Lessons from Stripe
markmcgranaghan.com
markmcgranaghan.com
> "Ambitious problems for Stripe look like enabling more internet businesses and supporting entrepreneurs in more countries, not getting more ad clicks."
I used to have a similar mindset until I actually ended up working on Ads at Google. There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of small business merchants, mom and pop stores, etc that rely on ads (be that Google, Facebook, Instagram, whatever) to run their businesses. In fact, these are the vast majority of ad buyers! The huge multi-billion dollar corporations are far and few between.
That's what drove many of the engineers (including myself). A small increase in conversion ratio (be that through better ranking, filtering, query interpretation, etc) meant a huge deal to these merchants and in some cases, could be the difference between life and death for some of these small companies. And at the scale Google operates at, very small incremental changes = huge impact. The engineers and projects, at least in my team, were driven by exactly the same goals mentioned here - to "enable more businesses" and "support entrepreneurs" all across the world.
It's easy to get sucked into the hype and blanket statements of "ads are bad" (I was guilty of that too). I've since left Google, but that experience really internalized for me that things like this are never so black and white.
However, does the desire of advertisement buyers to convert justify the profiling and tracking of peoples behaviors to the extent that it is happening?
You don’t seem to provide any reasonable justification beyond that not only big but also small companies profit from this state of affairs.
This doesn’t make the power and behavior of google any less creepy or undesirable.
Of course, the big part of your question is "to the extent that it is happening" - there's definitely an argument to be made that they're collecting too much info, but my point is merely to say that this kind of information collection allows for the kind of granular audience targeting that is disproportionately beneficial to small, niche businesses.
Business is a relative project where your profit doesn‘t really depend on the absolute capabilities that you are using but your relative advantage over your competitors. If fine-grained targeting wasn‘t available then small businesses would do fine without it. So the real problem is the competition between google, facebook, amazon and others which leaves users as the products. We would probably need some like an arms control treaty to tame these behemoths and make this situation somewhat sustainable in the long run.
Making money is all well and good, but this is not empowering anyone.
I imagine that two dry-cleaning places a mile away from each other would end up in competition eventually, and Google will drain all the profits from both.
Something is fundamentally unbalanced about this.
Unlike most resources though, Google ads take into account a quality score, so if one of those merchants is lower quality than the rest e.g. users go back from the store to keep searching more often, then they'll have to pay more and all other things being equal, the more useful merchants will outcompete them.
In practice AdWords does enable many businesses that would otherwise find it too hard to reach a niche audience, and wouldn't be able to rank organically for a keyword because they have no inbound links.
Could they enable a new business? They could, but as soon as they enable two businesses of the same kind in one place they will also take all the profits from both.
Even without that consideration, all 3 would also need to outbid one another while budgeting enough to take 100% of the traffic.
Whether this is good for the small business merchants is questionable, since it turns out your ex-employer was literally stealing the money those companies/individuals were earning through ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103280. In the linked thread you can even read some testimonials from small merchants which you and many of the engineers were "helping".
Ads are definitely bad for regular humans though:
* they waste their computing resources and make their devices slow & use up the battery
* they serve malware (Google got hit too)
* they spy on them
* they distract and manipulate them
* etc
Ironically, they're also bad for the software industry, since now customers are used to getting things for "free", so many are no longer paying for software, undermining the revenue stream of... small business merchants.
With friends and helpers like these, business merchants would probably rather get punched in the face.
Serious question: did you and fellow googlers ever have discussions like “what if that argument is actually not true? What if it’s just a convenient rationalisation?” I think even if you dismissed that POV, it’s a sign of a healthy culture that you can question the mission, even if you then decide it’s right.
1:1 Management Roleplay, Technical Roleplay, Technical Discussion, 3 behavioral interviews
there is a lot of overlap between mini onsite and full day onsite.
After meeting so many folks and spending so much time, the feedback you get is minimal. In my case the recruiter informed that everything was great but the team did not feel the spark.
I wonder how much of interview overhead it would be for Sr Enggrs and Managers. Multiple rounds of interviews like this is overkill.
In this case, maybe that one person, at the end of a long day, who didn't feel the spark?
It's not so easy to flip the bozo-bit and write someone off if you were involved with the interview process to hire someone.
That's a really poor response. I can understand that many of us would have that same implicit gut feeling, but recruitment, and especially supposedly exemplar recruiters like Stripe, have an obligation to articulate their reasons for decisions in a much more grounded framework.
When I say obligation I mean primarily to their internal stakeholders (to candidates would be nice, but let's be realistic here); the team's primary objective is to define & put process around finding, assessing and hiring people, not optimize for efficiently applying bias and "gut feeling" quickly to large pools of people.
That assumes you have ICs who want to and have the skills to go into management. Promoting people for the sake of filling a chair leads to really bad dynamics.
Moreover, newly promoted managers lack experience and if all you have is the blind leading he blind then it tends to create issues. You need some seasoned people in the mix to provide guidance.
I can't imagine doing that in an interview, especially with people I don't know... is it as embarrassingly cringey as it sounds?
I was interviewing for a forward-deployed/field engineer role and they expected me in an hour to come up with a nuanced strategy, down to SOAP vs REST with timelines and specific commitments, on how I'd do a large-scale payment integration with a partner. The interview was a disaster. Not only was it clear that my interviewer had little real-world experience in the sort of environment we were roleplaying (with internal politics, tons of legacy, teams of varying quality and type of skills, etc) but it seemed they were looking for something really specific I just couldn't grasp.
It went horribly and I didn't get an offer. So maybe a counterpoint to an otherwise great company with great process. To their credit, they said they didn't really have a bar for this (newish) role. But still, it was amateurish and all-around bad.
An EM role is going to be less about your technical competency and more on things you talked to them about. If you think back to what you were asked and the stories you shared with the hiring folks, maybe try to reflect on your lessons and behaviors in your stories. Were you considering your organization's top line goals when you pushed your team into finishing a project. Were you considering your direct reports' own career goals. Were you displaying empathy and asked the right questions to understand some bigger meaning? It's hard man to see any of that on your own, I know, it sucks, but the recruiter is busy talking to 100s of people and if you aren't going to be a sure bet, they have to cut their ties and move on.
But it's up to the recruiting dept to deliver the news / feedback, and because it's a large legal liability trap to actually give feedback and since the recruiters don't have the technical background to understand the feedback in the first place, usually tell candidates not much at all. On top of that, most recruitment departments are bad at most companies because of structural issues in being a recruiter in a first place.
To really solve this, you need to remove the legal liability trap. The industry works around it with backchannel communication of the feedback, but that usually means you have to know people on the team interviewing you.
I've been in hiring roles for 15+ years and I've interviewed somewhere around 1000 candidates. I don't work at Stripe, but I can probably explain why you didn't get feedback.
Giving candidates feedback is really fraught. First, even honest feedback is unlikely to be satisfying. It's entirely possible that your recruiter told you exactly what the team's feedback was. "Your answers were fine, but we want better" or "... but candidate X was stronger" is super-common, but very unsatisfying. Second, while some candidates take feedback well, most don't. When I've been specific -- e.g. "your answers to questions about software architecture fell short" or "you didn't clearly demonstrate experience solving production issues" -- most candidates argue or get angry. People are really, really bad about taking criticism well. I've even had two candidates threaten to sue me, and one threaten violence. These are obviously outliers, but they do happen.
Finally, the upside is limited: to the company, what's the value of feedback? We've already decided you're not a fit, so what value is feedback to us? Especially if, as I've explained, you're unlikely to get much value from it either?
The best way to get feedback about your prospects as a job candidate isn't from someone a company you're interviewing with. Instead, ask someone you trust to conduct a mock interview with you and give you feedback. You'll be more to be able to listen if it's someone you know has your best interest in mind; they'll be more likely to give honest feedback if they know you'll take it well.
Clearly there's some kinds of feedback that is likely to leave a negative impression (see those that threatened violence!) but on the hand putting someone through days and days of interviews and then saying "we didn't feel a spark" also is going to leave a negative impression.
The rare interviews where I received concrete actionable feedback afterwords, even though it still stung I have a more positive impression than those where I got some pabulum (much less the ones that ghosted me).
That I'd apply with you again - if I enjoyed the process and the specific feedback either suggests to me that I didn't articulate well or I need to be better prepared. If the process is bad or you treat me like cattle or you provide no feedback, I don't know if the problem is you or me and I don't think I'd try to work for your company again.
But if you have 50 candidates that are all qualified for the job, you are basically just looking for random reasons to exclude candidates until you narrow it down to a few.
Optimism can possibly mean anything from not blocking new initiatives through year-long corporate approval processes to cult-like you-have-to-drink-our-kool-aid internal communication that shuts down any and all critical voices and oversells what a company is doing and where it is currently at even to their own employees internally.
For me personally, optimism is a good thing when it means not taking issues as set in stone, genuinely believing that the future will be better than now and that one has some amount of control over that, and trying things out that might not work instantly - all while retaining one's critical thinking and being honest about the facts.
I have never met anyone who works at stripe or heard an inside take, but from the interviews with the founders I've heard, they don't strike me as the kind of people to push the delusional kind of "optimism" and shut down critical voices.
In smaller startups, where you might be able to steer more aggressively, you should still ask yourself whether the company is clearly in the wrong direction only from your perspective or if there are factors which you don't have any insight into (no matter how close you are to founder(s)) which would re-contextualize the issue.
Not disagreeing, but these are some caveats which I found useful to keep in mind.
[1] - There was a story about someone from Apple(?) here a while ago who was let go after a lunch with <someone important> where he expressed his dissatisfaction with the company's direction. He then took up japanese caligraphy. Maybe someone remembers and can link it here.
On the tech side, they continue to build on top of a broken foundation (MongoDB), resulting in millions of man hours wasted dealing with the complete lack of transactions. Mongo now has transactions, but last I heard Stripe was still running a very outdated version and spending absurd amounts of time dealing with issues that transactions would have entirely avoided. If you suggested that maybe it'd be worth changing course to something like Postgres because of the insane amount of work being wasted, you'd be shut down for not being optimistic enough.
Having worked at Stripe, these exact examples came up more than once. I can verify their authenticity.
You simply chew through those complications. Again and again. And try to optimize your application for less complications in the future, if possible.
Handling money is serious business and if one insists on using the unproven flavor-of-the-week to do so, they'd better make sure it has at least the fundamental requirements to accomplish its task, e.g., transactions/MVCC. Stripe apparently failed to do so, and has chosen to propagate that failure for many years.
One can make excuses for the spunky startup with a handful of employees needing to save time by using what they know or whatever, but Stripe is well past that point, and serious people should've taken over by now. I'd expect "replace Mongo with a real database" to be near the top of the todo list for any serious people.
The same cannot he said for a number of other services we use, including those from some companies with supposedly very good tech credentials. We’ve had to back out of integrations due to the clear evidence that they are non transactional and/or eventually consistent.
What storage options don't have the ability to delete all your records at once quickly? If it was MongoDB there would surely be an index attaching the data to your account. Same with PostgreSQL.
You seem to indicate that Stripe has consistency issues with their payment APIs. Have you seen this? Having worked directly on these APIs (note, I said ON and not WITH, I worked at Stripe on these products), it would greatly surprise me to see non-trivial consistency issues with their data model that surrounds money movement. Stripe might be on Mongo, but assuming that they have consistency issues because of that is quite a leap. Remember, Stripe is regulated federally and in most states, as well as in their international jurisdictions, so the claim you are making would be one regulators might be interested in if there is any veracity.
You also seem to be insisting that there are no "serious people" at Stripe, and that might be true! At least, I hope no one has mistaken me for a "serious person". But what does "serious" mean here and why can only "serious people" work on financial infrastructure? Moreover, why do "serious people" not see Mongo as a "real database"? In fact, what is a "real database" to you, other than something that has transactions?
I'm very interested in your answer here; while I had my issues with Mongo in my 2.5 years at Stripe, most of the issues I encountered I would lump into the "this is a trade-off consequence" bucket, as Mongo solved a whole lot of other issues for me. The other main bucket I would have used was "distributed database problem". I know Stripe had no plans, nor should they, to move to a non-distributed data store.
No one is forcing you to use Stripe, but I would suggest that attacking Stripe for their technology usage is not very useful.
How about "Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability"? That would be a good start for a database.
A nearby comment suggests lack of set-based operations (e.g. delete), so that would be another nice thing to add.
How do you say this without knowing that governments around the world feel the same way and so heavily regulate this space? Do you know any publicly available recommendation from these regulators against MongoDB?
> replace Mongo with a real database to be near the top of the todo list
This is where the businesses separate themselves from technology enthusiasts. Let's assume this is made the top priority, in your opinion, what task immediately follows? Or what former priority does it replace?
If there isn't one, there should be.
>Let's assume this is made the top priority, in your opinion, what task immediately follows? Or what former priority does it replace?
Mongo jeopardizes the overall security and reliability of the system, thus exposing Stripe to serious liability, so I'd say replacing it is part of the basic expectation from any production-level computer system. Obviously I don't have a copy of "Important Stripe Person's Priority List", but I'd assume such basic functionality is part of an implicitly-assumed functional baseline, and that Stripe would expect said important people to escalate and develop a plan to handle such a fundamental flaw ASAP.
If we were just tracking people's favorite cat videos or something, it'd be one thing. Attacks targeting malicious data modification and exploitation of races wouldn't really be that much of a concern. It's not great to have that attack surface but not necessarily the end of the world if someone's favorite cat videos get added to their account 1000 times. But when we're dealing with money, this kind of thing needs to be taken seriously, and tacking on a big pile of crap in front of the datastore is not a serious way to address its fundamental shortcomings, at least not when there are many better, proven options on the market.
Just in case someone thinks I'm being an alarmist here, this has already happened; multiple bitcoin exchanges have been pwned due to their reliance on Mongo's flawed semantics. [1] I can only assume that systems like Stripe haven't been attacked similarly because it would provoke the ire of much bigger fish, and why do that when you can knock over smaller bitcoin exchanges?
[1] http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/04/06/another-one-bites-t...
Just wait until you find out what technology actual banks use!
But the optimism point resonated. Before reading your comment, I actually reflected on whether I am being pessimistic. I'll tell you why: at this point in the game, cleaning up the software would effectively require a rewrite. And the company is in no position to do this. They do not have the talent, leadership, or effective recruiting necessary to undertake a meaningful second system effort.
So I think I've come to the realization that the job is a poor fit and I should move on, but while I am here it actually wouldn't help pointing out the obvious issues with the system. There really is no point.
However, what they are really talking about is that "why will it fail" is a "conversation ender", and "how might it work" is a "conversation continuer".
Those are probably bad terms, but hopefully you get my drift. One promotes conversations to end, and one encourages conversations to continue. I would personally promote that viewpoint instead to keep people from doing exactly what you are talking about.
There's a clear difference between giving an unusual or unconventional idea a chance; versus allowing an idea guy to let his imagination run away.
In the former, giving an unusual or unconventional idea a chance, is how progress is made. Fundamentally, a startup is always taking a chance on an unusual or unconventional idea. (When I worked for a successful startup, a lot of people at networking events thought what we were doing was weird and unconventional. It wasn't.)
In the latter case, when an idea guy is allowed to let his imagination run away, it just kills the company. Either he's wasting all his time, or even worse, wasting everyone else's time. (These are the kind of people who's whine that "we're supposed to be optimistic" when everyone in the room clearly rejects their ideas.)
I finally came to the conclusion ( for now ) that these sort of super optimism persist precisely and only because they are Startups.
Optimism as a Culture only works when it happens from those who held power to all the way down. It doesn't really work bottom up. When the company Culture is toxic, or bureaucratic as in every large companies, no optimism is going to save you.
In Startup, everyone is in it together, and it is mostly a flat or very thin structure. There is a huge transparency in vision and Goal. Everyone knew what their others are doing, and as long as everyone is fighting for it there will always be a fighting chance.
As someone with a hefty amount of anxiety and depression weighing down on me most of the time, I often feel like I'm the only person in the room who can't get excited about things, but I don't want to be the weight bringing everyone else down. Is there not a danger of this value becoming a proxy for "people with depression and similar mental health problems aren't welcome at Stripe"?
Edit: I know that this is largely the role of therapists and mentors, but I think there's a tendency in startups to expect people to teach themselves the skills they need to do their jobs, rather than provide training and guidance. So i'm wondering if this is the kind of thing that could be trained.
That an interesting question. Would you like to work in a tandem with a person with mental health problems? Is it the same as asking "people with chronic fatigue and similar health issues are not welcome at company specialized at manual labor" ?
As for whether it's the same question as the chronic fatigue thing, i'm not sure. I think largely it comes down to how negative their perceived impact on their colleagues is?
The goal of a business is profit, because without it, it dies.
Are you able to bring profit, moreso than other candidates? You're hired.
That's it, nobody gives a shit about depression and if some company decides on arbitrary qualities that are unrelated to profit in regards to hiring, it'll be beaten by a company that focuses on profits.
Depression, feelings and values are great topics to be discussed in romance novels, tv shows, dinner parties and other leisurely activities that you may engage in, after you bring value to society you're a part of, or else society will cease to exist.
Values-based hiring isn't a magic bullet, it can lead to problems such as having a monoculture. And as I alluded to before, it's possible for hiring too rigidly against a value to unintentionally become a proxy for exclusionary bias.
As an external applicant, I would say it was better than most, but still an internal recruiter shit-show. Week-long windows between email responses, dropped balls, and even no-shows for scheduled calls. Seeing this contrast makes me wonder if Stripe employees are just high on their own supply?
Recruiting is hard. I can only imagine it gets harder at scale. I'd bet that Stripe's best recruiting is done through employee referrals... and that is probably building a mono-culture.
That said, the interview process itself, once it was set up, was one of the best interview processes that I've participated in. The PDF they send about the questions and scope of each interview helped me know how to prepare. Each interview had a specific goal and angle on determining if I was a good engineer, and at the end of the day, I felt like we all had a good idea of each other. I ultimately didn't get the offer, but because the process was robust, I didn't have a regret of "I could have done better" or "These questions were unfair and I should have gotten the job". I was confident that Stripe had a good measure of my skills and mindset, and that they'd simply decided I wasn't a good fit.
It's hard to really ask for more than than from the process itself. I can't say if it's effective for them, but at least to me, it seemed like Stripe had thought more about the interview process than most companies I've ever been with or interviewed with. There's obviously going to be implementation issues and problems around the specific people who have to implement it, but the plan itself seems well conceived.
That may or may not be true and a single annecdotal evidence brought fourth based on a very specific actions that have led a single individual to feel uncomfortable is hardly enough to downplay the points that have been raised.
I still feel like they wasted my time. I told them my compensation expectations up front, went through the entire interview process, and then got an "non-negotiable" offer about 30% under what I told them.
They tried to justify it based on a very optimistic valuation of their equity. I'm already working at a unicorn that skimps on salary with the promise of the equity being worth something, and it would have been a significant cut in take-home pay to accept their offer.
When I interviewed with them. I got the same amount of long periods of no contact and people showing up late (if showing up at all) to interview calls. The things the recruiter told me about the role and interview process completely contradicted the things that the team members told me. I was told that the third interview would be a coding interview, and then when the interviewer showed up (late to the interview, of course), it turned out I had prepared for nothing and the interview was actually just a behavioral.
They weren't even able to tell me if the role was pre-sales (and commission based) or if the role was post-sales (and not commission based). The leadership team had apparently not decided yet, but still wanted to hire people for this role. This is a pretty fundamental characteristic about a job, and I honestly don't know how you can recruit for a position without even knowing the basic compensation structure.
In the end, the recruiter told me that they wanted to move forward with scheduling the final round, then rescheduled my interview several times, then cancelled it outright (but assured me they still wanted to interview once they found a good time), and then eventually the recruiter totally ghosted me without scheduling the interview and never responded to further emails.
My own experience was that Stripe was able to take me from a prospect to a hire in less than 30 days. My interviews and calls were all on Friday, and I would hear back on Monday with results and schedule the next round for that very same week.
Most people do not show up to interviews late and the process is a 1hr phone screen + 1 day onsite + 30m decision meeting. From start to end, if the candidate was available, took about 1 week. That part is not a scaling issue, but a cultural issue where it's OK to be late or flake on interviews.
It's very tough to take seriously the bemoaning about engineering hiring difficulty from the likes of pg and others when this is the case.
To the extent companies are investing in the process, it seems to be look for more ways at how to reject people. Now companies want some technical project phone screen AND an algorithms on site AND a "design" review AND some sort of weird personality thing where they grill you on working with past managers and whether you mentored people. Find 99 reasons to ding you. By the way, the design review is usually run by someone 2 years out of school who works on their Jenkins configs and thinks the most important thing is that you magically read their mind and know the right "questions" to ask them.
It's just barely tangentially related to actually working in the industry, which has the result it's actually biased against senior engineers, because ironically the standard for being hired as a senior engineer is actually being better at these interview games that juniors have more recently spent time preparing for.
A lot of companies quite frankly look at what Google did, think "we're just as good as Google", and more or less copy what they do except add even more junk. These companies don't spend much of any time getting to know candidates, they will run some "events" that appeal to people with excessive free time, again mostly juniors. They haven't invested a hundredth of the massive PR push that Google has (Google literally got a box-office movie with Owen Wilson made to recruit), and they CERTAINLY don't want to offer Google-style RSU compensation packages.
After all this "we have the best people" crap, "we have this rube golderberg style interview to filter out all the riff-raff" crap, they want to offer market salaries and some weak ISO package you will have zero chance of valuing accurately and leave 18 windows open for VCs to screw you.
So, given all this, should you waste your time interviewing at companies like Stripe?
Engineering involves critical thinking. You should have a firm belief that what you wish to create can be created. However, that is simply a foundation upon which to throw as many "why will it fail?" permutations as you can generate. This isn't pessimism, it's the culling of error, like a sculpture from a block of marble.
With "how might it work" you're proposing solutions to the potential "why will it fail" problems rather than dumping more obstacles in the way.
"this will work if we do X because it will fail if Y"
vs
"this isn't going to work because Y"
I think the prior would be a more pleasant experience.
He states his main thesis as 'the question to ask when designing such systems is not: "if something will go wrong, but when will it?"' I do not think he asks this in a defeatist sense (look at what he built!), but in a realist sense. He claims that, for a sufficiently complicated system built on new ideas, that neither rigor in design nor thoroughness in testing is sufficient to account for all of the unintended consequences of the system's design. Without considering the negative consequences of new designs, one is apt to learn them by hard experience.
Certainly I heard the same from friends at FB and Google back in the day.
And the consistency between then and now is fairly impressive. Ambition and Optimism seem like codified values that have emerged over time. But the one thread that is consistent is their thoughtfulness on hiring.
It should be no surprise to anyone here though, given that their interviewing doesn't consist of the standard 4-5 leetcode questions, but rather much more thoughtful rounds like a bug squash, architecture, and lots of hands on coding - algorithm rounds exist, but kept to a minimum.
Not to say that this is good and should be the new standard - just that it is extremely thoughtful and was going against the grain. Wish more companies would think about their hiring practices from first principles and didn't just copy Google
Glassdoor is not perfect, but I think I get more insight into the reality on the ground looking through recent reviews than a blog post, and at least from what I can see recent reviews over the last few months are extremely mixed.
I'd appreciate any advice or reading material.
Versus sales, or some separate product management team running the show. That model seems to work well with what Stripe does. It probably doesn't work well in many other niches.
Patrick Lencioni has written a few good books on company culture. Some of them are in the "business novel" style of The Phoenix Project and Critical Chain, which has the benefit of working well in audiobook format. If you prefer more straightforward nonfiction, then read The Advantage.
Most problems in business are not problems if there is enough money to go around.
By figuring out how to make money, you solve most other problems along the way.
Lecture 11 - Hiring and Culture, Part 2 (Patrick and John Collison, Ben Silbermann) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Dl8rZ6qwE
and perhaps https://www.infoq.com/presentations/stripe-culture-2016/ though that's more corporate.
Overall very nice article though, I do believe moving fast in hiring is the most yield/effort you can do to hire great people. Best companies I worked for(above one included) moved extremely fast in hiring, worst take 2-3 weeks just to reply to an email let alone scheduling an onsite. Wish decision makers in recruiting knew this.
p.s. love the Stripe Docs and Technical blog posts, this one specifically was very informative: https://stripe.com/en-de/blog/api-versioning
Not to say that optimism is all bad, but it's not all good either, and in the U.S. corporate world I see a lot more problems from an excess of optimism than from the reverse.
"I led engineering teams at Stripe"
Do managers in software companies actually think they lead teams? I've seen or heard "led engineering" or variants so much from mid level management that I wonder if my perspective is skewed.
Seems crazy to me.
Managing is generally considered a role that involves HR/scheduling/career development type tasks, i.e. soft skills.
Leading, alternatively, is perceived as a harder technical role. Sometimes involving overall architecture and design depending on the role. More hard skills.
Someone has to have the vision and the strength to keep things outside of that vision out of the scope of work and know how to say `No`.
1. Just grammatically, managers need some verb to use. If he said “I managed Engineering,” it would be really difficult to argue that isn’t what an engineering manager does. But good managers lead, so they prefer the word lead over manage, even though the meaning in context is quite similar.
2. You seem to be implying that managers suck and don’t know anything about engineering, so how could they claim leadership?
Speaking from my career path, most eng managers come out of engineering and are pretty technical. At Atlassian (where I’m a front-line Engineering Manager), you have to earn your way to Senior Engineer before you can join the management track, and the managers for several steps up the ladder are accountable for technical outcomes.
It’s very common in our office for the front line managers (aka Team Leads) to lead whiteboarding and pair a lot during the early phases of a project to make sure it’s built on a sound design, and to be similarly involved throughout projects to ensure they’re tracking to completion on schedule and hitting our quality bar.
My understanding is Stripe works very similarly. So, yeah, I buy that he “led” engineering teams there.
I would actually argue that good managers _support_ their teams, they don't lead them.
A tech lead or architect should be leading the engineering team, and the manager should be supporting the team's efforts and clearing the path for them.