks evidence. āI've heard thisā and āI've heard thatā about Stripe is hearsay, secondary, questionable at best.
Doesn't this post strike you as mildly disgruntled?
That's not a fair response. I clearly see what you're saying. Of course you're right. It's only decent they close the loop, but the reality is it's messy.
LCA might have a policy specifically precluding Stripe from communicating anything with regards to an unsuccessful interview.
> who wrote the book on managing managers at financial institutions
I've been around and worked with people who have written books, maybe not "the" books (one of them might have been, actually) - and honestly, one of the people who wrote a book was one of the worst developers I had worked with. The other was good but extremely lazy.
The one who wrote what might have been "the" book on a topic was (in my eyes) a fraud, he was fired shortly after he was brought on to consult, along with the CEO and marketing dept which brought him in.
>The CEO responded. He doesn't agree that this is norm, but he can't, can he?
I think, the CEO responding has no impact at all, as the options for him is to reply exactly in the way he responded to this thread or not reply at all. Either way, he can not admit anything going wrong within his company, so it is meaningless.
This is the best comment of this entire thread
I think you make some good points about the human part of the hiring process. Things happen - and hiring managers are often in a lot of meetings that run over.
But as someone who's been on both sides of the loop, I have very little faith in the hiring practices at them. And it comes down to something you said:
> What I'm saying is there is no spit or polish to the hiring process
This is totally unacceptable in my opinion. Devs spend months (or years) of prep to pass 1-2 days of rigorous whiteboarding, but HR can't work out a schedule and send emails / make phone calls properly? And don't even get me started about the shitshow that is the onboarding process at these megacorps. And these processes being total shitshows makes the failures intentional.
These processes are exactly the kind of thing I target for refinement. The process should be documented, it should be robust, and it should make things better for everyone involved.
I agree with you as an engineer. I disagree with you as a human being. Why be so formal during the interview process when the actual working environment will be anything but?
If they can tolerate the ridiculousness of the interview process, then they might be able to tolerate the ridiculousness of actually working there.
Ask anyone who's worked at any of these companies, and they'll tell you it's pretty fucking ridiculous a majority of the time. Even at the very biggest companies, IT shoots from the hip, and boy(!) does the interview process reflect that.
If we built houses the way we build software, the entire world would be homeless.
That is a ridiculous cop-out. Dev work is very regimented for many of us; we have a half dozen regular agile meetings, deployment schedules, etc. The process for code getting accepted and deployed is well-established.
It's very easy to establish a standard response time for getting back to candidates or tell them when you're going to make a selection, and to communicate and enforce a timeline for things like sending and signing documents. I could literally automate most of the process.
You could. Could HR? An HR rep can't tell you what a function key on a keyboard is.
Don't these HR systems like Taleo, etc. integrate tracking and workflow issues like this into their product suite? Surely they must.
I recently interviewed for Stripe for an SWE role. I went through what must be 3 rounds (each about an hr) before going to virtual on-site. My on-site had 5 rounds and I thought I did fairly well in each except one dedicated to a ālive debuggingā session where the interviewer insisted I install IntelliJ (me being a VIM person) and we spent roughly 30min together installing and setting up different things in IntelliJ.
Three days later I got one of those generic thank you for applying in Stripe emails. I reached out to the recruiter and asked for specific feedback and explained my interview experience but I heard nothing back.
I spent about 1.5days of my personal time off which at my current market rate is close to 1k USD. I sincerely believe we SWE should be paid to do the interviews at a prorated basis of their salaries or at least some level of expenses. With virtual on-site companies basically donāt have to do anything other than employing a few sourcers to hire potential candidates which incentivizes these sort of poor candidate experience.
To me it hints that Engineering MoM is not a very technical position.
Is a manager-of-managers ever a very technical position? I am one and almost nothing I do as part of that job _requires any differentiated technical ability_. An Excel pivot table is as a complex as Iād need to get by.
(I do technical items on the side so as to not lose my mind, but Iām not surprised by the hiring loop not being very technical.)
Iām a manager of managers at my current big tech employer and here we are still required to be quite technical. Iād think that a startup 1/25 the size would benefit from this approach, hence my surprise. I donāt know how to do pivot tables though.
Maybe a hot take: if you have a Manager-of-Managers role, you arenāt a startup any more.
There are startups with over 50 engineers you know ;) At sr manager role you are for sure not technical though even if you did get asked coding/design questions in interview loops (there are exceptions)
At what point does an organization stop being a "startup" and become a "private company"?
When its inertia has reached a point where it can continue to succeed not because of its actions, but in spite of them.
Immeditely added that to my favorite commebts. Short, crsip and it contains so much truth!
That is so nicely put. Worthy of Ambrose Bierce himself, I reckon.
Obviously itās pretty tricky to define but Iād say anything that doesnāt have an already established or rapidly growing customer base/revenue is a startup. If you can shutdown all r&d and itās still going to be viable business for a while then itās not a startup
When it stops taking VC money?
when you become consistently profitable and sel-sufficient.
I disagree. If you have 50 people, youāre just a business
A company with over 50 engineers that wants to be seen as a startup is a red flag for me. I usually stop reading their job postings as soon as I can detect this.
Is every job posting you look at is for a company that runs a version of lamp stack and 90% of workforce is sales? Then, sure
Of course not.
You'd need more like 300+ to have a manager-of-managers who isn't a director or VPE.
There is significant shuffling of interviewers and schedules. One almost has to be on-call to be able to react quickly.
This is a sign that an organization is doing too many fucking interviews. When you get scheduled for an interview every day of the week, you are quite literally forced to stop caring about the impact of cancelling interviews last minute. The recruiters may try to find an alternate interviewer, but often the candidate gets shafted. I never realized how common forcing the candidate to reschedule was (I had never experienced it while interviewing) but it happens to probably half a dozen candidates per day at my 600 person company.
Stripe notoriously went through a āhyper growthā (doubling headcount year over year when already past several hundred employees) phase for a number of years. That is an unspeakable torture to subject an organization to.
I myself did 40 interviews last quarter and it was very hard to keep all conversations engaging and interesting. Fortunately having a modicum of standardizing feedback + topics to be covered helps, but I agree with your point that over-interviewing is bad for business.
40 per quarter is very high. In ~2012 Twitter was doing 8 per week for ICs, which is also way too high.
There are more than five weeks in a quarter.
+1 to this as someone who is currently on the border of doing too many interviews. At worst, it can have a cascading effect because recruiters then scramble to find a different interviewer, scheduling things last-minute that then may be canceled last minute. I don't know what the solutions are other than inviting fewer candidates to interview.
everybody complains, nobody offers a solution. I'll start.
1. when you're first contacted by a recruiter, company provides a _written_ set of values/principles that the company expects from its recruiters and staff, contact info if you feel the company didn't live up to these principles, or have a suggestion for how to improve the process.
2. tie x% of recruiter comp to good behavior, and y% of interviewers.
3. automatically send surveys to candidates (both accepted and rejected) and check to see if you feel they could've streamlined the process or made it more pleasant. Capture an NPS score. Offer a cash bonus thank-you and another for referring friends.
other ideas?
Good ideas, good companies will of course already be doing stuff like this. This is a story because $BELOVED_TECH_COMPANY was bad to interview for with a side helping of āmate says itās chaos over thereā
Iād assume that Stripe isnāt trying to solve problems like this because of a lack of priority. Not because of a lack of ideas. A big company gearing up for a blockbuster IPO probably has many other problems to solve with higher priorities.
Definitely agree about the excess of complaining in this thread though. HN isnāt a good forum for discussions like this, but thatās probably more a social media problem than an HN problem.
Stripe already supposedly sends surveys to candidates, but even after asking for the survey on HN, having pc ask me to ask again via email, and asking via email, I have not received it.
If a process takes more than three interviews (allowing for an actually role-applicable take home) and two weeks, I bow out. Toss me some array shuffling algorithm challenge like I'm fresh out of school and I'm out as well. OP is just more evidence that tech hiring has been infiltrated by grifters lacking creativity and inventing processes to justify large recruiting/hiring orgs and oversized processes. It's just horribly broken in the majority.
I recently got a new job after around 6 months of searching and I was appalled by the practices of many well-known tech companies. Ghosted by multiple places, bait-and-switched multiple times (I was in secops/SRE and trying to move to appsec/offsec), you name it. Itās wild how unprofessional recruiters can be.
I did have some great experiences though; in particular Box, Airbnb, and Datadog.
I'm also in Cloud Security/SecOps looking to make a switch to Offsec/Pentesting. Would be great to connect and learn about your experience switching. My email is in my profile if you are willing to reach out.
To the first point, of āI only need 20 minutes for thisā thatās a classic get out of jail free card if theyāve decided youāre not a good fit or things arenāt going well. It manages your expectations and they can end the interview early.
That is extremely unprofessional and a bad look for the interviewer. I have done over a 100 interviews including some really bad ones, never have I ever cut one short. When you are interviewing you are representing the company, whenever I interviewed someone even if I knew it was going to be a clear no, I tried to make them feel good about the process as what that person is going to go out and say directly reflects on the company and future hires. 20 mins of your time is a drop in the bucket in terms of impact of getting a bad reputation, not only are you potentially shooting yourself in the foot with other candidates but leaving a bad taste in the mouth of the one you are interviewing who might in the future would otherwise reapply at a different stage in their career if/when they become a stronger candidate.
Yes, I'd like to order a few truckloads of people like this guy for the workplace please.
And yes, I still name the company when I tell the story of my worst experience interviewing at a company, 30 years ago.
Hm, sometimes when Iām interviewing someone who I know is a ānoā it feels like Iām leading them on if I go through the full interview. I thought it would be more respectful of their time to let them know that early, but maybe I am wrong about that?
Iāve also heard (via HR) about candidates being surprised to not get the offer in cases where I kept the interview going and pretended things were going well.
The interviewee already has their schedule booked off during that window, that extra 20 mins is not saving them any time. If your concern is their time, I would assume they'd "waste" more time stewing on an early interview exit and thinking about it rather than if it just ended normally.
Finish the interview, and provide feedback if asked why it was a 'no'.
Interviewing isn't just for fun, and even if you don't get the job, you can go through the interview to practice, and hopefully to figure out what went wrong.
If after 20 minutes they just say 'I think this is a no so go home' I wasted a lot more than 20 minutes and got nothing out of it.
I agree that ending an interview early is a no-go. However if it's an onsite/process with multiple interviews, I think the fairest approach (and I've done this in the past) is to manage expectations ahead of time that the full interview sequence only happens if you pass each one.
This way you don't waste the candidate or your time if it's clearly a no after interview 1. They feel a bit bad because they obviously didn't pass, but if you've communicated ahead of time it's not a rug-pull.
That's unacceptable, in my opinion.
I work at a company that grew more than 10x in under 2 years from a couple dozen engineers to hundreds. I personally interviewed well over 100 engineers. My time was valuable, but not so valuable that I couldn't spend an hour productively with each candidate. And certainly not by making them feel like it's an extended failure. On the super rare occasion that someone was gigantic "no", it's still possible to make the candidate feel valued.
One time, I had to shut down an interview cycle because a candidate was abusive to one of my reports. That's the only time I've cut a round short.
I once interviewed someone, who clearly had no programming experience.
They had someone else complete the screening take-home coding exercise for them.
We spent the whole hour interview making zero progress on the task assigned.
I kinda wish I had setup some kind of get-out-of-jail situation so that I could have saved everyone the time, but I sat though the whole hour just out of the embarrassment of ending things early.
I always put some āwrap upsā in my interview. Logical points where, when they stall or give a terrible answer, you can ask, āis there anything else?ā, let them say something else, and just say, āThanks! I think thatās a great place to stop, is there anything youād like to ask me?ā. I practice saying it with a smile, and donāt diverge from the script. Makes it much easier to end bad interviews.
I interviewed someone once who refused to try my problem. I don't know what was going on for him that day, but after the quick intro to the problem, he didn't want to do it. I was the last one on his interview schedule, so I walked him out and got 30 minutes back.
Yes. When I was very inexperienced I still remember being interviewed by an _extremely_ big dog in the open-source world (he was VP of engineering at a very successful startup). I was probably about a 3/10 in terms of quality of interview answers, and unsurprisingly didn't get the job.
Despite that, he still managed to make me feel good about the whole experience. At some points in the interview where I was close/slightly off he'd first coax "that's quite similar to X or Y, don't you think?" then if that didn't work he'd coach "here's how X works, _elegant explanation_, ok, let's talk about Y".
I remember this vividly years later with a smile. Just like I remember all the negative experiences where people were dismissive or ghosted.
If somebody is a no-hire, what favour are you doing them by extending the interview loop to the end? You're just wasting their time at that point. (Though I've never heard of an interview slot being cut short like that based on a couple of questions. If the interviewers are habitually preparing for that, it is just insane.)
I mean, I can imagine situations where it's appropriate, but like you said, I think it says more about the company if it's a common occurrence. For the types of interviews my company does, they're designed not to suck, even if you're not knocking it out of the park.
Most of the sessions are collaborative solution design exercises. The interviewer can drive the solution, if necessary, and hopefully it's at least educational. The remaining session is a behavioral interview centered on the candidates accomplishments. It's usually possible to set least draw out what the candidate is proud of from their career.
So they start the interview by lying to you in case they need it later?
I run a fast growing, succesful business. I only schedule first interviews for 30 minutes anyway and rarely use the whole time. It's just my nature, I get to the point of things quickly.
> It manages your expectations and they can end the interview early.
Do you mean they can end the interview earlier than 20 minutes, or that it actually takes more than 20 minutes but they can end it at 20 minutes mark?
Either case it doesn't sound good. If they said 20 minutes it shouldn't take much more or much less than 20 minutes.
This was also said in the post-loop interview. After I was approved and congratulated. Makes zero sense in my book.
that's unprofessional and shitty behavior. if the interview isn't going well and you want to cut it short, you can find some spine and say so.
Them: "I will only need 20 minutes for this. "
Me: "I only need a few seconds. Either you are more perceptive than anyone else I've ever met or you or as arrogant as anyone I've met. Either way I'm not a good fit. Thank-you and good luck in your search!"
I wish I had the finances to be able to deliver this burn.
Having other offers or an existing job is sufficient
Easy. They were keeping you as back up. They were not sure if their most preferred candidate would accept the offer, so they kept you in a loop until the other person joined. Looks like he did.
That's what my wife said as well. I would still understand this, except the "when can you start?" and the ghosting part.
Maybe they were really serious about him until a rockstar turned up and then they couldn't just pass that up.
I have no idea what the situation is at Stripe, but there are some trends that explain this experience in the larger environment right now.
Recruiters are extremely hard to find. Comp has soared. Many have left old jobs to go to new jobs.
Generally, people rely on recruiters to manage the communication with candidates. Very high turnover leads to very high rate of things being dropped.
Compounding this, hiring great engineers is extremely difficult right now. So recruiters have a list of 10,000 things to do. Itās not ok that recruiters might be less effective in candidate management for no-hires, but it makes sense.
Finally, add on top of this that candidates are being less respectful of company time as well. Candidates are ghosting and not responding like never before. The market and the remoteness of the experience are turning hiring from a human activity into a transaction, on all sides.
> Finally, add on top of this that candidates are being less respectful of company time as well. Candidates are ghosting and not responding like never before.
Managers started this trend so I donāt have a whole lot of sympathy for those who suddenly find themselves on the wrong end of it. Even kindergarteners understand you should treat others how you would like to be treated. All of these ābusyā managers who donāt like being ghosted better have also ceased ghosting candidates before complaining about the practice.
References are contacted and feedback is confirmed positive
The references idea is really weird (we do not practically have this in France). Has there even been a refence who was not in awe about the demi-god-genius-philanthropist that they are asked about?
The only one time i was asked for references, I send the contacts to good friends asking them not to do too much theater. Surprise! they came back positive.
I got one true, unexpected reference, when my university was asked about my PhD (confirmation of title only) and they came back with really nice words (again, nobody was asking for a reference, just a confirmation of tilte - bt they added it anyway and it was genuine (and yes, I knew the person who spontaneously wrote it :))
> Has there even been a refence who was not in awe about the demi-god-genius-philanthropist that they are asked about?
Iāve only checked maybe 50-100 developer references over the years, but I can think of at least 3 that sunk the candidate outright and many more that were lukewarm. Enthusiastic references were uncommon and stood out.
Normally, in my experience as an individual contributor, the references arenāt even contacted. I have had one place contact my references and it is the place Iām starting work in 2 weeks :)
My current employer had an interesting twist on this: they contacted my references, but not to get the actual references (they'd already decided to hire me), but to find out what sorts of things they could do to help me do my best work.
Previously, I'd agree it's pretty hit and miss, and mostly miss.
It's how it has to be.
This is why you don't need to give a 2 week notice, and you should always have your resume updated.
Need to take an offer knowing odds are a way better one is coming down the pipe, do it. They can lose budget and cut your role before you start.
Don't treat any job like a dream job, if you get there and nothing works, you have a nightmare.
My dream right now is to work hard until I'm 40 and retire. I can't imagine doing this for another 30 years .
dont have kids then
As someone who had kids in their 40s: this is the correct observation.
We had ours mid 30s. I also founded a company and ran it for the first 15 years of her life.
That is stressful. To put it mildly.
This said, having a kid is the toughest and most rewarding job you will ever have. If you don't like kids in general, sure, avoid them. Some of us do.
She's 21 now, applying to grad school for applied math, and (being slightly biased) is the most wonderful kiddo in the world.
As for FIRE type scenarios, unless you have an inheritance or a pre-existing nest-egg of some sort, yeah, kids tend to deplete cash flow. I'm 56, and if I'm lucky, I may be able to retire in my 70s. Part of that is due to the company being killed by our bank, all assets sold off, because they panicked. Leaving me with a giant hole where my retirement (and kid's college fund) was. Started over at 51, at (somewhat less than) 0. Do not recommend this.
>Part of that is due to the company being killed by our bank, all assets sold off, because they panicked.
Care to elaborate.
If I do end up FIRE, I imagine I could always have a family in a cheaper country. 2 million in FAANG RSUs can easily raise a family outside of America.
This is a reference to kids being expensive?
That is one of many complications. Less time less sleep less ability to relocate
What does this have to do with giving notice? You don't give two weeks notice without a written offer.
There's no bite to the company to decide not to hire you/fire you even if you have an offer from them.
So if you get terminated one week in now you canāt go back bc you burned the bridge by not giving the notice? Sounds like fantastic plan!
Odds are they won't just take you back even if you give 2 weeks.
Every company Iāve ever worked for except one (which folded shortly after me quitting) had asked if I was thinking of coming back. But yeah maybe with attitude like that they wonāt
Sure that's going to happen, but think about it from the other side. If a good employee leaves for greener pastures and wants to come back later, well, they already know the work and the team. Wouldn't you want to rehire some one if you were in that position? Even if they leave again down the line it's not like you spent a lot of time or energy getting them up to speed, they were already ready from round #1.
I thought it was implied, but generally if I don't even bother to put in a two weeks notice I'm not leaving on great terms.
I think its situational. I have only one employee that I can think of that I'd rehire even in the current market. The relationship is changed irreparably with me after quitting or threatening to if it was for another job. Any trust is gone unless you know they were a mercenary and worth it.
I swore off Stripe after seeing how they treated a former coworker of mine:
https://twitter.com/jennleaver/status/1402972896184586244?s=...
Your experience with interviewing there does not surprise me after hearing similar stories about them.
I hope this discussion doesnāt get automatically down-ranked just because it talks about Stripe in a negative light. This is an important discussion to have given how common this occurs at tech startups. It is rude and impolite for companies (not just Stripe) to behave in such a manner when hiring. Itās almost as if they forgot what basic manners are and yet they demand so much of the candidate.
We haven't downweighted this thread. Normally we downweight such threads because otherwise the front page would mostly consist of them, and mostly stacked at the top, too. Not that we exclude them altogether, but indignation routinely attracts tons of upvotes and one of moderation's jobs is to jig the system out of its failure modes.
However, we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are involved in the story. That doesn't mean we don't moderate them at allājust less. But in this case we've not touched it, partly because of that core principle and partly because the thread is arguably more interesting reading than most of its ilk, at least in places.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I was interviewing with Stripe about a year ago and had a very similar experience.
I also heard that attrition is really high and work-life balance non-existent.
So maybe I was lucky in this case.
This sort of nonsense seems to be common everywhere. A friend of mine is interviewing for senior product manager positions in Amazon India and the process is just as, if not more, broken. Multiple interviews for multiple positions, interviews go great, no rejections, just ghosting from HR. In the most recent application, after the initial phone interview, the HR contact responds to a what's going on query with "we are waiting on interview slots from all panelists for the loop".. Only a week later sends another email "The team has decided to fill the position internally". That is fine, the hiring manager's decision, but they do it by reposting the same exact same job again, I suspect as an end run around the hiring process since there is an application that is at the loop stage. All of this seems so sleazy I can't imagine what it would be to work in such a place.
Not taking sides on this one other than to say Iāve been on both sides.
- Iāve been at āwe agree on comp and the letter is comingā from a boutique consultancy only to learn āthe CEO didnāt really approve funding it. But can you help us understand the market we were going to have you help us with?ā
- Iāve been ready to make an offer for a funded position only to have the SVP say āUpon further consideration we have it leveled wrongā and then have to apologize to the candidate. (Who then went to the SVP to complain about me)
The lesson is these things happen in large and small companies even when everyone has the best of intentions. The situation sucks for all involved when it does. Itās not avoidable, but frequency can be managed. (Are you giving simultaneous offers for the same position?)
My only experience recruiting with this firm is being introduced to a recruiter via friend of one the folks listed in the thread. I had a quick HR screen. After 2 weeks I got a āWe are going in another directionā position. Just one data point. I wish it had worked out.
I was ghosted so many times. Finally landed a job with like-minded professionals.
It would be nice to have a curated list of companies to avoid or perhaps companies that have decent interview practices.
This was fuckedcompany.com back in the 90's, though companies and their lawyers didn't appreciate the satire.
Blind is still an alright forum for a gut check I think?
I hear of people interviewing regularly and I honestly don't get it. I couldn't be motivated to go through the process without the intent to leave my job and take one at the new company. It's very binary for me, I'm either definitely looking or not looking.
Some of my friends make it a priority to switch jobs every 2-3 years, they think that's the fastest way to get ahead. I don't necessarily agree or disagree with that, but if that's one's priority, one would practice interviewing so one can ace the "real" interviews when it's time.
Me too that's just masochism to me. Begging for acceptance in a constantly shifting system with no feedback is my hell. I will only do that when highly motivated.
The best time to look is when you have a job.
You beg for acceptance when you need the money. Companies smell your desperation. When you have a job, you can be picky.
Iāve had a job for every new job Iāve had since my first one. I have enough money saved to not work for a few years. I could probably be making more money if I switched, but ugh.
Interviewing is a skill like any other. You have to practice to be good at it, and actual interviews are good practice.
But I wouldnāt go out and interview a lot unless I was planning or willing to leave.
But once a year itās probably a good idea to do it to keep from getting rusty. It also helps keep a healthy perspective that you actually _can_ change jobs if you wanted to.
I joined Stripe over the summer.
Sorry to hear about the ghosting, my interview experience was very different to yours, no re-scheduling, and my recruiter was great with respect to timely follow up.
Now that I'm at the company, I've seen how much stress folks are under to interview. Stripe is currently exploding in HC and it's definitely taking a toll on folks who are being tasked with multiple interviews per week which include not just the interview itself but evaluation/coordination/feedback/etc.
The most awkward part of the hiring process for management is when they have a good candidate, who makes it all the way to the offer stage and a better candidate emerges before the offer is accepted. Most managers will sneak the offer to the better candidate, and hope the good candidate stays on the hook while the better candidate hopefully makes it through onboarding.
Most corporate hiring processes are voodoo anyway. A consistent process based on trowing resumes down a staircase and hiring everyone on stair 4 probably will have about as much impact on workforce quality as the random, inconsistent process that is used in most companies, especially when you factor in interview content.
I've interviewed for a number of companies lately. They don't sound that unusual to me.
Damn, if that's how they treat the higher ups I can only imagine what they would do with IC's lower down the food chain. Stripe were on my "would like to someday work there" list until I read this, now it'd be no way I'd jump through any number of hoops to apply to them.
The first time I interviewed for Google, I went through a couple rounds and, then, the recruiter vanished. I tried to reach out a couple times over the next couple months, and had regular chats with another googler who's a dear friend of mine, and, when they finally decided to move on with it, the position was closed because it stayed open for too long.
My friend apologized profusely, said she felt deeply ashamed, that that wasn't the Google way of doing it. Quite frankly, I was OK. I was never very invested in becoming a googler, as cool as it was at the time (not that it isn't now, but it was cooler back then).
Humans are flawed creatures.
Had similar experiences with two companies few months back for Senior MLE/Lead DS role. It seems practice of ghosting after selection and verbal commitment to offer is widespread. It's terrible practice they ask you to resign and join asap saying that offer will be made in few days and then they ghost. What a waste of time of everyone involved !
Hi danrocks ā I'm a tech culture reporter with Protocol, and I'd love to talk with you about your experience for a potential story. If you'd be at all interested in chatting, I'm at akramer@protocol.com and on Signal at 610-701-1197.
I was interviewed for the senior software engineer role and I have cleared the first coding interview round. It was HackerRank challenge and I pretty positive that it went really well. After that HR called me about an introductory call. I've mentioned about how I got into the software engineering and what are my passion in the payment industry and how I can help stripe grow as a company. I also mentioned about the indiehackers website a lot. At first HR doesn't know anything what I'm talking. She acted like she knows about the company. Anyway after few days I got the email saying that mine got rejected. I'm still thinking about what I have mentioned wrongly to HR that she got pissed to rejected me in the first place. This may Not a relevant story to the OP but hey just wanted to splash my story on the internet.
God, all the finance people in here backbiting each other makes me not want to work for any of you.
10) I call up a senior leader in the office I applied to, an acquaintance of mine. His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people". I was shocked with the response.
Stripe is preparing for an IPO, so naturally they will have some chaos in an effort to balloon it as much as possible.
Why on earth are you making excuses for a public company?
I am not, I was making an observation about the "It's a mess and a revolving door of people" comment. The recruiting practice that OP described is not acceptable for any company, public or private.
That's not making excuses as much as providing an explanation for it imo
> Stripe is preparing for an IPO,
I was thinking the same but this interview from Stripeās CEO says otherwise.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/11/23/stripe-very-happy-stayin...
Based on this interview, not sure who will be able to afford to buy $STRP when they do decide to go public. Nice for them, sad for the rest of us.
you can buy fractional shares on just about every platform now. i bought $10 worth of nvidia stock today on RH, even though a full share trades for like ~$250 (i didnt pay that close attention)
but the ghosting part
This is a huge personal pet peeve. Being ghosted after being made a verbal offer, or for that matter even just after making it through multiple rounds of interviews, is just flat out rude. I keep a list of companies that behave this way towards me, so that if I am ever contacted by them in the future, I can point to their previous conduct as an explainer for why I will not be wasting my time with them a second time.
I take it you are not from around here. People in this area are masters of flowery noncommittal. For example, you might ask somebody if they are interested in doing something and they say "Wow that sounds like a great idea." Translation: not interested.
In reading through your experience, they did not seem to give you a firm offer. Sadly this is kind of typical around here though I really wish it wasn't. I have had to translate the SFspeak to foreign companies doing business here several times who were just as confused as you.
Well, I see what you mean, having worked in the US, but this wasn't in the US. Maybe flowery noncommittal has become a global phenomenon? If so, I'll have trouble navigating it.
Please write a tutorial.
Obviously sucks, had a similar experience as an SWE intern and new grad. I even got a written offer which was then later rescinded because of COVID. They said they will honor it for the next cycle, but of course they didn't. After reaching out they wanted to do new full interview loop, and then at the end said "Sorry we don't have any headcount left for this anymore".
I just want to say thanks. Naming and shaming does the rest of us a favour and, hopefully, makes the whole industry better.
Stripe recruiting is terrible. It's a waterfall of red flags.
I don't know how they are managing to grow and have such a great product.
After their first call I decided to do not move on.
I had something very similar happen recently with Olive (Columbus, OH). I received a verbal offer and was told to expect it in writing in the coming days. After about a week I pinged the recruiter and was told they had decided not to proceed because of āa change in the companyās yearly plansā. It was all very bizarre.
Hello, I have experienced something similar recently with another tech company, where the hiring manager, HR and myself had agreed on everything including me applying for a visa au my own cost (and naturally stopping the interview process with several other companies). They weren't strangely silent for a month. I applied for the visa, got it andOl once I announced that I had the visa, they didn't want to employ me anymore, citing that the role had been "reformed".
I learnt a month later that my colleague was leaving for this company and position.
Adding my story interviewing at Stripe. Went for a IC engineering role. Flew out to one of their offices for the onsite interview. Ghosted after returning home.
Reading this thread makes me realise that I'm not alone in this experience.
Welcoming to the tech interviewing world, this is unfortunately a common occurrence.
Didn't realize the ghosting was so common. I had a leadership development and coaching firm approach me to join them, asked me to interview, spent 2.5 hours of my time and then ghosted. I thought this was amusing as it shows piss poor leadership skills and they're supposed to be high quality coaches, sent an emailing saying as such, no reply. In addition to our "Who is hiring?", "who wants to be hired?", we should add "who was ghosted?", heh.
Shout out to Sourcegraph who interviewed me ~Q1, had a good process, and although it wasn't a fit, didn't ghost me. It was one of the better interviews I'd had in my career.
It is a business convo, after all.
Being ghosted is normal and expected.
If I'm ghosted, I will follow up a couple times and leave it be.
People are busy with their own lives, so I'm not offended in any way.
Not ghosting would have been nice. But being nice is not expected.
People here are so offended about being ghosted for some reason. I thought HN crowd would be pretty good at doing business. Being ghosted is the norm.
Oh I don't mind being ghosted, heck I've done it. I just didn't realize it was so prevalent. My example was more I think it was amusing the one time I did get ghosted it was for a leadership dev company.
Maybe a red flag came up when checking references?
I thought about it but the recruiter said the feedback was positive, so much so that another hiring manager saw it and wanted to talk about another position.
Even if that had happened, ghosting would hardly be a good course of action, but Iām biased.
It is unprofessional but not surprising.
Once you are rejected, the recruiter probably has moved onto the next project and forgot about you.
Before the pandemic, I did a round of interviews on site with a bank. Not a very senior role, just a developer. Everything went well or so I thought and then radio silence.
Got a text months later from the recruiter who told me the whole group that I interviewed for was gone. So bizarre.
The point though is the recruiter reached out to me, which was nice.
Well one of the people I interviewed for one of my manager openings said, when asked on the motivation to apply: ātoo many surprise layoffs in banksā. I guess he was right.
Just re. point 1, I read somewhere that most interviewers make their initial mind up about a candidate in the first 4 minutes, and the decision changes after that in only a very small % of cases. I realise this is for a 2nd line position, but I suspect the same holds true.
Not the same, but somewhat similar to op's predicament: I interviewed at an eCommerce company for a role that I was very suited for. Went through the loop, got positive feedback, was told I'd been chosen as the candidate, and a week later--boom, "the business decided to table the job req".
It's really taxing on applicants when the inner turmoil of a company affects job postings. A company should not post a job role only to revoke it at the final step. You shouldn't be withdrawing a req after candidates begin interviewing.
It was an expensive (time-wise) lesson for me. I really admired this company until I had my chain yanked twice with them.
I feel your easily justified frustration. In a period when we complain itās hard to hire people, companies canāt afford these big blunders.
I also have a question. Is there a reason why you didnāt do #10 as the first step? I think you would have benefited from speaking with your acquaintance before the process.
Sorry to hear about this OP. I had a similar ghosting experience @ Twitter.
Interviewed for a Senior SWE position and they made me an offer - I asked for a slight increase in RSUs and the recruiter disappeared. I also sent two follow up emails that I supposed went into the void.
There are a ton of great companies / opportunities out there! Since you can pass their loop I am sure you have the right mindset and skills to pass others - their loss!
This is terrible. Tech recruiting needs some serious change.
As a positive counter point, I got last two contracting jobs by having one lunch/coffee and just talking for half an hour. No grind, no CS questions, not even checking on references... loved the experience.
When I was recruiting we only had a one hour interview. I did ask technical questions, but treated it more like a conversation and all questions were on point (related to the application, no CS algo).
As an individual contributor, nobody has contacted my references until they've given me a (conditional) offer letter and I've accepted.
Seems like a massive waste of everybody's time otherwise.
In the last 15 years I've had exactly one company contact my references. I went to work for them. It's rare these days, and it's a shame.
Hiring process involving multiple decisions makers can drag on- but thereās no excuse for ghosting.
I used to ghost people dating-wise to avoid uncomfortable (itās not you itās your dog) conversations until I got ghosted myself. It hurt and got me to remember to close open conversations quickly, perhaps to a fault.
For an engineering manager position, I only interviewed with only technical person. To me it hints that Engineering MoM is not a very technical position.
OP can you correct the typo in "with only technical person"? I can think of two very different things you potentially meant.
Reminds me of the interview gauntlet Hashicorp had me do a few years ago.
Iām glad experiences like these are getting exposed, success is no excuse for rudeness.
[0]:
https://blog.webb.page/2018-01-11-why-the-job-search-sucks.t...
I feel like there should be an open standard for companies to say they abide by when recruiting.
e.g
1) treat with respect..
2) ...
3) We will never leave interviewees not knowing at what stage they're at
4) We will never leave interviewees not knowing when we will next contact them
His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people"
What isn't? I see trying to deliver value in spite of an dysfunctional organization a part of my job description.
I had a very similar experience with DoorDash this year; I had been several interview rounds and met with people including c-level. The experience made me think the org must be pretty dysfunctional and I dodged a bullet.
sometimes companies can be disorganized, especially at various inflection points during their growth.
i had a similar experience with a company years ago... had a laugh about it with some friends and thanked the recruiter for their time anyway. six months later they came back and offered a more defined role, but i was already down the path with a different company.
i think, maybe, publicly shaming the company is not the best strategy. if they figure out it was you, and it does damage to their reputations, none of the people involved will ever want to work with you.
That sucks man.
Can you share what kind of questions you were asked during the interview process?
Standard behavioral questions not particularly challenging. The most striking thing is that there is no drill down: questions are independent of each other and interviewers donāt follow-up on the answers, making it hard to establish a conversation.
I only interviewed with only technical person.
Is a word missing? Did you mean to say only one?
Honestly, is this the right forum to express this? Did you try sending the same feedback to them first?
I've been ghosted after being offered the job before and it's a very uneasy situation...
I advise to check out r/antiwork. Thanks for sharing your story. Good to have these once in a while.
I can't imagine what circle of hell you are in if there is a position called manager of managers, but it sounds like you dodged a bullet for sure.
Itās the pre executive position and it is absolutely a shit position you donāt want to be stuck in for very long. Work work balance tends to favor more work, and not even work really just status updates and being the whipping person at hour of the night
I think it clarifies things, tbh. Managers of managers used to be called Directors and VPs, but now many companies have Directors as line managers. So at least Manager of Managers is clear in that regard.
I don't think that's the literal name of the position. This is a common term to refer to a manager with an organization of ~20-40 people, where their direct reports are primarily managers themselves as opposed to individual engineers. In most large companies this position is still called something like "Senior Manager" as opposed to Director, VP, etc.
It is actually the name of the position. Engineering MoM. It's funny and leads to some weird Google searches.
Oh, you're right, how peculiar.
This is what any middle management position really is. You are managing and coaching managers.
_"After passing the loop ... have the hiring manager tell me they'd be calling me after a week"_
That's when you know you're just the backup option. If you passed their hiring loop, and they like you, and they have actual budget + headcount, you're hired. They don't need to wait a week to call you back, and they know that; once they have confirmed good references, they should be sending you an offer immediately, not after an arbitrary amount of time.
Or, in this case, an infinite amount of time :D
If I can take a guess...
Recruiters are over-excited sometimes. The recruiter told you that you passed. The recruiter told you that you should expect an offer. The recruiter asked for and checked your references.
The hiring manager may have said very little to this recruiter to encourage this. We don't know whether it was "we're going to hire him" or "he's ok let's talk to a few more people".
So there may be a disconnect between Stripe and the agency they use to hire.
This makes no sense. A company like Stripe has in-house recruiters.
An external recruiter would never tell a candidate they referred they were hired without hearing it from the company first - as theyād be burned too many times by setting people up for disappointment, and it would destroy their reputation with the employer.
The references were checked by the hiring manager. The congratulations were also extended by the hiring manager. So itās hard to pin this on the recruiter.
Also no agency was used, it was all internal.
My take on what the recruiter did was that most of his/her prospects got flat out rejections and this guy didnāt - which is the most positive signal the recruiter could ascertain from their shitty hiring managers who canāt communicate properly.
So they breached a verbal contract here?
Ghosting is way too common these days. I've decided to start replying to many more of the cold emails I get. Even if the answer is "no" or "not interested". Not replying is rude except when you can't make space for it.
Recruiters have gotten strangely more persistent and aggressive recently. Somehow my corporate work email (@google.com) got into some leads database recruiters use and I get emails about once every two weeks from recruiters, which I usually ignore (or tell them to remove the address as it's for work, not personal stuff). Several that I have ignored have sent multiple repeated emails ("Just following up in case you missed it") and so on.
I used to get recruiter cold emails once every 6 or 7 months. Now it's at least once a week. I got two the other day in the same day from two recruiters at the same headhunting company with 90% of the same boilerplate text in common. Inconsiderate, I think?
I don't feel bad about not responding.
Actually if it reminds me of anything, it's 1999/2000 right before the .COM crash. That's the last time I remember it being this crazy. I remember a day in 1999 when I worked at a startup where everyone's phone (yes, we had desk phones then) all rang in sequence one after another as a recruiter made their way one by one through the company directory.
If I may: "Like flies to shit."
They are just playing the numbers. The dev interview gauntlet is tough, and even the recruiters know it. I made it past some tough technical screens, and the recruiter for a newly ipoād (well known company) was happy I got that far and flat out told me āI have to fill 30+ roles, I have no idea where Iām going to find these 30 peopleā. I didnāt make it any further, and apparently I made it further than a lot his other prospects. So imagine their frustration. They are trying to throw as many candidates against the wall because very few ever make it through.
I donāt hold anything against these recruiters anymore. They find decent people with good work experience, but even that is not enough for these companies anymore. I try to be as cool as I can with them because for better or worse, they might be the only person in that entire process that succeeds if you succeed (your only friend, believe it or not).
I agree. In big tech companies the recruiter is incentivized to make sure you win. If you win, they win and if you lose they basically lose financially too.
They really are your only friend in the hiring process. Knowing this gives you a lot of leverage.
I don't hold it against them. But there's way too many of them.
Not replying to unsolicited recruitment isn't really ghosting IMO
Agreed. Promising to meet or get back to someone and then never communicating again is ghosting, but you haven't promised to reply to every spammer who gets your contact info.
I'm sorry but fuck that. I get _at least_ 5 emails from recruiters a week even though my LinkedIn profile only had job titles, tenures, and a description that reads "not interested in a new role." I've disabled InMail and hidden my email, so they instead pull my contact info from some DB. They are beginning the relationship with an enormous amount of disrespect, so they can suck a fuck if they're going to call my non-responses "disrespectful."
I feel bad sometimes about ignoring cold emails, but even taking the time to read all of them I get would require several hours a week. I am more inclined to reply if I can catch a hint of authenticity. It is usually pretty easy to tell when you're getting an automated email from a sales funnel.
Nah, I've got better things to do.
My old boss, however, has good advice on how to make them useful, for those who care to respond:
https://code.dblock.org/2015/01/09/how-to-make-recruiter-spa...
You should have no obligation to reply to a cold email. Those go straight into the trash for me (or more often, to the spam filter for a permanent block). It's MY time that is being wasted.
With labour shortage I am amazed why people even subject themselves to such treatment.
I would stop the charade at 2) and said I am no longer interested.
Stripe has been giving horrible interview experiences to LOTS of candidates over the years, and they are very unserious about how they treat potential employes. They are lucky they are hot, cause the voice is starting to spread and the pool of people willing to be dicked around to work at a company starts shrinking after you have a certain reputation.
Companies employ the "shotgun" approach to hiring because there is essentially no existing feedback mechanism for panels to see the consequences of their decisions. Sometimes posts like this OP or some Glassdoor review will bubble up, but then the company acts on the defensive and the people who actually screwed up likely won't even ever know what happened.
Are you an IC doing tech screens? An EM or Director doing loops like those in the OP? How much feedback have you gotten in the past 2 years about the success (or lack thereof) of the candidates you interviewed, whether you hired them or not? (Here "success" is how they aligned to your evaluation-- could be they had _financial_ success or _career_ success choosing some other job).
EMs will sometimes try to keep tabs on "false negatives," and at the Director / VP Level there's more formal analytical effort (though a lot of it is trying to hit quotas, even if those quotas are bloated or poorly defined). But this aggregate information very rarely bubbles down to the panel and in particular the individuals who interacted with the candidate.
Why keep so many people in the dark? For one thing, if results were disseminated, then salaries / offers would leak too, and then the engineering org becomes much more expensive. (Ironically, the employee stock pool is tiny, and engineering salaries are often not the biggest cost to a Co. The issue here is more about the C-levels having so little understanding of the job market. That's why Steve Jobs wanted a no-poach-- he had no idea what his coveted Safari employees actually did).
Moreover, panels suck. They get stuff wrong all the time. I have never been on a panel that has not moved the goalposts at least 3-4 times between candidates as the panel tries to figure out what the panel even really wants. If ICs and the panel got to know about the outcomes of their actions, they're going to question what happened. And the higher-ups don't want to spend time having that debate.
How can we prevent outcomes like those illustrated in the OP?
If you're a recruiter, stop shotgunning candidates. Try to figure out what your client really wants, and poke half the passives you might otherwise. For actives, give _useful_ feedback, even if it's just verbally. If bombing one leetcode is all it takes relative to the rest of the pool, that can be good for a junior engineer to know.
If you're an IC doing interview loops, do a quarterly review of the candidates you interviewed and the panels you were on. Insist to your manager that you want to do this as part of your 1:1s. Think critically about the loops and discuss with others.
If you're a Director / VP / C-level, stop treating candidates like toys. You earn outsized compensation because you're supposed to be a force multiplier-- you're supposed to assemble an amazing team. If you fell into a goldmine of an opportunity, be extra generous to candidates. You're going to build a good team out of luck, not your own ability, and you'll thank yourself later for not being a sore winner. If your funnel sucks (e.g. you're a tiny unknown start-up), expect to need to improvise, and don't blame candidates for your own bad luck.
Don't see an "acceptance" anywhere. Positive feedback isn't the same as an acceptance.
I was curious about this:
"I get asked for references."
Is this still common? I thought these were such a potential liability in the US that nobody even asked for those any more. Is that just not true in SV maybe?
If turnover is high, can someone chime in with data as to why?
Are they burning people out with intensity? Firing? Quitting?
Is it 'growth chaos' around a solid product, or is the underlying tech a janky mess?
Is it just an aggressive cull of 'non working experiments' in which people get let go?
Or just a poorly operationalized HR process?
Itās a manager manager positionā¦ like not a great place to be in the organizational pyramid. You either hit exec get fired or burn out
holy sh*t. pretty trippy. sucks.
maybe they just figured, look, it's go-time now. we hire at 10x the ideal rate, we'll poison the culture a bit, lose at 10x the ideal rate, but in the end, we'll see the growth we want to see, which is really all that matters at this point. we think we can take on visa/whoever, so let's go.
i applied to stripe, in part, based on their rep as....being big-ish and maybe actually doing something-ish, but still somehow not sucking. and maybe one or more of the founders being irish means they're not quite as monstrous as a typical tech company?
i talked to this recruiter person who was, somehow, amazingly human and basically just nice. i was like...what?
it was actually notable, unusual, very surprising -- not too sure how or why, but seemed almost unbelievable. _just_ shy of me thinking this person was all prozac'd up -- but it was too genuine.
i _think_ i ended up bailing right on the call b/c of....i have no idea, could have been anything. this was low-level IC/technical account manager position.
...adding, i think you (and everyone) should get at least interviewing credit for time served.
like, i just got bounced from a solutions engineer position. i re-applied to a diff position at the same company - support mgr or similar - and i kind of wish details of my interactions to date would make their way into the new application. _maybe_.
i've talked to folks who absolutely hated my guts at some places, so maybe i should want a fresh start each time thru.
and, as for ATSs, i've had more than a couple of folks get back to me after weeks or months saying, "sorry we didn't get back to you, obv this is stupid late, etc." -- for tech, process, whatever reasons.
i wonder if any ATSs actually help you decide which hires worked or not, so that they could improve their process.
like, what if your most effective hiring happened when you only pinged people back between 8 and 9 weeks after first receiving their application?
google always bragged about how awesome they were at hiring -- to the point where they were at least claiming to track some non-obvious measures of quality, etc. i wonder where they're at now. adding, the obvious -- sucky is their painful-as-childbirth all-day interviews, their 30-day long labor-ious interviews, etc.
For those who have worked around and at Stripe for the past decade, this is not a surprise. Stripe, and especially the founders, have a quite a poor reputation for screwing over people in and around their orbit.
I can see why they didnāt hire you.
Care to elaborate?
You seem bitter and frustrated. Itās clear in your text.
Part of that is understandable. They probably didnāt do a great job interviewing you. Itās probably exasperating.
But I canāt imagine someone who gets so easily frustrated writing about an interview would be great to work with. Because you couldāve just as easily criticized the interview process without bringing the exasperated tone along the way. With clarity and a measured response. But you wear your heart on your sleeve and itās one of clear annoyance.
> Itās clear in your text.
Is it? To me it reads just like a blow-by-blow description of the situation. There is almost no personal commentary, other than a couple that aim (and probably fail) at being funny. But to each his/her own, I guess.
I agree. I thought your description was pretty unemotional. I think its OP projecting his own bias onto you. Judging by how rude his initial comment was (and rightfully flagged by others), I would take his comment with a grain of salt.
I feel bad now. I hope you get a good paying job. I was too rude.
Make this story 1/4 as long.
Interviewed. Passed. Congratulated. Asked for start date. Ghosted.
Could you have perhaps been too accommodating? By being a little bit "harder to get"[1] you may be able to weed out[2][3] recruitment opportunities that aren't serious and would just be a waste of your time to follow through on. Neither party should be expecting the other to just drop everything they're doing and reschedule on a whim. If that happens again, you should probably call it out (professionally) and state that you're happy to continue discussions but only when they're ready and serious about hiring.
Recruiters will hand out accolades, false hopes and more just to keep you engaged until the moment someone else (preferred candidate) has been picked by the client. Then you get ghosted because you're no longer making the recruiter money or because you're now the backup option in case the preferred person cancels before starting or soon after starting, and they would prefer you remain available "just in case you're needed".
[1]
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/smarter-living/benefits-o...
[2]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26408181
[3]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071362
Did it strike you that:
> You're applying for managers of managers role
> Which means you're probably going to need to know how to deal with ambiguity and difficult people situations
I wonder if organizations would be better if we all did that? The Internet would be a much more fun place, I believe.
/s
I also believe a bit of self reflection is perhaps in order.