What Working At Stripe Has Been Like | Hacker News Reader

What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

kalzumeus.com

439 pointsyarapavan262 comments

I mean this in the most constructive way possible.

As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period.

Stripe's core business is being a part of a "credit card sales tax" that is substantial. Much of this is the fault of Visa/Mastercard/Amex, but that is the problem-space they exist in. Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. If they want to "make the world better", that is basically the only problem that matters in their space, and I never see any recognition of this fact in anything Stripe puts out.

They do a LOT of work to try and make me feel better about the tax (e.g. your money goes towards book publishing!). None of it works, it just seems like the "your tax dollars at work" road signs.

Now maybe people at Stripe are working on ways to reduce the tax on businesses/consumers. It is not a technical problem, its societal. I hope they are, and they will announce something amazing and I can worship at their feet.

Please Stripe, work on reducing the costs to transact online by 1-2 orders of magnitude, where it should be.

Turns out private taxes aren't good!

Transferring those bits with just the right logic for each transaction scenario is what still costs something. I'm sure the margin is massively excessive today. But I don't think it can be quite 'effectively free'.

Debit e-transfers in Canada are free (and have been around a long time). It makes the Venmo thing a real head scratcher.

They're only free in certain circumstances: personal transfers, and only for some bank accounts. It wasn't that long ago that all e-transfers cost $1, which makes them pretty impractical for giving a few bucks to a friend to split a pizza or whatever. Venmo's been around longer than free e-transfers.

I pay for each etransfer what bank are you with?

Really? I thought it was universally free.

Simplii, TD, Scotiabank.

> Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free

Payments are also about establishing trust, which goes wrong a lot. You can in practice make payments very cheap with some cryptocurrency schemes, but don't get fraud protection, chargebacks, and customer service that credit cards provide (unless you introduce another party in the middle taking a cut).

It seems to me the innovation required to actually reduce costs would replace the credit card system, not build on top of it.

This is another phrasing of what jackdeansmith says, but this is not right:

> Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free.

Payments is taking on a short term risk that the (slow) transaction between a customer's bank and a vendor's bank will not settle, because of (a) fraud, (b) chargeback-like issues, (c) insolvency. This isn't exactly right, but overally its not quite 0 risk without crypto, which people don't trust (from a UX perspective).

And all kinds of risk-taking charges for it: loans, mortgages, etc. If you want to shoulder the risk yourself and save the fees, pay with a debit card.

Agree. I think that’s a very glaring omission in the original argument and one can interpret that as a simple misunderstanding or purposeful omission to misrepresent the totality of what comprises the cost to present a biased argument for more favorable terms.

It's basic human nature.

Out of sight, out of mind- and I could build it in a weekend.

But aside from that, the risk of payments is not intuitive. We regularly see threads on Hacker News where people pile on PayPal for 'seizing' the money of an entrepreneur with a business model that involves collecting payments up front and then delivering their good or service at a later date.

Unless you've worked in the space, or read the fine print of the agreements, it's easy to get upset about that.

One thing that often gets overlooked with respect to payments is consumer preference (and this is actually the primary driver of cost).

Why do credit cards cost 2-3% to process? Because of expensive rewards programs given to the consumers who use the card. Why are there expensive rewards programs? Because consumers like them! And they insist on paying with a credit card because of them. Except in edge cases, merchants have no choice but to accept credit cards despite the cost.

While Visa, Mastercard & Amex frequently get the blame, the lions share of the processing fee flows to the issuing bank of the card, and the lions share of that fee goes to fund rewards programs. (There are other perks to credit cards that encourage consumer usage, including chargeback protections, free 30 days of float, near universal acceptance, etc)

Payment costs won't materially decrease unless someone invents a form of payment that consumers prefer which doesn't have these cost burdens. Or if you, as the merchant, have such market power that you can mandate a less preferred but cheaper form of payment (like cash or debit card or ACH - this is why you often can't use your credit card to pay a parking ticket or your taxes)

At many American gas stations, (I don't know how applicable this is in other countries) there is a lower "cash" price because the station doesn't have to pay credit card fees on the transaction. It's less convenient, because you have to park, go to the cashier, give them cash, go back to your car, fill up, go back to the cashier, get your change, and then go - versus put credit card in pump, fill up, go. It's ultimately a consumer choice and some choose each option.

I'd love to have something similar for online payments. Give me a price, then charge transaction fees for credit and lower fees for debit or ACH, etc.

Companies like GoCardless exist for this reason. Problem is that fraud is still a thing and cash payments over the internet aren’t possible.

Interac Online in Canada offers this, for Canadian merchants with Canadian customers. It’s basically cash over the internet. Makes sense you wouldn't have tried this if you weren’t :) [1]

[1] https://www.interac.ca/en/consumers/products/interac-debit/e...

Interac Online appears to have been deprecated by most major Canadian banks in favour of Visa Debit. My understanding is the Visa Debit cards issued by banks like TD and Scotia are dual-mode: transactions will be processed through the Interac network when possible, with the lower Interac fees applying, and through the Visa network otherwise.

I don't know if the merchant fees for Visa Debit are any different to using a Visa credit card.

Looks like its 50/50. Banque Nationale and BMO only issue vanilla Interac cards, and in RBCs case, you get two debit cards: an Interac and a virtual Visa Debit. To your point dual mode Interac/Visa Debit are not eligible for Interac Online.

When at a physical point of sale, a Visa Debit card is processed over Interac rails, and I believe Interac interchange prevails. At one point back in 2009 Visa was going to set up their own debit network in Canada, but as of 2010, my understanding is they gave up on the plan. The value add from the Visa Debit rails is for international online purchases, for phone purchases and for international point of sale purchases, neither of which are well supported by Interac-only cards.

I'm American and I've never seen this and I've been in a good amount of the country. What region is this in?

Works everywhere I’ve seen. Give it a try next time you fill up!

I guess I really haven't been paying attention!

That doesn't have to be how those transactions work. In the UK that goes: park, fill, go to cashier, pay. It's still a little bit more inconvenient.

You pay the same price though. Some stations will also insist on prepayment at certain times of the day.

> Some stations will also insist on prepayment at certain times of the day.

I'm not saying that this doesn't happen but in nearly 20 years of driving around the UK I've yet to encounter it.

I’ve only driven in maybe a dozen countries, but so far the US is the only one where the pre-payment thing existed. I was glad to have read about it in trip prep, or I would have stood there staring at a non-functioning gas pump for far too long!

Obviously it used to be like that everywhere (except where you can't pump your own gas by law) but I'd rather pay a little bit more to not have to wait in line behind all the people buying cigarettes, chewing tobacco and lotto tickets.

I personally never understood the America style of paying for petrol first, and then presumably getting a refund at the end? As an Australian, I remember filling up in the US and the whole system baffled me (especially because the US bowsers did not accept my Australian Mastercard). Here, we just pull up, fill up, pay, and then leave.

This is common in Europe too. I guess the point from the retailers point of view is that they eliminate the risk of you driving off without paying.

It's extra annoying on a motorbike where you only have a rough idea of what your fuel level is and you absolutely need to fill it to the brim (typically you only get 150-200 miles out of a tank). At least in a car you can wait until you have a quarter of a tank and the put 40€ and know it's going to be some where around 3/4 full.

But why not have security cameras that record your face/license plate? People steal fuel here every so often, and you can be damned sure that the police will knock on your door asking about it within 24 hours.

They have those too.

Yeah, they have cameras and even ANPR in the UK. It's probably a easy one for police to deal with in most cases, often where someone has driven off accidentally, but anyone really trying to steal from them would presumably have the sense to use fake number plates.

Every gas station in France does that. If you leave the station without paying, the station may report (sometimes in real time) your car to the police (which is sometimes very close on certain highways) and the manager can even submit a complaint against you.

There was an explosion of people driving off without paying like ten years or so ago, when prices were very high, and they changed to the pay-first system. It used to work the way you described.

Similar in BC, Canada. A gas station attendant was killed trying to stop someone from gas-and-dashing. Grant's law[0] was made in his memory.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-to-imple...

Do all American gas stations make you fill up your own gas?

IIRC, Everywhere except Oregon and New Jersey, where it's illegal to fill your own gas tank and petrol stations still have an attendant.

Not quite. Some gas stations choose to have full service even when not legally required, and some municipalities require an attendant when the state they're in does not.

That’s because the price is not allowed to be cheaper even if you post with “cash” like debit cards on the internet so of course consumers will use 5% credit cards when the price is the same.

In Europe there is quite often a fee for credit cards, cheap airlines come to mind. Why would a save consumer not decrease risk and get something back for the same price?

Its 2% in europe too where theres no real reward programs.

The difference is actually wider, for example:

* Singapore 3.4% (https://stripe.com/en-sg/pricing)

* US 2.9% (https://stripe.com/pricing)

* Poland 1.4% (https://stripe.com/en-pl/pricing)

(+ some fixed amount in every country)

In some cases it can be even more expensive (see Adyen pricing for Amex or Diners cards: https://www.adyen.com/pricing)

This is a large difference and partially explains why the loyalty programs in Europe are not that attractive

I also kinda feel europeans would find reward programs stupid and call bullshit.

In the sense that someone would readily build a "no reward" chain and get adoption real quick.

I mean there IS reward programs somehow, but it's not like they give you 30% off sometimes like in the US. I always found them outrageous in a way when I was in the US.

> Why are there expensive rewards programs? Because consumers like them! And they insist on paying with a credit card because of them.

That is very US-centric - for example, this all does not hold in Germany (many people are actually still cautious of credit cards there).

> Payment costs won't materially decrease unless someone invents a form of payment that consumers prefer which doesn't have these cost burdens.

In the EU, there is: SEPA direct debit.

The rewards points are nice but the primary reason I use a credit card is that it's a convenient way to pay and if someone is somehow able to fraudulently use the card they're not directly debiting my bank account.

> Why are there expensive rewards programs? Because consumers like them!

I'm not convinced of this. The credit card costs are already baked into prices and so as a consumer I can either play the cc rewards game and get back a decent chunk of those fees or I can use cash and a few % of each purchase I make goes towards subsidizing the folks who do play the rewards game.

This is not a situation that can be resolved by consumer choice, because you'll never get millions of people to all voluntarily agree to give up hundreds of dollars a year in the vague hope of some change down the line.

Or unless there's regulation, as happened in the EU. Rewards programs got largely killed in the EU by the interchange fee limits in the last few years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#European_Union Card fees can be below 1%

Couldn't much of this be scaled back if we removed some of the layers and intermediaries?

If we had a single state-run bank (even if it were just as the fulfillment "back end" behind different consumer-facing servicing organizations), then a transfer would occur on a single ledger in a matter of milliseconds, rather than waiting for the East Podunk Bank, Trust, and Pork Cannery to pull a batched update file over a T-1 they put in in the first Bush administration.

Fraud could be handled better than it is now. We have terrible security/convenience compromises (Chip + Signature, anyone?) and when we try to improve matters (3-D Secure) it is presented so badly and clumsily that it basically dies on arrival (it's coming back, but mostly because the EU is cramming it down people's throats)

Chargebacks are a weird case. It feels like they come from two places-- either as the first response to a fraudulent transaction, or as an escalation for when there's no other way to get satisfaction. If you're fair with your refund policy, your chargeback rate should be close to nil.

Your basic assumption is that you only have one government involved - and that's ignoring all the technical issues.

_credit card_ payments are like that, but there is no technical reason for payments to work like that anymore.

This is just credit card stockholm syndrome. Nearly all the risk you mention is because of the insane and greedy design of credit cards.

In most of Europe, people pay with debit cards and the money goes straight off their bank accounts. If there's insufficient funds, there's no purchase. If the network fails, there's no purchase. If your bank goes bust 5ms before your purchase would clear, there's no purchase. I'm no banker and I'm sure there's some risk somewhere, but it's really not very much.

Fraud is still possible with debit cards.

Chargebacks are also still possible. Disputing them is expensive.

Fraud is substantially harder because you always need to authenticate payments (above a tiny amount) with a PIN, even when buying online. It's been 2-factor authenticated for 2 decades now.

That you only have to pay after 30 days, chargebacks, etc.. they are all in your favor.

How do you buy online then? Prepayment? Good luck with that :-)

? Debit cards also work online. They're part of the same payment networks. "Visa Debit" etc.

You can do that here but in the not-very-rare event of fraudulent use you have less protection and there's zero benefit beyond compensating for not being able to control your own spending. So I can't really see any reason why I'd use it.

This is true.

But what the comment is advocating for is systemic change/disruption. In that context, the whole complex (bank settlement, chargebacks, insolvency) are a single thing. There are always reasons for things being the way they are, but that doesn't mean that things can't change.

As the OP says, payments move bits around. There is no fundamental reason why this should represent such a big slice.

Besides technical challenges, and whether or not these can be overcome... I think the greater hurdle is entrenched structure and entrenched interests. Stripe is, at this point, a part of that. They have an overwhelming microeconomic interest in payments remaining a large "tax."

Imagine an imports "agent." Her job is to get your goods into country X and navigate the labyrinth of rules, chaos, fees and taxes on your behalf. The whole game costs Y. She earns a % of Y. She may have more, and more nuanced complaints about the labyrinth than anyone but... If Y becomes less, she will earn less.

It seems like a lot of people are defending credit card pricing, but the idea that they’ve been charging the same % since before the internet and are still absorbing the same “cost” of fraud protection is absurd.

I would love Stripe to start advocating for lowering credit card fees, either through regulation or providing more avenues for competition.

There are many costs that remain stubbornly fixed as a portion of GDP (Ads has been 2% of GDP for > 100 years). Fraud as an industry, and corresponding fraud protection services likely fall under this umbrella barring substantial technological innovation.

It’s too late. Much of that extra savings on fraud protection has already been funneled back to the card owner in the form of cash back or reward points. Not a whole lot can be done to break that unless the government comes in and legislates something as they do in Europe.

The benefit went entirely to the merchant the consumer lost out in the EU

If your merchants are charging monopoly prices then you need antitrust enforcement.

Has the internet decreased or increased fraud.

Be careful what you wish for the EU mandated reduced fees - the backs just stopped doing cashback cost me almost £20 a month.

Of course the reduced savings where not passed on to the end consumer

That working as intended. Now vendors can lower prices for all users instead of being held hostage by credit card banks/processors/users taking money from cash/debit users to divide among themselves.

No they took it for themselves

As a user of stripe I agree

However the biggest slice of the pie is Visa and MasterCard.

Stripe could release no new features in a year, if they could lower my rate by .1% I would be far happier.

I worked on a project where the client wanted to switch to Authorize.net from Stripe midway through because of Stripe’s cost. From a developer perspective, it was a lot more miserable to work with than Stripe. Other projects I’ve worked on have had a similar motivation for not using Stripe.

Annoyingly, the cost of implementing the replacement and getting it working with React Native (which involved creating native modules for iOS and Android) ended up costing them as much as several years of fees. Also the client was a startup that went bust, so they never really got the value out of it that they hoped.

Yea, when companies really want to lower the cost, they implement directly with the bank, like say JP Morgan. That makes authorize.net even seem good. Stripe is really a pleasure to work with as a developer.

Interestingly, I tended to prefer Authorize.net to other alternatives. But a lot of that is likely a 'moment in time" thing when I got into development.

There were a few years where Authnet was the "default" gateway. Other gateways offered compatibility modes for their SIM and AIM APIs, and if you had some random off-the-shelf cart, it probably spoke AIM out of the box.

Part of the difference in experience is also likely due to their model. The Authnet model was very much "take direct card data and relay it to your server and then to us", and the Stripe model is very much "JavaScript up your checkout process to do tokenization, so you never see the card number." If you're at a point in time when JavaScript is a bit sketchy (the IE6-is-the-dominant-browser era), you might be more willing to go for a worse PCI compliance scope in exchange for the comparative bulletproofness of doing things server-side.

Now I work for a firm competing with both of them, so I can hardly express a preference today. :)

As a customer of Stripe too, I almost[1] couldn't disagree more.

Running a global online/SaaS business is hard. So much complexity everywhere. I wish Stripe would handle MORE problems & complexity and would happily pay for it.

Just a few examples Stripe could handle:

- Checkout + Portal is a great start, but it still takes too much (expensive) design+dev brainpower to create the entire experience of a high quality trial-to-paid and existing-customer billing management in a SaaS app.

- Running a SaaS company at any scale is full of Support headaches that Stripe Dashboard simply does not handle well - stuff like tweaking a billing date, and doing combination (e.g. wire transfer + credit card) payments, "can you re-send my invoice but with my VAT ID on it this time?" and many more. At any scale, lots of effort is spend on custom billing support tickets and building internal tooling even if you use all of Stripe's features.

- Are you a SaaS company selling all over the US? Good luck being complaint with all 50 states in terms of sales tax reporting without expensive legal/accounting help. Did you hire any remote out-of-state employees? Good luck -- now your financial compliance got even more complicated.

Stripe doesn't do any of these things well today. And if they did, it would likely be much cheaper than the in-house solutions everyone is coming up with instead. I think Stripe should handle 10x as much complexity for a SaaS company than it does today, and of course they should get paid for doing so.

[1] I agree it would be amazing to see Stripe come up with smoother flows for supporting payments that bypassing the expensive card network's fees.

Do you know of anyone who does a god job for SaaS companies?

Paddle, they take on literally all of your tax and VAT compliance globally.

Where is this handled now? We do this ourselves, but then I hit the google, and got this page:

https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax-integration

but the header says the service is now deprecated. Is there a new one?

I don't know, I use Paddle, not Stripe.

Fully agree, I don't have a problem paying Stripe if it means they are properly incentivized to help me run my business.

I'd be happy to throw them a few more percent if they could handle more of the complexity you've mentioned above. Right now, Stripe is both too complex to set up and too simple from a feature perspective.

I'm optimistic though since it seems companies like Paddle, Chargebee and others are blazing that path. As much as I love Stripe and what they originally did for online commerce, they're already starting to look like the lazy incumbent compared to the challengers right now. Market dominance is not a great incentive to create better products.

The best thing I read was Australian regulator capped cc interchange fees at 0.5% and allowed merchants to charge as an extra fee over the price. I guess it'll never happen in the US but maybe Europe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#Australia_and_...

Could it also be you only care about transaction cost because everything else works so well? The time I spent on customer support with paypal/visa/plaid, ridiculous documentation from other payment processors and payouts snags make me appreciate Stripe even more.

EDIT: As in I haven't touch my stripe code for 2 years. They still work.

I understand the sentiment but I don't think you understand what exactly Stripe does that actually makes it cheaper than alternatives.

They are an ISO, payment processor, merchant bank, payfac and gateway all rolled into one.

Add all of those up and you can see why its actually, generally speaking, cheaper.

Decent fraud protection alone is worth so much. I honestly think you are a bit spoiled by modern payment processors. Their tax is hard earned.

Exactly. Fraud doesn’t exist. So why should I have to pay for it.

You barking wrong tree here, what USA needs is new competitors to credit card giants if you go about anywhere world there is already pretty good competitors with superior user experience to credit cards eg Mobilepay(Denmark and Finland),Swish(Sweden) and of course Alipay(chnina) etc.

Adyen is probably cheaper, but maybe not enough to matter: https://www.adyen.com/pricing

Adyen has also high requirements for companies in terms of volumes, so it's an alternative but available only to a subset of companies

To that end at least allow payouts in USD to the non-US banks.

We charge in USD and we pay for our infrastructure in USD, so the hit we get on the double currency conversion is really unpleasant... as it is completely avoidable.

This has been asked of Stripe for AGES and they did nothing. The only explanation is that this is by design, which means that they have no problem bleeding merchants with unnecessary fees just like all other payment companies. It's just that these fees are disguised differently.

Here in The Netherlands, we have a platform called iDeal. All dutch banks are connected and all webshops accept it (it's hard to find a place to use your creditcard here). Transactions are instant and non-refundable. Costs are around 0.35 per transaction and NO % fees. Just a fixed amount per transaction. For big volumes, that per-transaction amount can be lower. It's amazing and I wished they'd just roll that out worldwide. No risk for merchants at all.

do they handle sales taxes? for in country vs out of country sales?

Here in The Netherlands, everyone is charged sales tax (it's always included in all prices that's communicated to consumers, required by law).

Companies pay sales tax to the state and can deduct sales tax they paid to other companies.

There are rules for applying sales taxes to other EU countries and it get's complicated fast; once you do more than X amount in another EU country, you're supposed to register in that country and file taxes in that country. Thresholds here: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/r...

This doesn't really solve the problem, it just shifts all risk onto the buyer. Under this system, if you take my money and run, I have no possible recourse

It's something that works very well here in The Netherlands. Also, because it's directly linked to bank accounts and you have to identify yourself, etc. to set it all up, it really isn't a problem here. If people see they can pay with iDeal, people will trust it and it really has not been an issue that I know of.

It's also much less reliable than the credit card networks. Fundamentally it's not ready to be a large instant payment provider, as it's still based on the same slow batch processes that run your normal bank transfers.

>>Please Stripe, work on reducing the costs to transact online by 1-2 orders of magnitude, where it should be.

I agree with the could and should. Payment costs could be a tiny fraction of current. It is a tax. I'm dubious of the who. Stripe is now a big player. They're have no interest in turning their $X00bn sector into a $Xbn sector.

Incidentally, I think the current economy harbours a lot of sectors that could be orders of magnitude smaller. This has always been a debate in the financial sectors. Today though, there are some (IMO) less ambiguous sectors/companies.

Does facebook actually need $70bn in revenue to operate facebook. Could it be done on $7bn? To me, it seems like an obvious yes. Quite a glaring inefficiency, IMO.

What a wonderful advertisement for working at Stripe. The impact of long-form well-written essays like this is huge, and fits perfectly with the theme of the essay itself about helping others succeed at scale.

I like the personal notes included a ton, e.g. mentioning that he has struggled with depression personally, which I wouldn't have guessed, even if naively so. Being open and helpful with those topics helps a lot of people out in a serious way. Also love quotes like "I cannot say this enough: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview".

Just reading this post makes it tempting for me to apply at Stripe (They apparently have 530 roles open, wow! https://stripe.com/jobs/search), especially given all the other positive comments I've seen about the company.

i gotta say, it was such a strong article that i thought about applying (specially after i saw that they have openings in LATAM).

Drop me an email if you'd like to know more about Stripe @ LATAM! jlh at stripe dot com . Spanish / Portuguese friendly, too.

> What a wonderful advertisement for working at Stripe.

Exactly, which is why some of this should be taken with a grain of salt.

By all accounts, Stripe really is a good place to work and their success speaks for itself. Yet, it's important to remember that this article is at least one part advertisement. I'm not suggesting anyone dismiss the contents, but keep the context in mind. The article goes to great lengths to speak about the positives of working at Stripe, but the section about terrible work/life balance is written vaguely enough for the reader to dismiss it as a personal quirk, for example.

The author, Patio11, is such a trusted and long term member of the HN community that it counts for a lot more than usual for an advert.

it just reinforces even more the fact that it is somewhat an ad ...

I think most of us here are well aware of that.

However, it's important to keep in mind that patio11's popularity among developer communities is one of the reasons they hired him in the first place. He's paid to be a spokesperson for the company, among other things. He doesn't even try to hide that fact in the article:

> When I was hired, there was a fiction for my business cards but the job rounded to “Do anything required to make Stripe Atlas successful.” ... For about a year I was formally in the Marketing department

Indeed, the part about choosing peers to form one’s worldview really struck home for me. Probably also applies to who you follow on Twitter or which sites you read (like this one).

6,000 words is a bit long though. I wonder how many people read it through.

This is one of the few blogs where I'll always read the entire article, consistently great writing and thought-provoking ideas.

I agree with the other commenter regarding the Stripe application process. I've applied 2-3 times starting in 2015 and as recently as early 2020 and have never heard back, it's been the only company that never gets back to me!

Everything worked out, since I've landed some great positions at promising startups in the meantime, but I would have loved to experience the growth from ~500 to ~3000 employees like Patrick has.

Small improvement in this paragraph:

> “If you sell to doctors you prefer futures in which more money goes to doctors. Those are much better futures for you than futures with less money going to...

Since the article was just talking about call options, my first thought went to futures contracts instead of possible timelines. I think using "timelines" instead of futures would make this a bit more readable.

It is likely they don't really have many open positions no matter how good the applicants are. Seems they have some outside of the USA specific positions open.

It's such a basic thing too for a recruiting process. As soon as you get a no, send an automated email at least!

The theory is that it's better not to respond at that point, because if they change their mind in 3 months, they'd rather not have rejected you so they can say "sorry we were slow".

I don't think I've ever heard of someone changing their mind 3 months down the line. Maybe it happens.

I know I'm less likely to interview somewhere if my friends tell me they got ghosted.

Kind of crazy how all these articles come out about what it's like working at Stripe and how to apply. Everyone I've talked to who has applied has not received a response from their application.

Even in my most recent experience I wrote a cover letter, reached out to multiple Stripe recruiters. Most of them either ignored me, or said that they were not working on that role and said my status is still "pending".

I imagine that Stripe's recruiting team is overwhelmed but it was unfortunate that they weren't able to get back to me. I ended up accepting an engineering manager position over payments at another company.

At almost every large, successful company there is a huge disconnect between what hiring is screening for and what corporate blog posts might suggest, to the point of engineers themselves being unaware of how the experience is for most applicants (after all, they are self-selected…) Usually this boils down to "you don't seem to have enough experience" or "you don't know anyone on the team who can vouch for you to get through the initial resume screen". A real shame, since it leaves a number of qualified applicants in a poor position, but presumably Stripe has enough people applying that they can afford passing up people.

I'm sorry to hear this and apologize. We're definitely still a comparatively small team wishing we had more efficient ways to handle our inbound funnel. (We do have some ideas here.) But this is good feedback and we should absolutely have provided a better experience.

Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad candidate experience is a lack of resources.

Exactly, it's clearly not a lack of resources, but explicitly not prioritizating candidate experience for candidates you're not actively pursuing. Which, by the way I think is a totally valid decision to make, but let's not kid around and make it sound like your hands were tied.

There are two somewhat separate issues, I think.

(1) The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people. We'll do the best we can to identify promising people but a lot of people will get something somewhat functionally equivalent to a form rejection. You could argue that this is merely a prioritization decision -- we could keep hiring recruiters until everyone could be individually assessed -- but doing so would require a recruiting team of comparable magnitude to the rest of the Stripe organization and so the current state is an unfortunate compromise given the current constraints and given the decision to have an open application form (which is, I think, on net better for everyone).

(2) Cases where people at Stripe mishandled the process. I know for a fact that some of the anecdotes shared in the thread are from many years ago, and I know that our process has improved since then (we have empirical data to this effect), but we're also acutely aware that we continue to make mistakes -- recruiting is a high-stakes and complex process with a lot of fallible moving parts. For whatever it's worth, we issue CSAT surveys to every candidate who interviews (about 6,000 onsite interviews in 2019), and track the results both at the aggregate Stripe level and at the individual recruiter level. And I get why some people here sound so annoyed -- what might be "another entry in a database" to a recruiter or hiring manager is "the future of my career" to someone on the other side. While it's always hard to know what to make of a set of anecdotes, and while our referral rate among Stripe employees is very high today, I'm nonetheless bothered by the number of cases shared here, and we're going to be digging in. (Specific anecdotes with more concrete dates or data are welcome at patrick@stripe.com.)

Couldn't you "pen test" your own hiring process? Have some folks stage applications and see the process failures first hand. You might get better data from running these experiments yourself rather than through a survey.

You’re talking about a “secret shopper” test. They deliver very actionable findings, if there’s a will to improve.

"The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people."

It is not inevitable and there are company that do recruiting better and other worse. For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear. That is a not a sub-optimal interview experience, like being in a coma is not a sub-optimal life experience.

I understand that working with recruiters is hard (who ever said: I know a recruiter who is a genius? Or even the lesser: I know that recruiter, they are brilliant), but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.

> For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear.

Absolutely. That is category 2!

> but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.

Sorry, but it's not. I'm not giving Stripe a pass here per se, but the priority of an org is to make money so that they can offer positions.

Scaling recruiting is hard. Just like you might want an org who see thousands and thousands of applications every day to act more benevolently, the opposite also holds true.

Yes, it is not, but it should be. And not "the priority" of the organization, which is, as you said, making money, but one of the priorities. In fact, using the double KPI method, "finding great candidates and treating all with basic respect" should be the guiding light/mantra/KPI of any recruiting team.

"Scaling recruiting is hard". Sure, plenty of things are hard when scaling, but calling back candidates after multiple rounds of interviews (just to highlight one common complaint) is not. That is a cultural problem.

> I understand that working with recruiters is hard (who ever said: I know a recruiter who is a genius? Or even the lesser: I know that recruiter, they are brilliant), but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.

Generally speaking, the same sort of superlatives used for high IQ aren't used to describe high EQ, but we probably should.

I have interacted with a few recruiters (not at Stripe, I've never applied there) who were off-the-charts in their ability to make people feel comfortable and at ease, occasionally even in the face of truly horrendous processes and systems failures.

Also, it's an interesting signal when you get ghosted by the hiring manager (bosses boss of the team lead I would have been reporting to) and the recruiter re-initiates communication to apologize and get things back on track.

I still never got that job, but that was basically because "Remote OK" really meant "Remote OK in theory because we like the idea of paying a lower salary, but in practice it's only 'OK' for overqualified candidates that we can't convince to relocate, or maybe a relative of ours", and definitely not the recruiter's fault (it turns out that the hiring manager wasn't a good fit for the organization. Go figure.).

I did get some really good chocolate chip cookies as a consolation prize, though.

My "genius" comment above was a bit salty and over the top. But, I had so many bad experiences with recruiters (of a company, independent) that is quite difficult at this point for me to take them seriously or offer any (professional, I am not talking about human of course) respect beyond what I grant to anyone, from poor to rich companies, from guilty to innocent managers, from stripes to stars. I understand it is the nature of the job, but also that the nature of jobs tends to attract certain people.

For example, the most common behavior with these recruiting companies (and I am fully employed and paid very well) is that they take 30 minutes of my time with the usual general questions, then they make me chat with some sort of hiring manager of the target company, then they send an email "I will let you know in a few days", and they never write back. I send an email saying "so?" and I never get an answer. Then, I find out they moved into real estate. Ten, 15 times over a few years (why I continued answering? The hiring companies were quite interesting, one in Vegas, some in the East Coast where I don't have much of a network, they could, with emphasis on the conditional tense, be useful).

We can say that they are just a little piece of a bad process, or that it is the hiring manager/company fault, or "yes, but you did not have to deal with certain rude candidates" (and I have seen plenty of those rude candidates, there I certainly offer my solidarity). And if we go on with the circumnavigation of people, we find a justification for any sort of less-than-good behavior. If telling lies is part and parcel of one's job, they (recruiters/hiring managers/C-level) are still liars, they don't get a pass in my book.

It sounds like you found a decent recruiter and it is quite telling that a recruiter re-initiating a conversation and apologizing, things I happen to do also in my job, is now an "off-the-charts" EQ genius. That's the 101 for anyone with a modicum of professionalism. I am sure there are great recruiters around like there are plenty of needles in haystacks.

> It sounds like you found a decent recruiter and it is quite telling that a recruiter re-initiating a conversation and apologizing, things I happen to do also in my job, is now an "off-the-charts" EQ genius. That's the 101 for anyone with a modicum of professionalism. I am sure there are great recruiters around like there are plenty of needles in haystacks.

Ah, sorry about that, I didn't mean to conflate the two quite so directly. I also didn't make it clear that I was ghosted by the hiring manager after the recruiter handed me off to them. The recruiter wasn't supposed to even be involved from that point forward, but they followed up anyway. However, you can ignore the anecdote as an unnecessary distraction if you like.

Anyway, sure, recruiters get a bad rap, in the same way as used-car salespeople do. I wasn't really arguing that the reputation the profession has is entirely undeserved. I was just saying that good and even great recruiters do actually exist. For many of the working-environment reasons you've mentioned, they often don't stay in the role of recruiting ICs, or even for relatively senior roles. They have better opportunities in recruiting-adjacent fields like executive search services, life-coaching, and so on.

It's not hard to have an automated system that tracks if a candidate that's been interacted with has been ghosted. If the candidate has been previously contacted then require communication with the candidate for any archiving or other rejection. Hell, require communication even if you reject them without ever talking to them. Sending an automated email tied to the HR system candidate status isn't expensive or hard. You can then reprimand the recruiter or their manager as appropriate if they don't do this or try to get around it

>For whatever it's worth, we issue CSAT surveys to every candidate who interviews (about 6,000 onsite interviews in 2019)

I interviewed in 2019 and never got a CSAT. The recruiter (and rest of the team) completely ghosted me after telling me an offer was coming. No further communication, and certainly no CSAT.

It seems that could be a huge hole and your entire CSAT program is subject to confirmation bias if you are not even sending them to the people who are most likely to respond with a negative experience. I'm not sure I would trust this "empirical data" you have.

I had an on-site interview in your San Francisco office in 2019 and did not receive a CSAT survey

What do you want him to say publicly ? Do you want him to say that he doesn't care about developers he doesn't hire ? Even if that's what every business owner thinks, you can't tell it because you will sounds like an arrogant person.

They don't have (and you should not expect them) to give a feedback to anyone who apply (as it is the case of the parent comment)

> Even if that's what every business owner thinks, you can't tell it because you will sounds like an arrogant person.

It's not, in fact, what every business owner thinks.

I don't have a horse in this race, but I always get surprised when people critique responses from high-profile members of organizations.

Have you ever seen a businessperson make a public statement on behalf of a company that espoused or accepted negative/neutral sentiment?

I dunno why people even bother responding or reacting internally to these statements. There's not a human being behind them -- there's a corporate entity who has to answer to stakeholders with a spotlight being shined on them.

It's purely politics and statesmanship, the human being is long gone, or only shows up in private settings after everyone's had several drinks.

Except Elon Musk. That's a man you can, probably, take at his word.

Can we get a citation on that last one?

Well the answer is that they get lots of applications from really good developers who also have top colleges on their resumes and top companies they've worked at. So they interview them first and can't get to the rest. This is obvious but can't be said publicly.

This is also why people fight so hard to get prestigious companies and universities on their resume.

what sort of ideas are required besides sending an email to your IT folks and telling them to set up a JIRA project for tracking job applications? you could, in an afternoon, ensure that no applications are ever mysteriously forgotten about.

All that is already included in any ATS (applicant tracking system) on the market

Crazy suggestion: figure out a way to dogfood your hiring process. Have an engineer with a few years experience at Stripe try to get through the application process and see what kind of feedback they bring back. Kind of like secret shoppers but for hiring.

Don't forget to send often marginalized people through as well!

This is such an insulting excuse.

Ironically, this is almost the exact same attitude I got in my poor experience interviewing with Stripe. Interviewers were constantly late to our calls and mixed up who would be interviewing me more than once. Despite that, I still was told I was going to receive an offer... only to be ghosted for weeks. Once the recruiter finally reached back out, they said the position had been cancelled but they would find me another position. Spoiler: I never heard back from them, and they ignored all of my further communications.

Throughout all of this, I was apologized to several times (credit is due there, I guess) and each time the excuse was "ha ha sorry things are such a mess, that's just how things are when you work at a start up!" First of all, "haha we're a startup" is not a valid excuse for being late to meetings and ignoring communication.

Second: you're a company worth tens of billions of dollars, have thousands of employees in offices around the globe, and were founded a decade ago. You are not a startup. You are not a "small team". Stop using it as an excuse.

> each time the excuse was "ha ha sorry things are such a mess, that's just how things are when you work at a start up!" First of all, "haha we're a startup" is not a valid excuse for being late to meetings and ignoring communication.

Pretending to act like a startup has become a cover for being sloppy at big companies. People want to pick and choose what it means to work like a startup, and usually they choose the aspects that give them flimsy excuses for bad behavior.

In reality, my experience with actual small startups has been that people are better at arriving to meetings on time and following through with commitments because small teams mean everyone knows each other. If you don't show up to the meeting, we can see you across the small office and hold you accountable.

It's the big companies where accountability starts to disintegrate. People know they can get away with dropping balls all over the place as long as they get their OKRs finished for quarterly review. Things start to slip through the cracks because that person you're dealing with is just another e-mail address, not your close coworker who sits on the other side of the room.

My college classmate put in a referral for a specific role a couple of weeks ago, and no word. Not even an email acknowledgement that my job application is in the system.

Well I don't know for Stripe but subconsciously recruiters will always consider people who apply to be needy compared to people who are 'hunted' via Linkedin.

When you do that kind of blog posts, you try to improve the image of the company externally so that more people want to work there. It could help with more people applying but also increase the acceptance rate of the offers.

When you have a lot of people applying then you just cherry pick the best ones

I applied for a new grad position two months ago, did the coding challenge and passed all test cases with clean code and time to spare and haven't heard a peep from them since. It's a shame considering how I only hear good things about the company and the recruiting process but almost all the big companies I've applied to have at least had the decency to let me know they aren't moving forward

what an amazing industry we work in! denying top talent every day because people aren't motivated enough to check emails, make phone calls, click buttons to schedule things.

Stripe likely has pick of the cream for open positions. It has been public knowledge for a while that they're a rocket ship, and that attracts top talent by definition (in addition to sharks and wolves [0] I'd presume).

[0] https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-story-from-s...

Overwhelmed or not, ghosting after coding challenge/technical interview is unacceptable.

Correct. Never responding after an application? Par for the course. But asking someone to complete a coding challenge or even an interview and then ghosting is downright unprofessional and should be unacceptable.

Totally agree. From what we can see in this thread, when a recruiter / hiring manager / HR department makes it a regular practice to ghost interviewed candidates, it has a significant effect on the company's reputation - that they lack common decency and respect. It does not seem worth it for whatever time/effort they might have saved by such behavior. To put it another way, it seems it'd be worth spending time and effort to improve the process and experience, to improve such a reputation.

I think it's like most companies, really hard to get attention unless:

- You have a referral

- You went to MIT, Stanford, Caltech, CMU, Cal

- You're coming from FAANG or similar

The frontdoor is a waste of time.

Even with the above odds are against you, but at least you have someone to ask about progress/move things along for you.

I don't know about "most companies." Maybe most really big tech companies, places that are constantly getting crazy amounts of applications. And if you're living in a heavily populated city.

I live in a place with a fairly small population, and I got offers at 3/3 programming jobs I've applied for since my first in 2017.

Yeah - you're right.

I should have said 'most bay area software companies' and even that could probably be qualified by 'competitive' or 'famous'.

I applied for the new grad position too a couple months back, having a previous FAANG internship and starting (and selling) my own startup during college. Never heard back or even got the coding challenge. I’ve used Stripe in my own projects a few times and have also heard good things so I’m bummed too.

When I was an undergrad I applied to Stripe several times with a FANG on my resume as well without any responses.

Two reasons for that are:

1) I went to a state school (NC State)

2) The FANG in question was Amazon, which I don't think they "count". I have friends that applied when they decided to leave Amazon and they didn't get interviews either.

If your FAANG was Amazon I'm guessing you're in the same boat.

Haha, you guessed it. I wish I knew how much my school would matter when I applied to colleges, and that Amazon isn’t as well respected as I hoped. Unfortunately Microsoft gave me a LeetCode hard for my internship interview and google auto declined me so I didn’t have a chance at them. Not sure what was up with that either.

I knew how much school mattered I just couldn’t get into a better one save UNC. Shame, really.

Oh man. I have a juicy Stripe story from a friend, but I'd rather not share all of the details in case anyone from Stripe is here listening.

The gist is that I had a friend apply, go through a few interviews, and then just get completely ghosted. After several emails and attempts to reach out, the hiring manager replied to his email with a two word reply when my friend asked about his application status. That reply was "no thanks".

In my experience, stories like this are par for the course. While at Stripe, a few of my close friends and former co-workers were treated so poorly during the application process that I stopped referring anyone over a year before I left.

Yeah. I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of these blog posts are just astroturfing.

Well designed astroturfing, nonetheless.

Edit: Astroturfing is the wrong word, perhaps. What I mean to say is vocalized better in the replies. These all should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. A rock of salt?

I don't see how that would be possible. If you say you like working someplace, we know that you work there. You couldn't possibly be hiding who is paying you. I don't think that is a fair accusation.

I think it would be much better said that we should take with a grain of salt anyone's assessment of their current job.

Fair. Wrong word choice. The point just being that there could be a lot of company... encouragement... to be vocal about what you think of working at the org.

And of course, to the point you raise, we must always take that with a grain of salt. Nobody is going to come to the table with complete honesty about the problems at a company with their name right next to it.

Within reason, at least.

Astroturfing just means faking grass roots / community movement. Makes less sense here than in politics, but it would be possible if the marketing department was writing these blog posts on behalf of engineers.

These blog posts claim that they enjoy working at Stripe. The comments claim that the application/hiring process at Stripe is not great.

It's entirely possible both are true, since they're mostly unrelated, so I don't understand the accusation of astroturfing.

It's possible for both (a) people to enjoy working at a company and (b) for that company's recruitment process to be abysmally bad.

The people handling the recruiting functions are usually not the people you would be working with (unless you go into HR), and generally if HR starts ghosting you during the recruiting process it's because they're putting their efforts into the candidate they are trying to hire.

EDIT: Conversely, the opposite is also true. I used to work for a firm that was an absolute nightmare to work for, but the HR process was amazing.

patio11 quite famously on here had a recruiting startup before going to Stripe. Recruiting is likely the only reason they hired him.

He's more famous for generally being a developer blogger, he was well known here well before Starfighter. I think he always had the most karma before they got rid of 'top'. He was always very open about his bingo card creator software, and then his appointment reminder sass. His yearly round up of BCC was always a top voted post.

Afaik he originally became well known for his helpful posts and advice on Joel Spolsky's business of software forums before HN even existed. That's where I first came across him, useful info about SEO.

This is a long way of saying I thought he'd been hired as a developer advocate for their startup thing, Stripe Atlas, rather than a recruitment advisor.

Edit: It's on his blog that he was hired for Stripe Atlas https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-wo...

That's a different type of recruiting ;)

I'm well aware of who he is and what he's famous for though.

That's a tough choice. In the end a functioning hr/payroll department beats a good experience.

I've worked in both. When the company with a good environment closes we were all let go. They mishandled my last paycheck so I'm still waiting. No way to get references. Had to contact government to get seperation papers. The bad environment place that stressed you out and then let your department go for something out of your control. The firing process felt good. They provided career support offered a reasonable settlement package. Easy to use as a reference as they provided a contact #

At most companies of this size, HR/payroll is separate from the recruiting department.

I'm definitely in agreement that a functioning HR/payroll department is a prerequisite for a good experience though. I had an employer that kept paying me after I left company, and they only stopped because I told them that this was the case. Obviously, afterwards, they sent me a letter saying they had "discovered" an overpayment, and I should send them back the money to exact cent, with no allowance for the cheque/mailing costs...

It's like when you see a dozen Glassdoor reviews for an employer where the only recommendation to management is to "keep doing what you're doing" and that any complaints are "sour grapes" or from employees who can't handle "growing pains".

Any positive glassdoor post should be suspect. You generally visit glassdoor for three reasons.

1. You are researching a company.

2. You own or work in hr at a company or have been told to post a review by management.

3. You are angry/unhappy at your current role or that you were let go. You go on to warn others / get even.

Rare is the person who is working a company and is happy who decides to visit glassdoor and tell everyone how happy they are. Have you done this? Know anyone who would follow this chain of events?

Glassdoor asks to leave a review for your current company or share your pay before looking up in detail about other companies. I wrote a review about my current company just for this reason but it was a honest review and not overly positive etc.

Why provide any real information vs filling in random data?

Wouldn't it make sense to give referrals some kind of VIP treatment, just to keep a pipeline of referrals open from any employees who are happy with their jobs?

I can't understand why a company wouldn't do that, even if they were overwhelmed with the challenge of hiring in general. The win is potentially exponential, if you get good people who come to work with people they already know how to work with.

I went through the whole loop, "cleared" the interviews (as per the recruiter) and was told to stand by for the offer. A week later, instead of the offer, they just said they ran out of headcount. Never heard back from them again (even though they said they'll reach out when they get headcount back).

This was for a pretty senior position.

Stories like this make absolutely no sense to me, and yet I hear them all the time about Stripe.

Why not just tell the candidate that they aren't getting an offer? Why make up elaborate stories about headcount? Why say you're going to follow up? It's clearly not a bandwidth issue since they took the time to respond anyway.

Even something like "We've filled all positions. Your application was strong, but not strong enough. It's unlikely we'll reach back out."

That's 1000x better than getting ghosted after being told they WOULD reach back out. Complete bullshit on their part and a total lack of integrity. There's really no excuse for it.

Saying that they ran out of headcount is both telling that they won't offer and offering a reason, which is exactly as your example: they filled all the positions. It's a polite and somewhat sugar-coated reason instead of bluntly saying that they thought the person was not good enough, but it's standard to be polite when rejecting candidates.

Going back to nsenifty:

> A week later, instead of the offer, they just said they ran out of headcount. Never heard back from them again (even though they said they'll reach out when they get headcount back).

Saying you'll get back to a candidate, especially when that candidate has already been told to expect an offer, and then ghosting is not polite. Any framing of this as acceptable behavior, be it polite or impolite, is unacceptable. You can say "oh that's just the way it is" and there's some truth to that, but that doesn't mean it isn't pure fucking bullshit and deserving of condemnation.

It is unacceptable in theory, in practice it sounds like most of the ghosted in this thread would gladly work there, given the opportunity. Money and visibility (and beauty) make many sins forgiven.

I had terrible interview experiences (rudeness, ghosting, and making zero sense) with Lyft, Airbnb, Twitter, but if they make the right offer, I might say yes (although I have quite a strong memory).

Catch the next wave. The interesting problems may have moved on but the aura around those names continue.

They did not ghost him.

They came back to him to tell him his application was rejected. That was obviously the end of it.

I don't understand the anger here.

No - you are being far too generous towards Stripe here. If they say they cannot hire due to headcount, after saying they were going to make an offer, and they'll reach out again once they have headcount again - they are ghosting if they never follow up.

They lied, full stop, don't apologize for how "polite" it is (and it's not polite, it's disrespectful).

How is it polite to mislead candidates? Surely it can be uncomfortable to hear that you aren't up to par for a job or didn't interview well - but if that is the truth it is better to hear that truth than to hear some platitude about headcount. If I believed the "headcount" story I might invest time waiting to see if headcount opened up, or hold out hope that I'd potentially get an offer. On the other hand, if I heard that I had gaps X, Y, and Z I'd probably start working on X, Y, and Z - or at least think through how I could demonstrate my aptitude in those areas better or mitigate my weakness there and so on.

It's like if your doctor tried to be polite to you by not mentioning some serious disease because he was afraid it would make you feel bad. It might indeed make the candidate feel bad to hear about their (perceived) deficiencies - but if they do hear about it then they can do something about it!

If a recruiter or hiring manage wants to sugar coat a rejection then go for it. It's a coward move, but not a straight up lie.

Telling the candidate that you'll reach back out, and then not doing that, is complete bullshit.

Literally the exact same experience at the Seattle office. Horrible candidate experience.

Lol the worst job application turn down I ever received was from Spotify.

They said “ we don’t want you in our band “

It was oddly personal and upsetting. Lol

How tone deaf is hr sometimes

The level of unprofessionalism is just ridiculous - all these 'great companies' with 'billions' can't fing manage to tell someone what time it is. So much ghosting, don't know what's going on, left in the lurch etc.

Is there literally not a single HR Portal that tracks status? That flags 'pending'? Notifications for '2 weeks no reply'?

The HR person can't grab the hiring manager and hand-hold the response?

An automated response would be just fine.

And just cordial as a minimum you know 'Thanks so much for turning out, but we can't move forward at this time'.

>Is there literally not a single HR Portal that tracks status? That flags 'pending'? Notifications for '2 weeks no reply'?

As a hiring manager, absolutely all portals/HR management software I have used up to this moment have this feature. Most of them highlight the application and put them in a visible 'No progress for X time' category; some even send separate e-mails for each long overdue candidate.

The truth is that - at least in the orgs I've been part of - the trend for HR is to be apathetic to the needs of the team they're hiring for and tone deaf in communication. Recruitment has been the least favourite bit of their job.

Over the years I have received Linkedin messages from a number of candidates whom I have referred to other teams/department after they interviewed for a position in mine. HR should've followed up with them; they didn't.

Maybe these HR people should have to go through some whiteboard algorithm gauntlet of their own.

Years ago, before "FAANG" was a term, I was flown in for an interview with Amazon in Seattle, a city I like enough to have considered moving there. They put me up in a grimy capital-M Motel by the airport with a cracked sink and a $50 cab ride into town (back when that was expensive).

OTOH they were quite efficient with their response. It was a mutual "no" and they spared me the trouble by getting to me, with useful feedback, within 48 hours.

There is a lot of BS around the hiring process these days, but some parts of it are still in HR's control: namely the "before" and "after" of the actual interview day(s).

If that part is bad, it indicates rot in HR, which will be a problem every single time you interact with them.

I have nothing against Stripe, just commenting on the general case.

Just to give another anecdote. I went all the way to the onsite and within a couple of days I was given a few notes from each separate interview and a fairly clear reason for not proceeding with the hire at the time. They also did this in a video call. This was in either late 2016 or 2017.

I'd become an apple music or google music user for life after that

I know! It was particularly painful because I used spotify daily for about 5 years up until that point and was technically aware of the product.

However I realise it was just a bad person in a big company so I did not let it reflect badly on my use of the product.

Doesn't surprise me. I did an on-site a while back and several of the interviewers seemed like they'd rather be anywhere else rather than in the interview room. It's a good thing the product has scaled well because it seems like the culture hasn't.

This happened to a friend too, got totally ghosted by Stripe.

This is generally how our industry works, though, which is that it's not worth it to go through loop for a job unless you were referred by someone on the inside.

I interviewed in March, thought I did really well in the interviews, had great conversations with the hiring manager etc. After Covid hit they told me they were postponing hiring decisions and I never heard anything since. Sort of a weird way to manage things but I suppose the lockdowns have added quite a bit of chaos.

I'm surprised to hear so many in this thread had negative experiences. My experience as an applicant at Stripe was stellar from beginning to end, probably the most professional and well-executed interview process I've seen in my career. I can say that without bias because I ended up choosing another offer, but it was really difficult to turn down Stripe's after that.

When did you go through this process? I imagine they get a lot more applications nowadays

I do mainly frontend work and am just shy of 10 years experience. My resume is solid and I can at least get my foot in the door at well known companies including FAANG. I'm not saying I'm going to get the job, but I feel like I can at least get a response.

I was job hunting earlier this year due to my last company (a fintech start up) shutting down and Stripe was the only company that just handed me an immediate "No" without even a recruiter call. I know one other engineer who is more mid level and she said she had applied and never even got a response.

I harbor no ill will toward them, but I'm really curious what their hiring criteria is and why it seems so different that most of the other major companies out there.

I'm tangentially familiar with the process, so let me paint a picture.

Imagine you have enough high-quality candidates such that you could have every single employee interviewing candidates all day every day, doing no other work. What do you do?

In the real world, most engineers top out at one or two phone screens a week, and/or one or two on-site interviews a week. Sometimes more. Each is 45 minutes at least, usually an hour. Each involves writing deliberate, thoughtful feedback and a professional assessment. Candidates that do well lead to decision meetings that take more time for all the interviewers to discuss -- candidates that do poorly can circuit-break.

Then there is scheduling! Is there physical space available for the candidate to interview? Can we get all the necessary interviewers? What if one or more of them can't make it (sick, etc.)? What if the candidate needs to reschedule? Time zones? Holidays?

Imagine Stripe has 100 recruiters (this is at least accurate within an order of magnitude). What does the back-of-the-napkin math look like for their maximum interviewing bandwidth?

Hiring is a really hard problem, even for well-equipped organizations. Even the best in the world do it badly sometimes. And the anecdote cases tend to shout the loudest. Maybe you had a typo on your resume. Maybe other candidates looked better. Maybe there is a nasty rumor about you. Maybe the recruiter was having a bad day. Or maybe you were just unlucky and arbitrarily cut.

"pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview." is something I have found to be difficult but required. Very nice friends of mine have simplistic views on issues I am interested in or lack the ambition I would like to have. We still close but we chat about personal problems, not work.

"every time I convince a Stripe customer to raise their prices ... we benefit directly" sounds like the exact words of an illegal cartel. While I doubt that that is Patrick's intent, if I were an antitrust attorney, this would convince me that the notion of payment processors as clearinghouses for price-fixing merits investigation.

This is a great example of how one can do something well-meaning at small scale (Advise tiny, tiny businesses that they would be better served having more confidence in their value) that can turn into something illegal at scale (Advise price leaders that they can safely lead by less and so-on).

Most important comment of the whole thread right here.

Those sound like perfectly legal words.

A stripe customer is free to tell Stripe "Your fees are too high, and I'd prefer switching processors than raising prices".

I could be wrong. Is there an example of an illegal cartel, trying to persuade customers from whom it makes transaction fees, to raise prices? Surely this isn't a new thing under the sun.

Ultimately consumers foot the bill. It's why antitrust legislation gets pursued in the first place.

It's the raising of prices in the absence of market forces that gives room for the payment processor to increase fees. Theoretically all payment processors benefit from advocating that their clients raise prices. If some companies raise their prices, no issue, but the coordinated effort to do it is where you "smell a rat".

It's then up to the litigating party to try to find collusion between companies to do this. This is like how the anti-competitive hiring practices of Google/Apple/Facebook/etc were surfaced. They all had a set of practices that stood out as anomalous and during the subsequent investigation it was found that they colluded with each other to set the market (rate for hiring talent).

It's probably not the case here...and also patio11 has little risk saying so while living in Japan where industries are highly vertically-integrated/monopolistic.

Of course the customer can say that. And nowhere does Patrick suggest that taking his advice is a condition of continuing a relationship with Stripe. That's not the issue.

The issue is that coordinating pricing is illegal in any form. In any industry, each company could make more money if they knew their competitors would raise prices. Even calling a competitor to tell them that you are raising prices is illegal if they raise prices.

If there's even a single incident of two companies being advised to raise prices on products which compete with each other, it's about as close as it comes to an open and shut price fixing case. And this post makes it easier to prove because it suggests that companies know he's giving the same advice to their competitors. Whether that's said explicitly or not won't matter.

The idea that any form of price optimization among firms violates antitrust laws would put basically all management and marketing consulting at antitrust risk. This doesn’t sound plausible.

You will find that management consulting firms (and the companies that hire them) have fairly clear rules about how they approach and talk about pricing and competition to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Most notably, they would never ever: 1. Indicate that their advice always is to raise prices 2. They would never share the pricing advice they gave to a competitor.

I don't know if what Patrick does is problematic. It wouldn't surprise me if he was trying to be glib and his actual advice is more nuanced.

If one interprets it literally: Someone who receives advice from him to raise prices can look down Stripe's customer list and find its competition and feel confident that the competition will receive the same advice.

Again, I don't know what he does. All I know is that what he says if read by the right person would be sufficient to trigger their curiosity to ask for records of his correspondence and find out.

Every time I read about Stripe, it seems that the most interesting people work/have worked there (Julia Evans, Aditya Mukerjee, Mudge, Brandur, Greg Brockman). And it seems like a great culture.

But the CEO's "progress studies" thing repels me because it reeks of the Kochs' efforts to implant conservatism into education. I don't want to enable that. It sucks.

BTW, I am one of the people who had their YC app reviewed by patio11 and it was a great experience. It's amazing how much time he's able to dedicate to individual Stripe Atlas participants -- thanks!

You're welcome!

Can you explain what stood out to you as conservative about the "progress studies" article?

Wikipedia defines conservatism as "a political and social philosophy promoting traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization".

Patrick Collison's article [1] to me seems to be saying "we should be a lot more systematic and scientific in figuring out the drivers of societal progress, and aggressively invest in those things." That seems in direct opposition to conservatism, since it advocates a dramatic overhaul of ineffective institutions.

Collison's definition of progress does seem narrowly focused on measurable economic metrics. Is that the source of your grievance? I think that developments like women's suffrage and racial desegration should be included in discussions of "progress studies", whether or not they led to improvements in measurable metrics. Collison neglects to include examples of this type in his article, but it's not clear to me that he considers them unworthy of study.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-...

He's not saying its conservative, he dislikes business leaders using their influence to pursue ideological change in society.

> But the CEO's "progress studies" thing repels me because it reeks of the Kochs' efforts to implant conservatism into education. I don't want to enable that. It sucks.

If you had that amount of money (and that reputation), you'd probably try to improve the world _according to your vision of improvement_ too.

Paul Graham just recommended this article on twitter: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1314260316134531075

> Incidentally, invoking such questions ritualistically is a fairly accurate description of the job of a YC partner. If you start asking questions like "what's preventing you from launching today?" the answer, to the founders' own surprise, quite often turns out to be nothing.

One of my friends worked at Stripe but left because she said that management is made up of young OGs that don't know how to manage but they've been at Stripe for so long they are rich and think they know what they're doing. It's hard to get real work done because of this from what I've heard.

To be fair, this can apply to a lot of young companies.

Fundamentally, the job to work in a startup is different from the job to work at a large company. The people that grew a company when it was small might not be the best people to grow a company when it becomes bigger.

I saw this at a previous company where the OGs were convinced they were untouchable because they created the entire technical solution with a handful of engineers. To their credit, it was an amazing accomplishment. Unfortunately, as the company grew, their solution ran into scalability and reliability concerns that couldn't be easily fixed. In every architecture meeting, there was always the disagreements between team "ten years ago, this product would have already been shipped with half the engineers" and team "but that product wouldn't work with the scale we need - it is an exponentially harder problem now"

Although sometimes they are right as well. It's often layers of people with many different lines between them slowing down the overal pace of development. I don't buy the argument that ensuring scalability equals long processes. But I do believe that when the product grows in terms features, components etc, the pace also decreases. Even in the perfect multilithic software solution.

I'm sorry, but isn't "young OG" a contradiction?

How can someone be "OG" (Original Gangster, i.e. really old school) in a very well-funded company founded ten years ago?

Am I misunderstanding something?

OG in terms a group of people means the group that initially started it (the originals). In this case a bunch of young engineers.

It means they were early employees

Does anyone know enough about Stripe's product lines to comment on what the following paragraph means?

"My view on Stripe’s business prior to joining was “Stripe is basically a B2B SaaS company with extremely reliable capture of upside when users succeed.” I believe that substantially underappreciates the actual business. Large portions of Stripe’s business add another loop on top of the B2B SaaS loop, where Stripe is effectively indexing on its ability to grow the count and success of customers who are themselves structurally equivalent to B2B SaaS companies."

The "reliable capture of upside when users succeed" seems to be referring to the fees charged by Stripe. More revenue for the user means more revenue for Stripe as well. I don't know what the "effectively indexing" sentence refers to. Is there a network effect at play here, where being on Stripe encourages a user's customers and suppliers to also be on Stripe? Or is there a product offering that somehow creates that effect?

And then there's another loop mentioned later, which is presumably a product in development, and not something anyone involved with can comment on. (But I would love to hear about it if you could.)

I think it's the kind of mix of inside-baseball and jargon that makes it pretty much impossible to decode for those not involved in creating annual reports and executive summaries.

Which is not at all surprising if you're familiar with Patrick's other writing.

https://stripe.com/es/marketplaces Is the most NFX'

Sigma is sold separately but built with everyones data too

If you follow Patrick on Twitter you get used to this - even to the point where I didn’t realize this was from his blog but intuited it was a quote from him just by the style of writing.

I believe what he’s getting at here is close to the following: Stripe isn’t just providing payment (Reliable capture on success, aka Stripe gets money on revenue generation), but is also trying to provide tools to make the B2B model easier to deploy, based on their experience with these business models. Stripe Atlas or Sigma are probably a good example of those types of services - they’re trying to use their payments play to also push for selling you Business Intelligence or Legal.

Indexing is just taking knowledge and deploying it to make something faster, like a database index (I know I want to join on this column, so I index it).

I am familiar with and very much enjoy patio11's writing style. I enjoyed his "An update on a pre-registered result..." to the extent that I was actually laughing out loud while reading it, which was very much not the intent of the writing.

I now see two potential explanations. The first is Atlas, where Stripe enables the ecosystem of B2B SaaS companies to expand rapidly. The other, mentioned in a sibling to your comment, is marketplaces (Connect), where Stripe collects revenue from a number of operating payment networks. In both cases, Stripe is a B2B SaaS which serves other SaaS companies, which allows growth in a way that being a B2B SaaS that serves traditional business doesn't.

An interesting read as usual from Patrick.

I picked up on a few points others here have mentioned already, but the most striking thing for me, particularly from the first half of the piece, is the huge emphasis on growth, recruitment and looking to do new things in the internal culture at Stripe.

Of course, this is reasonable and understandable for a business in Stripe’s position. However, the corollary seems to be a lack of focus on the core service that got many of our businesses using Stripe in the first place. In a nutshell, we use a payment processor like Stripe because we want to easily and reliably collect payments from our customers, so we can get on with what our business actually does.

It would be interesting to know how much is going on at Stripe, presumably involving people other than patio11, in that area. I have a business that was an early adopter back when Stripe launched in the UK, but our perception is that the challenges we face with online payments today aren’t necessarily the areas that recent developments at Stripe are addressing.

I don't doubt this is true. However, given that the author put his name on it, it's impossible that this blog post could be anything but glowingly positive (unless he wanted to complain on his way out).

I asked for, and got, total editorial control of my voice in my spaces when I joined. Though in any universe where my experience at Stripe wasn't positive, I would be unlikely to have stayed for four years or to have written the post, right?

I tried to be honest about my frustrations, too, but there's a possibility my salaryman indirectness made them not leap off the page.

Sure, but you can't say too many bad things about the company. Of course you would never write "I don't like working here", as long as your real name is on the post.

> My sleep schedule has ranged from atypical to disastrous, but that has been true for almost all of my adult life.

This is been my life as well, with the exception of a few years when I was doing over an hour of cardio per day (first on a swim team and later as a hobbyist distance runner).

It's so hard to shut down after just a 24 hour cycle but not doing so always catches up with you.

Yup, same here. It takes a ton of discipline to keep a 24-hour cycle.

It's not a lack of discipline, it's a recognized medical condition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wake...

I've heard several times about the Stripe "Library" and "written culture", both in previous patio11 posts [1] and elsewhere. I understand part of that comes from the top and screening for writers. But I'm also curious about the basic mechanics of the library; wordpress? big ol' mediawiki? git repo of markdown docs? custom software?

How has the library process (if any) itself changed over time?

I've worked at non-startup BigCo/healthcare with formalized procedural docs, (technical) writers, change management, etc., and often they were minimal, boring, impersonal, frequently outdated -- and rarely read. I'm imagining (for better or worse) this is something a little more like a shared internal blog archive?

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/

I may be mistaken here, but I think Patrick may be referring to the library of Stripe Press published books, which are available internally (and externally, if purchased)?

https://press.stripe.com/

Believe they're referring to:

"Stripe is a celebration of the written word which happens to be incorporated in the state of Delaware. We produce prodigious amounts of it internally, most of it widely visible within the company." - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/

Yes, that.

I am also very curious about this. I've been keeping track of knowledge mgmt tooling (esp. plain text) and approaches (e.g. ADR) for a couple years. Grand Unified Theory forthcoming :)

I work at Stripe. From a quick browse through my inbox and Chrome tabs, I see multi-thousand word documents in: Google Docs, Dropbox, markdown in Git, internal wiki, _other_ internal wiki, email to mailing lists, custom software, and internal wiki pages generated from markdown in Git.

All of these tools have weird superpowers and limitations that prevent them from becoming a unified catalog. Google Docs can do live concurrent editing between 40 people but can't relax width limits (e.g. for code listings), and ${WIKI_SOFTWARE} can embed every document format in the world but can't require certain pages to be changed via code review.

There's another internal meta-tool that acts like a search engine across the various vendor platforms, so I can search for [network egress policy] and be assured of somewhat reasonable results.

"You minimize (and regret) nuisances like incorporation, setting up payroll, and the gigantic productivity tarpit that is fundraising"

Basically the exact work of Stripe Atlas

I find Atlas really interesting and may yet use it, but how does it reduce the need for fundraising?

Mainly the former things, but also from the article:

"Sometimes this involves scalable writing such as the Stripe Atlas guides. Sometimes I work with a single founder to get their B round accomplished."

The article really does make you want to apply. However, all remote jobs are Americas-only. Remote was supposed to be Stripe's next engineering hub even before the pandemic, so I'm curious if that will include Europe any time soon.

Does anyone know if Patrick has talked somewhere about why he decided to take a job at Stripe instead of continuing his consulting business or starting a new venture?

Patrick didn't strike me as someone interested in working at a "regular" job.

Yeah, not knowing about him at all when I watched a talk by him and then realised that he is somewhat of an icon for indie/solo founders, I was very surprised to find out he had starting working as an employee in the meantime. I know he's doing well, but since I had just started out solo myself it felt a little like he had thrown in the towel ;)

He talks about it here: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-wo...

What a good blog post this is.

> A portion of my job is helping folks communicate that we're serious, reliable infrastructure for the largest participants in the global economy while also keenly appreciating that the user might be on a small team trying to sell bingo cards or politically-themed breakfast cereal.

AWS and Cloudflare are two other examples of XaaS companies that benefit from this mode of operation. They're both workable for a one-person team as much as they're for global enterprises.

I interviewed at Stripe a few years back and they were extremely rude in the interview. I was still early in my career and I’ve never forgotten it. Even still, I’ve applied a few times and never heard back. Definitely seems like a company that’s going places but also has a bit of an ego.

The second-order effects that are described here around the "capture of upside" may be a little exaggerated. Credit cards and Stripe are common payment mechanisms for consumer, prosumer, and self-serve SAAS. I'm not denying there is a lot of money here, but I imagine the majority of B2B SaaS companies by revenue handle payment through annual contracts through checks and wire transfer.

I don't have any data here, but I'm thinking EHR, ERP, office building rent ("a SaaS company plus some glass and concrete") etc. If the service provided is annually worth 100k USD, theres probably human-human interaction which facilitates the exchange of legal documents and money. Think Oracle, SAP, ADP, ServiceNow, Workday etc.

I really like long form idea packed essays like this.

One of the many ideas that jumped out at me:

> A huge portion of the value creation of Silicon Valley is through directly intervening on the ambition of impressionable people.

This seems especially applicable for software-only or software-heavy businesses that scale very efficiently. Increasing ambition by a little can result in large increase in impact on the other end.

Another idea that caught my attention:

> Silicon Valley was a place. It has become a metonymy for a community of practice. You can find outposts of Silicon Valley in Tokyo cafes, in WeWorks in Bangalore, and on the coast of Cape Town.

If we can inspire ambition all around the world that bodes well for our future.

>Stripe is, qualitatively and quantitatively, about as different counting from my start date to today as it was counting from launch to my start date.

We've been using Stripe to accept payments for longer than Pat has been there. From the customer perspective, Stripe is largely unchanged from when we first started using it. i.e. easy to use and no complaints (other than the high fees which are probably in line with other processors given our low volume).

We tried to use Atlas to set up an Ireland sub, but had no success. I was not involved, only my COO, so don't have much to add on this.

why would you work at a company that may never go public and even if it does, already has such an oversized valuation you’ll likely not make much from it?

it seems predatory and abusive to employees to stay private this long

A quirk of Silicon Valley culture is that senior employees on the inside of it tend to be rather sophisticated about how they think about equity, and they also tend to be rather reticent about talking about that externally, because of factors such as legal and PR risk.

This is immensely frustrating to me, because thinking lucidly about equity is incredibly important for career planning for engineers who are startup-adjacent, work at AppAmaGooBookSoft, or who are in markets where those firms' offers set market terms. I think this sets us up for a continuance of the class system, where people who talked about this subject around the dinner table or have a frat brother who was in Google in 2004 know the score, and people who grew up in Chicago and didn't know what Google was in 2003 do not, even when they're evaluating career options which are heavily dependent on correctly valuing equity.

I did not always think lucidly about equity, and overly trusted the representations of folks on Internet watering holes who said that equity was likely to be nearly worthless. I would like to think I've learned a bit over the years.

I apologize for being indirect here; feel free to ask me about equity in some place where it will not be reasonably read as a comment on a firm I owe various duties to. (Offer broadly open to HNers.)

I don't think the equity is worthless. I just think an engineer can work at Facebook with a monthly vest and their equity is as good as cash. An engineer at stripe has illiquid shares that they hope they can convert to cash in 3+ years. Usually the hope of a large return would offset that (time value of money) but thats cancelled by the fact that stripe's private valuation is 30B+.

Not patio11 but you can still evaluate something like net preset value by doing discount to the eventual liquidity event. In reality this is complicated as you need to assign probabilities to (1) when liquidity event can occur (2) real value of your equity at the event (3) discount rate.

While estimating probability distributions is probably beyond what one can do without detailed inside knowledge (and even then), it's useful to think of a number of stories, eg: target_co will ipo in 3 years at 2x last raised value, target_co will ipo in 5 year at last raise, target_co will be acquired at 0.1x last raise in 8 years (what is the overhang?); let's say all at equal probabilities. For discount rate you can think of alternative places where you could work (eg. alternative_public_co will grow at -10, +20, +30% yoy with equal probability) + time value of not being able to liquidate (let's say another 10%).

This will give you some range of numbers to consider.

that makes sense. though it seems like many companies these days such as uber, palantir etc are actually worth less after IPO than before.

Maybe I'm misreading what Patrick is saying here but personally, if I believed that the equity part of an offer was worth near zero, then I'd ensure that the cash part of an offer met my needs and aspirations for the medium term.

Perhaps there is an argument that by being so focused on the cash part of an offer I probably left equity on the table, if the IPO lottery ticket came in perhaps I would find myself regretting that.

What you mean it's all about the money? Come on there is more than that. Everyone started at stripe should have known the implications of their options.

Public companies are a pain in the arse. I'd prefer not answering to shareholders.

OT question:

> AppAmaGooBookSoft have individual products with more engineers than our company has people total.

Which products would have more than 3000 engineers?

Amazon has publicly said is has 10k+ on Alexa/Echo, and you're welcome to get other examples from chatting with folks.

The link to Twitter in the article (https://stripe.com/patio11) appears to be broken.

Thanks, fixed.

I just wish Stripe was available in my small country as a small indie developer who can't spend mountains of cash on Atlas.

I have never had a payment on a site using Stripe go through (having tried a number of cards). How are they still in business?

This is a great read, but for the feedback, I stopped here: “I cannot say this enough: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview.”

I’ve heard this, but here there’s an ulterior motive, which may not benefit. Stripe benefits from startups, and if you hangout with successful professionals and mentors and people that don’t bring you down, that will probably make the startup community successful and that in turn will help Stripe grow.

But would you ignore your family member that needs your time and attention? How about your friend that seems to be tanking? If Warren Buffett were to have serious health problems, I seriously doubt Bill Gates would be like “whatever- I don’t have time for that.” He’s going to be there. Because that’s what you do. Sure, there are times when you need your space, and friends change, or tend to abuse. Maybe you need to withdraw some, get off of social media. But, being a fair weather friend or family member just because someone else is not on their A game or never was is B.S.

I’m not discounting the advice; if you’re only goal is to have what is generally perceived to be worldly success, having only peers that boost you is a way to do it. But the greatest person that ever lived had a bad friend that got him killed. He wasn’t like, “sorry, I have dinner plans.”

> But the greatest person that ever lived had a bad friend that got him killed. He wasn’t like, “sorry, I have dinner plans.”

Is this a reference to a well known figure? I'm trying to think about who this might be and I'm drawing a blank. Who was the greatest person that ever lived?

Probably a reference to Jesus.

I don't see anything in the article close to implying that you should drop people who are down on their luck.

All I read is: If you talk a lot with finance oriented people, don't be surprised if you start thinking in finance oriented ways.

To give a different example from me personally: For a while I read red pill material, because I thought I could take lessons from it, while dismissing all the women hating parts as I had no reason to be angry with women. Guess what: if you read about a lot of anger towards women, you become angry towards women yourself as well!

So the lesson I took from that was: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview.

Either the post is missing something, or this particular job didn't involve a lot of "high-tech". Which is ok, but perhaps not particularly interesting for most "hackers". At least, that's the feeling I was left with.

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