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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

If anything, OP's subsequent employment by Stripe is a very strong endorsement for the workplace culture of the company.

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I actually used Stripe as an example before I realized that's where she had moved to so consider that a double endorsement, it's not like I have any dog in that particular race but I know some people that work there and without fault they report working there is a dream come true.

The brothers have something good going there and I'll bet that when the dust settles Uber will be part of that dust and Stripe will have IPO'd or similar (possibly even this year).

This is how it's done:

https://stripe.com/code-of-conduct

I wish I shared your optimism that HR practices had anything to do with IPO pricing...

At some level they are linked.

Uber will have to learn to play within existing frameworks.

Key Nordic proverb: "Pissing in your pants keeps you warm only for so long". In other words, using your funds raised to make up for shortcomings elsewhere in the organization will sooner or later come to and end.

That's an excellent proverb, and the way things are going in my neck of the woods, I feel like I'm going to get a lot of mileage out of it.

Stripe seems to hire an unusual amount of really talented engineers who are also really good at explanatory writing. (Though this may just be an availability bias thing for me.)

Fowler is one. Julia Evans is another that comes to mind.

I wouldn't be surprised if they had amazing internal documentation for their engineers.

They have amazing external documentation. It was so good I [blogged about it](https://dev.clintonblackburn.com/2015/07/24/good-documentati...)! I have never had an easier experience integrating with a payment processor.

Their recent guide on incorporation and taxes for startups was the simplest take on legalese I'd seen

Etsy is another company with extraordinarily talented writers. Their engineering blog "CodeAsCraft"[0] is superb and I invariably learn something everytime I read it.

[0] https://codeascraft.com/

Is it? A person in need of a lifeboat will take one.

Also, the author repeatedly used the percentage of women engineers as an index of workplace quality/sanity. So we'd expect Stripe's to be much higher, right?

Is that the case?

Right, because moving from one market leading tech company to another, with a book deal and tech talks thrown in for good measure, is the definition of "needing a lifeboat" in software engineering.

It's not like she got a job working at the DMV or something.

Going from 26% to 6% of any particular description of employees that quickly is probably not a good sign for quality/sanity.

I'd feel the same way if, say, s/women/conservatives/ or s/women/$minority/.

I am surprised that you would include an active political choice with immutable personal characteristics. Some companies are purposefully political; it is why they hire lobbyists. They may also take positions, such as support of their own transgender employees or buying insurance that fully covers women's health care, that are objectionable to many conservatives. I could see things unrelated or even positive for business repelling conservatives.

The same is true of some other dynamics. I've seen an exodus of young men from a team because a new boss came in who didn't think sexual harassment was acceptable workplace behavior. The excuse was "the workplace isn't fun anymore", but before that it wasn't fun for people who didn't enjoy spending all of lunch talking about how to pick up chicks. Or for technical quality, if a company is successful the engineer who didn't want to write tests or get code reviews is going to rage-quit at all the "extra process" that keeps them from breaking the build on a Saturday night like they used to.

Sometimes when conflict emerges, a company has to take a side and whichever side is alienated is going to end up leaving. The question then is which side did the company come down on.

>Also, the author repeatedly used the percentage of women engineers as an index of workplace quality/sanity. So we'd expect Stripe's to be much higher, right?

Don't have the answer for you. But I would say the repeated lies by HR she stated in defending repeat offenders, and having the same reports of harassment by her female coworkers over the same managers speaks more to the quality/sanity of the place than percentage of women in the workplace.

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