Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe | Hacker News Reader

Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe

1,703 pointsdanrocks655 comments

Recently I interviewed with Stripe for an engineering MoM (Manager of Managers) for one of their teams. I interview regularly, so I am used to many types of processes, feedback mechanisms, and so on. I won't go into details about the questions because there's nothing special about them, but I wanted to share some details of my experience for people thinking of interviewing there.

1) About 35-40% of the interviewers started their questioning by saying "I will only need 20 minutes for this", while emphasizing it is an important leadership position that they are hiring for. So 20 minutes is all needed to identify "important, critical leaders"? What a strange thing to say - also a GREAT way to make candidates feel important and wanted!

2) There is significant shuffling of interviewers and schedules. One almost has to be on-call to be able to react quickly.

3) For an engineering manager position, I only interviewed with only technical person. To me it hints that Engineering MoM is not a very technical position.

4) Of all the people I spoke to, the hiring manager was the one I spoke the least with. The phone screen was one of the "I only need 20 minutes for this" calls. The other one was quite amusing, and is described below.

5) After the loop was done, the recruiter called me to congratulate me on passing, and started discussing details of the offer, including sending me a document described the equity program. Recruiter mentioned that the hiring manager would be calling me to discuss the position next.

6) SURPRISE INTERVIEW! I get a call from the hiring manager, he congratulates me on passing the loop, then as I prepare to ask questions about the role, he again says "I need to ask you two questions and need 20 minutes for this". Then proceeds to ask two random questions about platforms and process enforcement, then hangs up the call after I answer. Tells me he'd be calling in a week to discuss the position.

7) I get asked for references.

8) After passing the loop, have the recruiter discuss some details of the offer, have the hiring manager tell me they'd be calling me after a week, I get ghosted for about 3.5 weeks. References are contacted and feedback is confirmed positive.

9) I ping the recruiter to see when the offer is coming - it's not coming. They chose another candidate. I am fine with it, even after being offered verbally, but the ghosting part after wasting so much of my time seems almost intentional.

10) I call up a senior leader in the office I applied to, an acquaintance of mine. His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people". I was shocked with the response.

11) I get called by the recruiter saying that another director saw my feedback and is very interested in talking to me and do an interview loop.

Guess I'm not joining, then.

I am ok with passing loops, being rejected, I've seen it all. But being ghosted after acceptance is a first. What a bizarre place this is.

View on HN

All: there are several pages of comments in this thread - to read them you need to click the "X comments more..." links at the bottom of the page, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264&p=3

We sometimes prune top-heavy comments to balance the subthreads out, but not in cases like this, for obvious reasons. There are some pretty interesting comments on the later pages too though.

For those who have worked around and at Stripe for the past decade, this is not a surprise. Stripe, and especially the founders, have a quite a poor reputation for screwing over people in and around their orbit.

Almost every fintech startup has the story of Patrick reaching out about an acquisition, mining them for information playing along and then ghosting - same thing for candidates. They leadership team, specifically Patrick and Will Gaybrick are extremely smart but have screwed over a ton of people - be very careful about trusting.

You don't hear anything about this online, they're incredibly effective at squashing hit pieces and have a huge amount of reporters and power brokers under their control. On HN and silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine. Patrick has almost direct control over YC and HN, you'll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.

With Patrick now living in Woodside, Will on permanent vacation in Malibu and John permanently in Ireland the company is definitely a bit in chaos mode internally. Their entire people team has turned over and they're having major retention issues - so I'm not super surprised that stuff like this is starting to leak out.

I run a $XB fintech, and am afraid to use my name given the backlash.

+1. Also a founder of an $XB fintech. Exact same story. Patrick + John dangled an acquisition to get a look inside, and ended up re-trading on the terms. Then proceeded to target 2 of our team members to recruit. Fast forward a few years, and now they have deployed a team to directly copy one of our products.

Amongst their L2 team, Patrick and Will are described as the "killers". I guess maybe a bit of duplicity is required to build a company of that size...

As much as the parent comment strained credibility, this double-down (posted exactly 10 minutes after the original) breaks it. Seriously, how many $XB fintech founders are out there, waiting to tell their salacious tales about one of the most transparent and accountable individuals on HN?

It's OK, come out $XB fintech founders, it's safe for your temp accounts here...at least until the moderators get here and start checking the IP addresses.

This sounds like typical tech infighting, sadly. We shouldn't normalize this stuff, but we do. I really hope more companies hold their leaders to a governing, conscious culture that they actually follow themselves.

That's sad. Sorry that happened to you. I hope you guys are still moving forward and building.

There are so many founders of $XB fintechs in this thread, I want to start one! Thanks for sharing.

You were brain raped. Bill Gates was famous for this. There was even a Silicon Valley episode about the practice.

I'm also a founder of an $xB fintech (Coinbase!) and I have to say, this does not ring true to me at all.

I've known Patrick since 2013 or so, and I have found him to be nothing but the highest integrity. Same for John. We are semi-competitors (not a ton of overlap) so you might find it strange for me to stick up for him like this, but I just think this description is wildly inaccurate. As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).

He has direct control over reporters and YC? I'm sorry but this sounds like conspiracy theory.

People are living all over due to covid - so what. Remote is the future of work.

There are plenty of more reasonable Occam's razor explanations for some of what is being reported in this thread (and from the OP). You always have to assume ignorance over malice first. For example:

- companies often look at startups they may want to acquire, and decide to pass for various reasons (saying no more than yes is a good process), they then launch their own products (this is why they were looking at acquisitions in the first place), pretty normal

- any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences, I know for instance these happen in Coinbase periodically, and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly)

- most rational explanation for OPs issue is that references were checked and came back luke warm/negative, so more were done which delayed it etc (they may not tell you this was the reason to protect sources btw), this is one of many potential reasons, i'm guessing, but benign explanations are more likely

- also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer

Anyway - if people had negative experiences, then feedback is great. I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this. Patrick and John are great founders we can all learn from, and yes human like all of us (not perfect). Let's all help each other improve here, and assume positive intent.

Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?

The point is not that they have direct control over YC or HN, it's that they have massive indirect control over the organization and have done a wizard's job of making themselves untouchable in the media.

Some context: I'm a former (early) YC founder, and during my batch the YC team recommended that we spend time with the HN team. The HN team gave us edits on our posts, recommended the best times of day to submit, emailed us when stories about our companies hit the front page, and explained how the ranking algorithms worked (and thus we learned how to game them). And we are not the most valuable YC company ever -- so it's possible more was done for Stripe.

It's not direct influence, but rather indirect impact. So again I ask -- Did Patrick request that you write this post?

This is the first time I’ve seen a post with anything negative about Patrick and having a Coinbase founder come out of the woodwork to make a post like this defending all of this with nothing more than conjecture sends a completely different message than you think.

I’ve personally conducted business with Patrick, and integrity isn’t a term I’d associate with him. Most polite term I can think of would be “shrewd”.

Props for attaching your name to your comment, something I wish the throwaway OP also did, though in the spirit of believing the victim, I can understand why they didn't.

That said, with threads like this, there's also value in letting people come forward with their experiences (positive or otherwise) to see if there's any sort of pattern; any such patterns can then inform future interactions with the people or companies involved.

My own personal experience over the last year as a manager of managers that may be relevant to both pc and barmstrong: seeing a surprising number of security resumes on the market from current Stripe talent suggests there may be a bit of impending brain drain (for reasons I can't put a finger on as I'm not inside). I've seen less of this with Coinbase talent.

Sure, but you run Coinbase. It wouldn't surprise me if people with less soft power than you had negative interactions.

Not to fuel the fire here, but from the startups perspective I'm not sure there's much functional difference between a company attempting to acquire a startup and then deciding to go it alone, and using the acquisition process for research on their future products other than intent.

No matter what if you do the DD process on an acquisition you'll certainly apply those learnings to your future efforts.

There's even a PG blogpost about it. http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html

Side Note: I'm always amazed to find people that run large companies posting on hackernews. Doubly amazed that two companies I'm interviewing for are mentioned in the same post (about interviews no less.) :D

Small world.

I know so many people who have been screwed over by Coinbase, it's complete lack of customer support, and dark business practices (it's borderline criminal at this point). The fact that you're associated directly with Coinbase does not benefit your reputation nor does it add any weight to what you're saying - it in fact does the opposite.

This is biased because they are your acquaintance. Because they act a certain way in your circle doesn’t mean they aren’t being a bad actor in others.

Your post makes it clear you’re very out of touch with the reality of interviewing. I’ve had this same stuff pulled on me at Google, Amazon, and multiple other companies. Being offered a position and then getting surprise interview and then ghosted. It’s draining and demoralizing, and a major waste of my time.

> Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).

I used to get very frustrated at a previous job (realestate.com.au) that they would treat their main competitor in such a venomous way.

If the features looked similar then they 'copied' if they launched a feature first then denigrate it until you can launch the same feature. There are only so many ways you can do a real estate (car, job) ad portal. Especially if you're following best practice UI/UX guidelines.

I get being competitive, but you can be competitive and still be civil. Making the other company to be an arch-villain is such small-minded zero-sum thinking.

Sadly there were also many things where they could have worked on collaboratively to make everyone's lives better (e.g. Rental standards and processes), but this is impossible when you frame the competitor in such a negative way.

> most rational explanation for OPs issue is that references were checked and came back luke warm/negative, so more were done which delayed it etc (they may not tell you this was the reason to protect sources btw), this is one of many potential reasons, i'm guessing, but benign explanations are more likely

> also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer

All reasonable things to happen, for sure. Would other HMs in the same building show interest after bad references? Debatable.

I accept all outcomes - all except ghosting.

Have you considered that he might just avoid sharking out on people he considers friends, or people with too large a platform?

Genuine question.

I don't think Coinbase and Stripe are in the same business but...

> As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).

I'm not sure why this is positive or signals a high-integrity person. If he doesn't have to tell you, he probably shouldn't. He runs a private company and that's what he should care about.

Or maybe he did that, so that in the future you can kick back and write this comment?

> any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences... and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly)

Spot on. Nor should anyone expend disproportionate energy in bringing down common causes of quality issues to zero. https://apenwarr.ca/log/20161226

> I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this.

You must be new here.

I agree with you but after being an employee of a dozen of companies and founded some, I started the Stripe's application processe and after a waterfall or red flags I decided myself to do not continue. I couldn't ignore my gut feeling clearly saying me that there is the place to have a good salary in a very miserable, unhealthy and unstable job.

PS: I don't know how they are managing to have such a good product.

Japan has a long tradition in coopetition. SV has adopted many Japanese traditions. Unfortunately some people seem to take competition too seriously, ruining the culture. It seems some are suggesting Patrick and John take competition too seriously. Whether the allegations are true or not, it can unfortunately be damaging.

Adam Smith, on his work on competition, took many ideas from the Muslim Caliphate. Where markets can only work on trust. That nobody will do business with someone they don't trust.

Trust is what underlies communities like this, even if people are competitors.

> There are plenty of more reasonable Occam's razor explanations (…). You always have to assume ignorance over malice first.

That’s Hanlon’s razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

I have never interviewed at Stripe, but I did interview at Coinbase in mid-2020 and it was among the best interviewing experiences I've had. The hiring manager for a TPM role (NM) was awesome, as was the entire loop. I didn't end up with an offer (I suspect that I flubbed one of the interviews) but left with a mostly positive experience (aside from what seemed like an implied offer from the recruiter, which I consider to just be miscommunication).

As opposed to K (another SF-based exchange), which took a month to set up the loop in the first place, had one-way video during interviews (candidates on, interviewers off), and took 3 weeks after the interview loop to send an offer which I declined for another company (65% of CB's pre-offer, not that it mattered based on the other stuff).

These experiences make a difference and really help sell the organization to a potential hire.

> You always have to assume ignorance over malice first

At a certain valuation (namely, well before yours or Patrick's), ignorance becomes malice. With the resources Stripe has, it is outrageous that there have been a non-zero number of cases where for example references haven't been checked before an offer letter was sent. That Patrick is ignorant about this, as you claim, is even more damning, as it suggests no one knows what is going on at Stripe.

So I guess thank you for your scathing review of Stripe's hiring process, and for giving us the notion that Coinbase is probably an equally toxic workspace?

Funny that you think your endorsement works in their favor. Coinbase is not entirely kosher in the crypto industry so there's that.

Strange that the downvote button was hidden on this post. I had to manually submit the GET request.

You know the best you could have done is say nothing. People like this, best way to prove them wrong is to show there's nothing. Even a "oh it's true but we ll try to change" helps more than doing exactly what the OP did with his catch-22: if you defend here, he's proven right.

Well now we know who is your master.

I'm too am also a founder of an $xB fintech, and I have to say I disagree with your assessment. The initial poster was right on all counts.

You TWO could be the same person? Just a wild guess...

I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith. (We obviously don’t control HN or YC or journalists. If or when my comments on HN are ever ranked highly, it’s because they’re upvoted. The internal claims about Stripe are also inconsistent with the data around things like retention. Etc.)

All of that said, I’d appreciate hearing from any founders who feel mistreated as part of an acquisition process. We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.

I'm sorry but no. Patrick, we met with you once, Gaybrick and Claire multiple times and opened up a data room to you all. I then emailed you (and the others) three followups over a couple weeks only to see them opened but never replied. Your team then sent targeted cold emails to multiple people on our team. I've validated this experience with multiple founders.

You also had Moritz and Sequoia renege on Finix's term sheet after they already had it signed and wired (I guess props to Sequoia for branding it as "giving it away")[1]. You've also had your team get diligence materials from Sequoia and nuke deals.

You've clearly crushed it in the business and developer brand space, hats off to you. You want feedback - I (and the broader founder community) just wish you stop the dance of pretending and just admit you all are sharks, and it works for you! Just own it.

But I will admit, the HN comment was a bit trolly and written in frustration. But you have to admit - you are documented as proofreading every one of PGs posts, are a huge LP in YC and are friends with a lot of people there. You can't believe that the conspiracy theories are purely in "bad faith"....

And yes - this is out of place in HN comments, I'm sorry. But sadly there aren't very many other options.

[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/09/sequoia-is-giving-away-21-...

When you’re in top position on a Stripe-related post, that has nothing to do with your karma score. It’s because dang has a pin button that he usually uses for himself, but very often is used for exactly the situation you describe when it comes to YC portfolio or celebrities showing up or something (without visual feedback of such a pin, as every single other website with the capability provides). It’s pretty obvious if you keep an eye out for it

This can undoubtedly be spun as “HN just trying to bring the right voice to the top of the discussion” but the alternative take is just as valid. It’s not bad faith feedback, it’s HN UX and practices confusing readers as usual

> We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.

Isn't the comment about things you (purportedly) did personally? Have you "reached out about an acquisition, mined them for information playing along and then ghosted", or no? You clearly don't deny it but you object that you hadn't "heard" about bad things they claim... you did? For things you're the subject of, shouldn't it be easy to confirm or deny them just based on your own memory? It's not only a bizarre defense on its own, but it's an especially poor one when the claim is that you ghost people, and your reply is that they never tried to talk to you about it! Wouldn't it make more sense to just reject it and say you did not ghost people during acquisition talks, or fish for information under the guise of an acquisition, etc.?

Also:

> I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith.

"Some" leaves a lot to the reader's imagination. Which ones are the ones that are true?

Say "Bloody Mary" ten times in the mirror at midnight and she will appear...

I honestly do not see your participation in this thread as good faith. You apologized to the candidate in public—- good start, now do something of consequence in private. But any further involvement from you (especially trying to out the OP) is simply fanning the flamewar. Even HN moderation is helping fan the flames by adding stats and other commentary. This is why I find YC so utterly untrustworthy.

> Patrick has almost direct control over YC and HN, you'll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.

This sounds like such BS. They are just very reactive around PR, and Stripe while it might be hated internally (based on what you say), it is loved by external developers, so of course developers on HN will tend to have a positive opinion of anything related to it and vote accordingly. And they are quite a lot.

I almost downvoted you for going with the conspiracy theory route, but I like the irony of this post being on the top 5 on the front page and your comment being the top comment of that post, while complaining about him having "almost direct control" of HN and the press.

Stripe is a YC company. If Stripe becomes a shit show, YC may lose money. How is it a conspiracy theory to suggest that both YC and Stripe might want to exert some control over bad PR?

Let's not forget that HN's primary function is to attract people with ideas for YC to turn into companies whose equity generates money for YC. And we're not talking chump change like a couple million. More like billions. What's a little push back on negative comments to save a couple billion dollars?

He tricked me into working for a month without a contract and then wouldn’t answer my calls when I asked him to sign the terms we agreed upon. I had to show up and sit on their couch until he showed up to write me a check to go away. He’s a slippery character.

I was also on that contract and can verify this. Here’s an odd wrinkle: just prior to that contract, Patrick wanted to purchase bitcoin from me (this was back in 2013) remotely, with me sending him the bitcoin first and him paying when he had time. He also wanted the terms to be that if the USD price of bitcoin went down before he paid me, that he would pay the lower price(!) and he would choose the time of repayment. I declined to do anything other than an in-person cash transaction. Later, I heard he had previously purchased some from another friend and then ghosted him for many (>6?) months despite persistent requests for payment.

I was fortunate to work with pc/jc/will in ~2016-18, and my experience has been the opposite. They were super professional and in the time that I've worked with them seemed like genuinely good people. They can be tough negotiators which hey, sucks if you're on the other side of the table, but that's exactly what you want out of a good leadership team. And a lot of stuff slips through the cracks, but I'm not sure what else you'd expect from a company that went from 0 -> $100B in a decade.

I can see how the intersection of these two properties may sometimes look like what you're describing, but from everything I've seen (which isn't too much, but it's enough) your interpretation of the facts really doesn't seem accurate.

(As a disclaimer, I do have a horse in this race because I have some stock, but I'm pretty certain I'm being objective about this)

TL;DR: me and you are looking at the same screen but aren't watching the same movie.

It isn't dang's fault that Patrick has a Google Alert or daemon running for his name (or just has a lot of employees who notify him whenever it comes up). It's not direct control of HN, it's Patrick being enterprising.

dang has done nothing to deserve bad faith, and while I don't like Patrick, either, it's best to keep the knocks on the right doors.

HN routinely shadowbans and apparently shadow-pins with at least some frequency per this very thread. It's not an organisation that warrants assuming good faith.

Their recent 1yr equity periods to screw employees out of upside caused me to lose interest (even though that equity will still likely be very valuable). I really disliked how they tried to spin this as something good for employees.

Which is a shame because a lot of stuff they do is super cool, stripe press, increment (recently discontinued), blog posts, patio11 etc.

It seems like a great place in a lot of ways.

How did this screw people?

I can't comment on Stripe, but I had a similar experience with a B2B $XB company, but a bit worse. So I can sympathize going anon.

I agree that the public has a rosy view of a lot of these $XB founders, when in reality it's lies and back stabbing behind the scenes.

Honestly to be the kind of person who runs a company like Stripe you have to be a bit crazy.

To have the chance to be bought out for unfathomable sums at every step, and willingly go manage the headaches of a big and fast growing company (like this thread) instead?

OK I've saved the HTML of this page... just in case :-)

> On HN and silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine.

That's why we still need a thing like Gawker to come back. Almost all of SV hated on Thiel for standing behind Trump but when it came to him bringing down Gawker nobody left a finger in Gawker's defense, and so that here we are, a multi-trillion dollar industry with no internal means to self-regulate ourselves.

Gawker were scum. The worst of the worst in “journalism”. Their whole business model was based on creating outrage and division. They don’t deserve an inch of sympathy.

I do miss Mike Arrington's Techcrunch, though

I'll stick to NYT and WSJ breaking real stories, thanks.

Gawker's issues were entirely of their own making. What was their big scoop? That Thiel was gay? At least Gizmodo did some coverage on a pre-release iPhone 4 before being exiled.

Gawker did come back FWIW.

Not that I've heard a peep from them since they re-launched.

Inspired by this comment, I have created a tracker in the Open Market Research project https://github.com/OpenMarketResearch/Labs/issues/new?labels... Please feel free to share any comments or suggestions.

> have a huge amount of reporters and power brokers under their control

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all that... Can you list this 'huge amount of reporters' that Stripe has 'under their control'?

We are approaching this wrong. We should not look at ghosting as a personal attack. If you want a fiend to bring to yhe interview get a dog, comes to mind.

Also compare how a lowly cook handles interviews at a new dinning place. It's none of the entitled BS but oh a new adventure...lets see what happens.

>"I run a $XB fintech, ..."

I've seen this term a couple of times no in this post. Might you are someone else explain what a "$XB fintech" is?

A billion dollar fintech company, the X being how many billions.

Ex-Borg financial technology... Resistance is futile!

“$X billion fintech” was my interpretation

$XB is the symbol for a new cryptocurrency called XBitCoin, it’s a fork of Bitcoin Cash.

Could you elaborate what "$XB fintech" means? Couldn't google answer myself.

From this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389350

3 comma club

market cap or "valuation" company, x is a place holder so $1,2 or 3 billion

I am also a founder of a $XB fintech startup.

Don't forget the female engineer they fired for calling Elon "a little shit" on twitter. I don't know if it would be worse if it turned out to be because Elon complained or because he is their hero.

I am not sure about "HN code of conduct" here, but personally I dislike serious allegations posted anonymously and without any proof to back it up.

You may well be right, but posting these kinds of things this way is best way for HN to devolve to be unusable for any serious discussion on anything.

EDIT: (I can't answer any more because I am being throttled by HN for posting "low value content").

How hard do you think it is to create multiple fresh, throwaway HN accounts to post "corroborating" comments?

I dislike these comments not because I think they are incorrect but because if this is the discussion standard we accept it is basically open season for trolling.

Had the opposite experience recently as an EM. Spent a few months trying to find a staff-level engineer. Found a great candidate who worked for a FAANG, worked to get our budget up to his expectations, sold him on the team, and he accepted our offer with a start date 6 weeks in the future so he could have time to wrap up his work. Fine, I'm just happy to have filled the role after an arduous search. A few weeks go by, and he hasn't responded to my "we're excited to have you join the team, etc" email or any HR emails about filling out his paperwork. I call and email, the recruiter calls and emails, nothing. We never hear from him again..

He's been active on social media so we know he's alive, and assume he parlayed our offer into a raise somewhere else. Ok, that happens, but to accept an offer and totally ghost? Jeez. I could have used those intervening weeks to interview more candidates had he just sent me a quick note, now I've got to backfill his position while also trying to fill the new ones that just opened... I guess hiring is a shitshow from both sides sometimes.

According to the papers, candidate ghosting has been happening more and more often. With such a senior, high-paid position as that, it doesn't really apply, but I can't help but feel a bit of schadenfreude at employers lamenting ghosting candidates, after themselves being the ghosting party so routinely.

I had a somewhat opposite experience: went through an interview process, accepted and then the company drug its feet about a start date which ended up taking weeks longer than expected after several delays for simple things like ordering equipment and other things which pointed to "we don't have our act together". I was committed and had already left my previous position and exited other interviewing pipelines.

I should have persisted and ghosted them, they ended up putting me in a different role than I had been offered and generally were extremely disorganized.

Honestly, I think going forward if you don't have me sign a contract and give me something in return (say, a signing bonus that is actually paid upon signing instead of weeks after I start), the deal isn't done until I start.

When you can't expect the other party to hold up to their side of the bargain because there are bad actors out there, it doesn't make sense to trust them or tell them what's going on until after everything is settled... and even then when litigation is such a concern...

It's a much bigger deal for the other party tough. The employee is typically more dependent on having a job than the employer is dependent on having an engineer. Granted a staff level engineer is not quite the same, especially for a small firm.

What's lamentable is that ghosting has become part of our culture. People think it's the done thing, so they do it. Just as with dating, how hard is it really to keep track of who you owe a response and send them a short piece saying you're no longer interested? It's especially grating in your situation where you know there's no reason why they don't just tell you they have a better offer.

I think that's the key actually. People don't like the icky feeling of negotiating, where you often keep cards to yourself. When game ends and you get your desired outcome, you continue to feel bad about it. And you certainly don't want to be called out and have to defend yourself, even if picking a better offer is perfectly fair.

I have a third pov of this, I was interviewing for a large financial company in an SE role, everything went well, the team seemed really good and projects were interesting, good quality of interviews too.

It was through an employment agency and so I was negotiating via them. Recieved the offer and needed a few days just to review it and consider everything. I told the recruiter this. Then had a medical emergency which had me in hospital for 3 weeks, on the 3rd day in hospital however, I fired an email from my phone just to let the recruiter know what the situation was. Thought nothing of it.

When I got out of hospital after a serious surgery etc, was distracted in fairness. I had emails from the recruiter which bordered on threats about how I was completely unprofessional for not regularly updating him, and how the city is small and the company is big etc.

Needless to say I wasn't too bothered but it took me back a bit.

Think of the bullet you dodged.

A job applicant doesn’t have a hiring department with a codified process and team so it’s not quite symmetric.

Ghosting is really the worst. And it doesn't matter if it's a romantic relationship, friendship or professional interaction. Why can't people see themselves on the other side of the line?

Two in the ANS is as good as one in the BIS

This is so satisfying to hear. Always happy to see management and recruitment types being used up and hung to dry.

You most all the time or at least most of the time!

I'm posting this from a throwaway and not my regular account so not to incriminate myself. But my experience outlined below is 100% truthful.

Stripe is arrogant. I have many years of solid and proven experience. They called me out of the blue and I accepted to speak to the hiring manager. The recruiter sounded very arrogant in first conversation. She rushed me to schedule an interview but inexplicably postponed the interview with hiring manager by four weeks once I accepted.

When I reached out to an acquaintance of mine who had worked in Stripe in the interim, she said that they are simply in search of marquee brand names in your resume and it is a mess inside. As per her, the people who work there are simply too egotistic. Even people who just happened to have won the "lucky sperm/egg" lottery by joining a rocket ship early on considered themselves as geniuses.

In my experience in interviewing with them I felt the same. I sensed an undercurrent of arrogance, feeling of superiority, etc. They deserve praise for what they have accomplished so far and their valuation but it feels like it has gone to their head for many employees who work there now.

Needless to say, I didn't get the job. I'm not bitter but felt that they didn't treat me well in the process...

If you are interviewing there, beware.....

I'm sorry; that's bad. Can you email me with details so that we can investigate what happened? (patrick@stripe.com; others welcome to do so too.)

More than 10,000 people have interviewed at Stripe so far this year, so "several sigma bad" still happens to an unfortunate number of people. That said, we want those who interact with Stripe to come away having been treated professionally and respectfully, and our recruiting team cares about fixing our process failures. On behalf of Stripe, I apologize.

I’m not convinced this several sigma explanation applies:

- 35% of interviewers did the 20 min thing. Why haven’t you said you’re going to investigate this specific issue yet? You should have enough data to now go back to the team and find out if this is a real issue, rather than waiting for op’s email.

- this was a senior manager position and already in the offer stage. So you can’t compare that sample size to the top of the funnel.

Spot on. Patrick and Brian Armstrong are on PR damage control 101 and one of the multiple reasons I left this manipulative industry.

You caught Patrick on his false argument.

Patrick did not mention the number of Manager of Managers that interviewed at Stripe this year, did not address the "I will only need 20 minutes for this" culture and did not apologise for the ghosting.

The PR spin:

> professionally and respectfully, and our recruiting team cares about fixing our process failures

If Patrick is interested in fixing anything is up to him and he absolutely does not need an email from OP for this.

The fact Patrick is asking for OP to doxx Stripe’s hiring managers should tell you anything you need to know about how Patrick operates.

Publicly, Patrick cannot afford Stripe to begin to develop the slightest trace of a bad place to work and a bad reputation for such a niche recruiting position as engineering Manager of Managers at Stripe is damaging.

Patrick is asking OP to doxx the senior leader in the office OP applied to.

> His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people"

hey danrocks, bear in mind if you discuss details of your experience with pc, you run the risk of outing the senior leader you consulted in step 10.

You may wish not to do this. As much as the feedback would probably help Stripe and possibly even yourself, given the post you've written, it sounds like it may put someone else's career on the line.

It sounds like it's a failure of coordination more than anything; a broken system not a person acting in a way that should lead to termination (unless they are unwilling to fix said system over time).

I think if they cared to look at their internal data they'd be able to figure out who he was without much trouble at all based on this thread and his recent post history here (named 'Dan', interviewed recently for manager-of-manager position, lives in ~~place~~, currently works for ~~someone~~).

Stripe recruiters were the worst I've dealth with in the past twelve months.

Extensive talk about a position. Then ghosted. Then invited for an interview with the hiring manager, who then cancelled last minute. Invited to do an ad-hoc interview during one of my work meetings. Denied and asked for different time.

Ghosted.

Definitely dodged a bullet with these guys. Some companies think because they're growing they can do whatever.

I seriously doubt they're as bad as google recruiters. I had almost 3 job offers from them over a period of ~10 years, and I finally decided I will never interview there ever again.

Hey Patrick,

You might look to improve y'all's process by looking at datatdog's interview process. I have never felt more appreciated and well treated than interviewing there.

1) they always give feedback

2) they have more generic positions, get you in the door to some small filter interviews, and then shop you around to find the right team for you, instead of the reverse approach where people shotgun resumes across your company trying to get in the door. The problem with the recruiter and multiple HMs I talked to at stripe is they didn't seem to care about getting people to work at stripe, only getting people to work in their org which didn't have open positions for X.

3) incredibly quick and responsive through the process. My recruiter at stripe did this!

Love what you're doing for science, Take care

Incredibly ironic comment - I interviewed at datadog for an engineering position and left feeling atrocious about it.

They gave me a large and complex take home assignment which I put a significant amount of time into, and which I felt I did a very excellent job with. They declined afterwards without a word. We didn't discuss it, no feedback was given. Just unmatched on the hiring platform we were using.

I am an experienced developer at a reasonably prominent company and I know I wrote the code well for that assignment. The fact that they would assign something so time consuming and then take no time to go over it at all and reject it so out of hand left me with a very very bad taste in my mouth.

Datadog gave me a take-home assignment, which I could have done sloppily in one day or done well in two days. They added "we respect your time, so don't spend more than 3 hours on it". Then they rejected my solution because I didn't guard for all kinds of invalid input that was never mentioned anywhere.

I had a funny experience with DataDog. I applied to a new grad position. Few months go by, and then I receive an email to schedule an onsite, well that seemed odd since I hadn't done any coding test, recruiter call or anything else. I scheduled an on-site and went there. I tried asking what the normal process is, and everyone just kept replying "you are on the last step". So I just ended up going through the interviews. Then couple days after received an email that someone had checked the paperwork and said that they had thought I was someone else lol

2 is such an obvious thing for a tech company to do. How can a candidate know the exact best team for them to apply to? This is the purpose of the recruiting team.

Even though I did not accept Datadogs offer, I can only confirm this - my interview experience at Datadog for a software engineer position was truly amazing. I could feel they care.

Can confirm, at least for France - the interviewing experience at Datadog was amazing. Everyone was very humane and very responsive. I accepted the offer.

Only some of this could be explained by "several sigma" of bad luck. The rest is either the candidate misunderstanding/distorting the process or a structural hiring problem.

I interview a lot of candidates. I just can't imagine to make a hiring decision for a dev, let alone a manager that manages other managers, based on 20 minute discussion.

I also hire a lot of people and I tend to agree with you. It’s hard to think that I misunderstood the process, however, when a start date was mentioned.

What size org do you manage? At some point your choice is to either talk to candidates for shorter times or delegate the entire decision to managers under you. While 20 min definitely isn't enough to fully evaluate a candidate it can be enough time to assess potential gaps you see based upon the feedback of the rest of your team. It can also be enough time to make an intro and make it clear to the candidate that someone very senior values their role.

> I interview a lot of candidates. I just can't imagine to make a hiring decision for a dev, let alone a manager that manages other managers, based on 20 minute discussion.

But what if others in their 20 minute discussions with the candidate ask the questions you would have asked if you had spent longer interviewing them?

If the hiring decision is based on the feedback from all the interviewers I could see having many of those interviews be short interviews where the interviewer just concentrates on finding out one important input for the group decision working, provided that there are enough interviews to cover all the important things and if there has been some planning on the part of the company to coordinate who covers what in the 20 minute interviews.

I have no idea if Stripe does the necessary coordination to make that work, but the fact that several of the interviewers started out mentioning they would only need 20 minutes suggests that it was some sort of organized thing.

Describing your recruiting process as a random variable...wut? Does the hiring manager make decisions randomly? Someone calls up, the hiring manager gets out the lucky 8-ball, and it comes out "give a 29th percentile recruiting interview", and the manager just straps on the Biggles goggles to bomb the candidate. Why even say that to someone who is pissed off with your recruiting process? Just don't say anything.

As you say, it is very hard to attribute a bad recruiting process to something that is non-structural...no matter how many thousands of people you hire.

Humans make mistakes, and Patrick apologized on the behalf of this experience.

While there may be opinions on whether or not this “makes it right”, apologies in today’s world should still carry some worth.

The most important part of an apology is, imo, sincerity. I think Patrick is chiming into this thread to perform damage control, not to sincerely apologize.

This, to me, is evident in the fact that OP interviewed for a specific, high level position, and named specific, repeated bad processes that go beyond Patrick's generic "We interview a lot of people so some people are going to have a bad time."

Patrick has more than enough information to start fixing things on a systemic level. Instead, he optimizes for the appearance of contrition without committing to fixing any of the specific problems mentioned.

Talk about great HR support

"several sigma bad" is really still not OK. As a founder, you earn vastly vastly outsized compensation because you're supposed to be able to build an amazing team with an amazing funnel. You deal with payments and fraud, so you know that "several sigma bad" is not acceptable. Your employees and investors deserve a refund.

I'm not defending Stripe here but this is a rediculous take. Perfection is unachievable.

you're supposed to be able to build an amazing team with an amazing funnel.

I think it would be hard to scale a business to the size of Stripe without those things. It's fair to say that, no matter what else you might believe, pc has managed to do that. Ergo, by your own logic, he has earned his comp.

I recently did a few interviews & was shocked at how often I would complete an entire loop (coffee chat, tech screen, full-day 'onsite') only to be completely ghosted. I'm totally fine with rejection, I don't think I've ever done better than 50/50 for an offer, but it's super unprofessional to just ghost someone who's given you 5+ hours.

It's not that hard to just send a "thanks but no thanks" email.

To name names: Flymachine.io, Boulevard, and Pepper.

Even an automated email is better than no reply. Past companies that I interviewed that ghosts me, I would never apply again in the future. It’s just basic manners. Having too many candidates is not an excuse. Especially if you want to hire senior programmers because we always remember. HR is usually the first impression candidates have with the company and it’s a lasting one. This is also why HR and recruiters are viewed so poorly with many programmers.

Naming names, AWS ghosted me after a full day of interviews. Actually that entire process was a charlie foxtrot. Not that I think I earned an offer in that interview, but they didn't earn an acceptance either.

I have a theory that companies do this when they don't trust their own hiring process. They're waiting for you to ring them and say, "Hey, I've got an offer from X? Are you guys going to get off the pot?"

I once followed up and the manager invited me onsite just to explain me in person that I get rejected... I took a day off for that.

hate to say it but I've been trained to assume it's a no unless I get a yes within a week.

to name names - Microsoft, its been over a month and no response after onsite loop.

Boulevard actually reached out to me & apologized, apparently the 2 people working with me both left the company. If there's a good reason for someone to fall through the cracks, I suppose that would definitely be it!

I can say that I've otherwise had a great experience with Boulevard.

Thanks for sharing the company names, I respect that!

Never heard of any of those names, so you dodged a few turds!

I had a pretty similar experience interviewing at Stripe for a (frontline) Manager position a couple of years ago.

I get scheduled for a screening call with the hiring manager. The hiring manager doesn't call me. Recruiter follows up and offers to bring me onsite (no apology offered) without need for screen.

I'm shared the interview loop which has about 5 people (including the hiring manager who ghosted me).

Interviews were not very technical, just casual chats about management stories.

When it came time for the hiring manager to interview me, I got stood up. Again. Sat 45 minutes in the interview room with no one to check on me or inform if the HM slot will be replaced. Recruiting coordinator was unreachable.

At the end of the last interview, I told the recruiting walking me out about the no-show. They shrugged (zero apology again.)

This was followed up by 2.5 weeks of radio silence despite me seeking for updates.

Ultimately they responded to my follow up e-mails with standard rejection template.

> When it came time for the hiring manager to interview me, I got stood up. Again. Sat 45 minutes in the interview room with no one to check on me or inform if the HM slot will be replaced. Recruiting coordinator was unreachable.

Hah! After 15 minutes of waiting, I'd get up, walk out of the interview room, and wander around the company, talking to random employees, trying to learn just how much of a shit show the place was, if only for morbid curiosity's sake.

Somehow this is even worse than what I went through. At least I didn't get stood up in person.

Wow..

I mean that Seems like typical big company behavior. Maybe you are so special that you usally get treated better but a typical non tech engineer gets that treatment in big companies

This is almost point-for-point identical (minus the offer talk) to the other Stripe interviewing stories I've heard lately. (Context: Management positions. Not sure about IC roles).

From the outside, I wonder if Stripe has reached the point of notoriety where they can get away with poor hiring and even workplace practices because nobody wants to admit getting rejected by Stripe. Every negative anecdote I've seen has been shared under anonymity or strict confidentiality. I assume Stripe knows they're a hot commodity and therefore can get away with negative interview practices.

The one named anecdote I've heard about Stripe was from someone who got fired because they said something negative about Elon Musk on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/isosteph/status/1459566899151396867

I applied at Stripe a couple of years ago through their website when I was looking to switch jobs. The position I applied for was on one of their backend teams. I had 5.5 years of work experience at a FAANG, excellent university grades if they care and 6 years experience with Java (which I believe was the primary language for the role) and within 30 seconds of applying I got a rejection email. Obviously an automated email because my resume didn't have a certain keyword or keywords their bot was looking for. Weird company... I don't feel entitled to an interview but you'd think at the bare minimum a human would look at it... (or at the very least add a sleep(time.hours(6)) to make it look like a human looked at it). Made all the more funny with a recruiter from the company contacting me around the same time on linkedin for positions.

Had that happen to me (other company). I would be less pissed if I hadn't to manually copy and paste my resume data into their shit RMS.

A couple of years ago I applied with a similar resume, and even wrote a cover letter because I was worried that I would be auto-rejected if I didn’t include it. I spent far too long on the cover letter, I probably spent 2 or 3 hours on it, normally I’d never do something like that but Stripe had such a great reputation on this site I figured it was a solid investment. I sent my application and heard nothing. Figured I had been ghosted and moved on. Applied, passed phone screens, passed interview loops, and received offers from other companies. The day I accepted one of those offers, some 1.5 or 2 months after I applied to Stripe, a Stripe recruiter reached out to me basically biting on the application.

How was it that 3 other companies were able to fit and entire interview cycle in in the time it took Stripe to get back to me about my application? I turned the recruiter down and wrote it off as a fluke or some sort of mixup. I’ve been ghosted before, I’ve been auto-rejected before, but I’ve never been pseudo-ghosted wherein the recruiting team effectively ghosts you by ignoring your application for 6 weeks and then reached out to you once you already had offers in hand. Weird company, for sure.

It happens. In the mid 90s I interviewed with a windowing pc operating system company in the pacific northwest. Next day the guy calls me, says they're really excited to have me on board, they're discussing the best team for me to join. Then nothing. Meanwhile I visit my friend who is working for a web browser start-up in Mountain View. He suggests I interview there. A couple months later after I'd started work at that place, the first guy calls me, says they're ready to rock and roll. I tell him it's been a while, and where I'm currently working. He doesn't see too happy. Worked out well for me though.

> There is significant shuffling of interviewers and schedules. One almost has to be on-call to be able to react quickly.

This is a sign that an organization is doing too many fucking interviews. When you get scheduled for an interview every day of the week, you are quite literally forced to stop caring about the impact of cancelling interviews last minute. The recruiters may try to find an alternate interviewer, but often the candidate gets shafted. I never realized how common forcing the candidate to reschedule was (I had never experienced it while interviewing) but it happens to probably half a dozen candidates per day at my 600 person company.

Stripe notoriously went through a “hyper growth” (doubling headcount year over year when already past several hundred employees) phase for a number of years. That is an unspeakable torture to subject an organization to.

+1 to this as someone who is currently on the border of doing too many interviews. At worst, it can have a cascading effect because recruiters then scramble to find a different interviewer, scheduling things last-minute that then may be canceled last minute. I don't know what the solutions are other than inviting fewer candidates to interview.

I myself did 40 interviews last quarter and it was very hard to keep all conversations engaging and interesting. Fortunately having a modicum of standardizing feedback + topics to be covered helps, but I agree with your point that over-interviewing is bad for business.

Yeah I’ve been ghosted by Stripe twice after very positive “this is great we’ll set up next steps” meetings.

One of which was a 1:1 with the CTO, really positive stuff. Few days later I emailed a thanks and “would like to talk about next steps”. Nothing. Sent another a couple weeks later. Nada.

Several months later, got a reach out from a team, said I was interested, and the HM said ok yeah I’ll get you set up. Nothing.

I know I’m not the only one, I know of others who have had similar experiences.

It’s just poor form.

> It’s just poor form.

This. This is what I meant with this post above. Poor form. Incompatible with the supposed criticality of the position at stake. I still think Stripe is a great company, was just disappointed at being ignored after all the festivities.

This from someone who does not answer when people ask clarifying questions about his post on HN. Different stakes, sure, but glass houses.

Stripe sucks so much as a company. For one, they classify all businesses catering to LGBTQIA+ clientele as 'Adult Services' and drop them as customers.

But even worse, they do so in a particularly destructive way. The accept the business as a customer at first, and then suddenly withdraw service without warning, leaving the business scrambling to find an alternate credit card processor.

yeah, well - true fact: Stripe does ton of Adult Services shit - they just hide it by farming it out through shady payment services like https://www.bankingcircle.com/ that proxy it for them so it "looks legit". that way the various payment providers can claim legitimacy by saying "stripe is one of our biggest customers" and stripe can say "we dont do shady shit"

In your mind you imagine an HR professional planning your loop, interviewers that are genuinely interested in you, a hiring manager who's carefully read your resumé and has specific questions about your experience. You just (wasted|spent) five or six years and $200,000 on your four year degree. They better be interested, right?

Not.

In reality, a hiring manager clicked on your resume because an algorithm suggested it, told HR to setup a loop, and then promptly forgot you until the day you showed up.

If you're one of the lucky ones, your resume might have actually been read by a human.

The interviewers on the loop are probably not even on the team you'll join if hired.

There's a 90% chance they haven't even read the job requisition for the position you're applying for, if they could even find it. I've had to interview people blind without requisition or resume, and yes I did feel like an idiot both times, a rude one.

The person sitting across from you asking questions probably first learned of your very existence 15 minutes before it began; not because of disinterest, but because HR assigned the interview with that short of a window! re: x out sick, y in important meeting, etc.

All of this is true for at least 2 FAANGs and 1 MSFT in my experience as an interviewer and interviewee on over 50 loops over a decade.

What I'm saying is there is no spit or polish to the hiring process, not even at competitive companies, not even at the big ones, perhaps especially so because the assumption will be that you actually know what you're doing since you were bold enough to apply and even bolder to attend an interview loop at one of these "amazing" companies.

The musical chairs you experienced at Stripe, if explained at all, will be calendar conflicts, meeting overruns, sick employees, fire drills within, etc., all of those ambiguities that constantly interrupt IT. The show doesn't stop within because you're being interviewed on Wednesday. You are not the show. That $1000 suit you're wearing, the only suit you'll ever buy or ever wear ever again, bought you 60 minutes (or 20 at Stripe for Mgr of Mgrs).

The real explanation you will never know, but something as facile as the third guy on the loop not liking the fact that you have a full head of hair and he has none is actually sufficient, if you understand what I mean, that hiring is messy and opaque and human and, therefore, often ridiculous.

Would you believe one of these companies has had for decades now, as a core competency to hire for, “A tolerance for ambiguity”? I always loved that one.

Spot on. And even people that normally can be counted on to put in effort and keep their word, about 40% of those people have fallen apart as workers under covid.

I think you make some good points about the human part of the hiring process. Things happen - and hiring managers are often in a lot of meetings that run over.

But as someone who's been on both sides of the loop, I have very little faith in the hiring practices at them. And it comes down to something you said:

> What I'm saying is there is no spit or polish to the hiring process

This is totally unacceptable in my opinion. Devs spend months (or years) of prep to pass 1-2 days of rigorous whiteboarding, but HR can't work out a schedule and send emails / make phone calls properly? And don't even get me started about the shitshow that is the onboarding process at these megacorps. And these processes being total shitshows makes the failures intentional.

These processes are exactly the kind of thing I target for refinement. The process should be documented, it should be robust, and it should make things better for everyone involved.

Well it's seems like in 2021 with so much tech and automation resources available it should be possible to set up a process that does not ghost candidates.

This is the best comment of this entire thread

I went through the hiring loop recently when switching jobs.

Decided to do the right thing for once and make a serious effort at investigating my options.

I started out very sincere and honest, but two months of being fucked over by companies left and right in the interview process definitely changed me.

In the end I found a nice position working with honest and empathic people, but the path that lead there was a total disaster.

I had an analogous experience with Toyota's self-driving division, Woven Planet. Not nearly as bad, but some similarities. The recruiter had three calls with me first, asking rote questions that were clearly scripted. She asked the same questions multiple times. Afterward, she had me fill out a form with my experience, strengths, weaknesses, etc. She had me read the profiles of various people at the company, and insisted I read through the entire website as well.

After all this, she insisted that I sift through all the publicly listed positions and give her a sorted list of the ones I thought I was suited for, along with a checklist of how I matched each qualification. She then asked me to only select one, even though it wasn't clear what each group did or which role I was best qualified for or interested in. Then she asked for open slots to start doing interviews. Lastly she asked for a salary range. I let her know my FAANG salary, and she gasped and paused a bit. She quickly ended the discussion and said she'd call me in the next couple days with an interview schedule. Then she ghosted me for a month. She eventually mailed me and let me know they weren't ready to move forward.

By the way, the Woven Planet website is a mess, and the company probably is too. You'd never guess they are an automated driving division. They have all these ideas of a "future city" they are building and are paving over a section of land near Mt Fuji to build this "future city". They've hired Japanese speaking foreigners to do all these touchy-feely motivational videos that have nothing to do with self driving vehicles. Complete lack of focus. I lost a lot of respect for Toyota after this experience.

If it makes you feel better, you dodged a bullet there not wasting time with Woven Planet [0].

[0]: https://i.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/pi6mdk/psa_i_waste...

> You'd never guess they are an automated driving division.

Woven Planet's automated driving division was acquired from Lyft earlier this year [1]. They probably are still going through the integration.

[1]: https://investor.lyft.com/news-and-events/news/news-details/...

> To me it hints that Engineering MoM is not a very technical position.

Is a manager-of-managers ever a very technical position? I am one and almost nothing I do as part of that job requires any differentiated technical ability. An Excel pivot table is as a complex as I’d need to get by.

(I do technical items on the side so as to not lose my mind, but I’m not surprised by the hiring loop not being very technical.)

I’m a manager of managers at my current big tech employer and here we are still required to be quite technical. I’d think that a startup 1/25 the size would benefit from this approach, hence my surprise. I don’t know how to do pivot tables though.

Here's my own little story. (not as bad as the OP)

About a year ago, I was reading Byrne Hobart's excellent newsletter on financial stuff (no affiliation, but it's well worth its money), and I see an ad where they're looking for a head of strategy.

To apply, you simply had to email John Collison (the youngest of the Collison brothers) with your idea about it.

I thought I had a shot, given my experiences, and decided to spend several hours to prepare a memo, that I shared with them.

Of course, I thought, after all this work, and considering that this candidature comes from a respected, still niche, newsletter, and given my resume and past experience (ex AWS - first hire in Europe in 2008 -, ex VMware, etc - I'm not trying to beat my chest here, just stating that I objectively had a good resume for a position like this), at least I should get one chance to interview, or worst case, a simple but kind "we saw your note, not interested, good luck".

Of course, as you can guess, I've never heard back. Reached out again after a couple of weeks, and still nothing from them.

Reached out to a friend who works at Stripe, asked him if he could help with my application. He says he will try, but then... nothing.

Ok, Stripe, I guess you won't have me.

Side note: compare that with how I got my job at Amazon Web Services, back in 2008 [1]. Completely different experience.

Eventually, after I gave up on this opportunity, I decided to make the memo into a blog post [0], omitting or tweaking a few minor details. It might be worth a read, and I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

[0]: https://simon.medium.com/stripes-opportunity-reinventing-cus...

[1]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...

So you just sent “a memo” for an ad you found on a newsletter and never heard back, and this is shocking somehow?

Thanks for sharing your story.

but lol this strategy memo is so oblivious to the company's current strategy and just unfit. Not surprised it did't get a reply.

It's a net negative. Zero useful thoughts in there for Stripe's founders.

The worst part is trying to sound smart while expressing really superficial thoughts. No bigger sign of incompetence.

I recently interviewed for Stripe for an SWE role. I went through what must be 3 rounds (each about an hr) before going to virtual on-site. My on-site had 5 rounds and I thought I did fairly well in each except one dedicated to a “live debugging” session where the interviewer insisted I install IntelliJ (me being a VIM person) and we spent roughly 30min together installing and setting up different things in IntelliJ.

Three days later I got one of those generic thank you for applying in Stripe emails. I reached out to the recruiter and asked for specific feedback and explained my interview experience but I heard nothing back.

I spent about 1.5days of my personal time off which at my current market rate is close to 1k USD. I sincerely believe we SWE should be paid to do the interviews at a prorated basis of their salaries or at least some level of expenses. With virtual on-site companies basically don’t have to do anything other than employing a few sourcers to hire potential candidates which incentivizes these sort of poor candidate experience.

> I spent about 1.5days of my personal time off which at my current market rate is close to 1k USD.

Seriously, then don't interview.

everybody complains, nobody offers a solution. I'll start.

1. when you're first contacted by a recruiter, company provides a written set of values/principles that the company expects from its recruiters and staff, contact info if you feel the company didn't live up to these principles, or have a suggestion for how to improve the process.

2. tie x% of recruiter comp to good behavior, and y% of interviewers.

3. automatically send surveys to candidates (both accepted and rejected) and check to see if you feel they could've streamlined the process or made it more pleasant. Capture an NPS score. Offer a cash bonus thank-you and another for referring friends.

other ideas?

I’d assume that Stripe isn’t trying to solve problems like this because of a lack of priority. Not because of a lack of ideas. A big company gearing up for a blockbuster IPO probably has many other problems to solve with higher priorities.

Definitely agree about the excess of complaining in this thread though. HN isn’t a good forum for discussions like this, but that’s probably more a social media problem than an HN problem.

Good ideas, good companies will of course already be doing stuff like this. This is a story because $BELOVED_TECH_COMPANY was bad to interview for with a side helping of “mate says it’s chaos over there”

Stripe already supposedly sends surveys to candidates, but even after asking for the survey on HN, having pc ask me to ask again via email, and asking via email, I have not received it.

I recently got a new job after around 6 months of searching and I was appalled by the practices of many well-known tech companies. Ghosted by multiple places, bait-and-switched multiple times (I was in secops/SRE and trying to move to appsec/offsec), you name it. It’s wild how unprofessional recruiters can be.

I did have some great experiences though; in particular Box, Airbnb, and Datadog.

I'm also in Cloud Security/SecOps looking to make a switch to Offsec/Pentesting. Would be great to connect and learn about your experience switching. My email is in my profile if you are willing to reach out.

To the first point, of “I only need 20 minutes for this” that’s a classic get out of jail free card if they’ve decided you’re not a good fit or things aren’t going well. It manages your expectations and they can end the interview early.

That is extremely unprofessional and a bad look for the interviewer. I have done over a 100 interviews including some really bad ones, never have I ever cut one short. When you are interviewing you are representing the company, whenever I interviewed someone even if I knew it was going to be a clear no, I tried to make them feel good about the process as what that person is going to go out and say directly reflects on the company and future hires. 20 mins of your time is a drop in the bucket in terms of impact of getting a bad reputation, not only are you potentially shooting yourself in the foot with other candidates but leaving a bad taste in the mouth of the one you are interviewing who might in the future would otherwise reapply at a different stage in their career if/when they become a stronger candidate.

That's unacceptable, in my opinion.

I work at a company that grew more than 10x in under 2 years from a couple dozen engineers to hundreds. I personally interviewed well over 100 engineers. My time was valuable, but not so valuable that I couldn't spend an hour productively with each candidate. And certainly not by making them feel like it's an extended failure. On the super rare occasion that someone was gigantic "no", it's still possible to make the candidate feel valued.

One time, I had to shut down an interview cycle because a candidate was abusive to one of my reports. That's the only time I've cut a round short.

So they start the interview by lying to you in case they need it later?

I run a fast growing, succesful business. I only schedule first interviews for 30 minutes anyway and rarely use the whole time. It's just my nature, I get to the point of things quickly.

> It manages your expectations and they can end the interview early.

Do you mean they can end the interview earlier than 20 minutes, or that it actually takes more than 20 minutes but they can end it at 20 minutes mark?

Either case it doesn't sound good. If they said 20 minutes it shouldn't take much more or much less than 20 minutes.

This was also said in the post-loop interview. After I was approved and congratulated. Makes zero sense in my book.

that's unprofessional and shitty behavior. if the interview isn't going well and you want to cut it short, you can find some spine and say so.

If a process takes more than three interviews (allowing for an actually role-applicable take home) and two weeks, I bow out. Toss me some array shuffling algorithm challenge like I'm fresh out of school and I'm out as well. OP is just more evidence that tech hiring has been infiltrated by grifters lacking creativity and inventing processes to justify large recruiting/hiring orgs and oversized processes. It's just horribly broken in the majority.

Them: "I will only need 20 minutes for this. "

Me: "I only need a few seconds. Either you are more perceptive than anyone else I've ever met or you or as arrogant as anyone I've met. Either way I'm not a good fit. Thank-you and good luck in your search!"

I wish I had the finances to be able to deliver this burn.

Easy. They were keeping you as back up. They were not sure if their most preferred candidate would accept the offer, so they kept you in a loop until the other person joined. Looks like he did.

That's what my wife said as well. I would still understand this, except the "when can you start?" and the ghosting part.

I have no idea what the situation is at Stripe, but there are some trends that explain this experience in the larger environment right now.

Recruiters are extremely hard to find. Comp has soared. Many have left old jobs to go to new jobs.

Generally, people rely on recruiters to manage the communication with candidates. Very high turnover leads to very high rate of things being dropped.

Compounding this, hiring great engineers is extremely difficult right now. So recruiters have a list of 10,000 things to do. It’s not ok that recruiters might be less effective in candidate management for no-hires, but it makes sense.

Finally, add on top of this that candidates are being less respectful of company time as well. Candidates are ghosting and not responding like never before. The market and the remoteness of the experience are turning hiring from a human activity into a transaction, on all sides.

> Finally, add on top of this that candidates are being less respectful of company time as well. Candidates are ghosting and not responding like never before.

Managers started this trend so I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for those who suddenly find themselves on the wrong end of it. Even kindergarteners understand you should treat others how you would like to be treated. All of these “busy” managers who don’t like being ghosted better have also ceased ghosting candidates before complaining about the practice.

I was interviewing with Stripe about a year ago and had a very similar experience.

I also heard that attrition is really high and work-life balance non-existent.

So maybe I was lucky in this case.

It's how it has to be.

This is why you don't need to give a 2 week notice, and you should always have your resume updated.

Need to take an offer knowing odds are a way better one is coming down the pipe, do it. They can lose budget and cut your role before you start.

Don't treat any job like a dream job, if you get there and nothing works, you have a nightmare.

My dream right now is to work hard until I'm 40 and retire. I can't imagine doing this for another 30 years .

dont have kids then

What does this have to do with giving notice? You don't give two weeks notice without a written offer.

So if you get terminated one week in now you can’t go back bc you burned the bridge by not giving the notice? Sounds like fantastic plan!

I hope this discussion doesn’t get automatically down-ranked just because it talks about Stripe in a negative light. This is an important discussion to have given how common this occurs at tech startups. It is rude and impolite for companies (not just Stripe) to behave in such a manner when hiring. It’s almost as if they forgot what basic manners are and yet they demand so much of the candidate.

We haven't downweighted this thread. Normally we downweight such threads because otherwise the front page would mostly consist of them, and mostly stacked at the top, too. Not that we exclude them altogether, but indignation routinely attracts tons of upvotes and one of moderation's jobs is to jig the system out of its failure modes.

However, we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are involved in the story. That doesn't mean we don't moderate them at all—just less. But in this case we've not touched it, partly because of that core principle and partly because the thread is arguably more interesting reading than most of its ilk, at least in places.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

This sort of nonsense seems to be common everywhere. A friend of mine is interviewing for senior product manager positions in Amazon India and the process is just as, if not more, broken. Multiple interviews for multiple positions, interviews go great, no rejections, just ghosting from HR. In the most recent application, after the initial phone interview, the HR contact responds to a what's going on query with "we are waiting on interview slots from all panelists for the loop".. Only a week later sends another email "The team has decided to fill the position internally". That is fine, the hiring manager's decision, but they do it by reposting the same exact same job again, I suspect as an end run around the hiring process since there is an application that is at the loop stage. All of this seems so sleazy I can't imagine what it would be to work in such a place.

I hear of people interviewing regularly and I honestly don't get it. I couldn't be motivated to go through the process without the intent to leave my job and take one at the new company. It's very binary for me, I'm either definitely looking or not looking.

Me too that's just masochism to me. Begging for acceptance in a constantly shifting system with no feedback is my hell. I will only do that when highly motivated.

Some of my friends make it a priority to switch jobs every 2-3 years, they think that's the fastest way to get ahead. I don't necessarily agree or disagree with that, but if that's one's priority, one would practice interviewing so one can ace the "real" interviews when it's time.

Interviewing is a skill like any other. You have to practice to be good at it, and actual interviews are good practice.

But I wouldn’t go out and interview a lot unless I was planning or willing to leave.

But once a year it’s probably a good idea to do it to keep from getting rusty. It also helps keep a healthy perspective that you actually can change jobs if you wanted to.

> References are contacted and feedback is confirmed positive

The references idea is really weird (we do not practically have this in France). Has there even been a refence who was not in awe about the demi-god-genius-philanthropist that they are asked about?

The only one time i was asked for references, I send the contacts to good friends asking them not to do too much theater. Surprise! they came back positive.

I got one true, unexpected reference, when my university was asked about my PhD (confirmation of title only) and they came back with really nice words (again, nobody was asking for a reference, just a confirmation of tilte - bt they added it anyway and it was genuine (and yes, I knew the person who spontaneously wrote it :))

> Has there even been a refence who was not in awe about the demi-god-genius-philanthropist that they are asked about?

I’ve only checked maybe 50-100 developer references over the years, but I can think of at least 3 that sunk the candidate outright and many more that were lukewarm. Enthusiastic references were uncommon and stood out.

Normally, in my experience as an individual contributor, the references aren’t even contacted. I have had one place contact my references and it is the place I’m starting work in 2 weeks :)

> The references idea is really weird (we do not practically have this in France). Has there even been a refence who was not in awe about the demi-god-genius-philanthropist that they are asked about?

It happens; I gave a negative reference to someone who had lied substantially about their role with the company.

I was ghosted so many times. Finally landed a job with like-minded professionals. It would be nice to have a curated list of companies to avoid or perhaps companies that have decent interview practices.

This was fuckedcompany.com back in the 90's, though companies and their lawyers didn't appreciate the satire.

Blind is still an alright forum for a gut check I think?

The first time I interviewed for Google, I went through a couple rounds and, then, the recruiter vanished. I tried to reach out a couple times over the next couple months, and had regular chats with another googler who's a dear friend of mine, and, when they finally decided to move on with it, the position was closed because it stayed open for too long.

My friend apologized profusely, said she felt deeply ashamed, that that wasn't the Google way of doing it. Quite frankly, I was OK. I was never very invested in becoming a googler, as cool as it was at the time (not that it isn't now, but it was cooler back then).

Humans are flawed creatures.

> but the ghosting part

This is a huge personal pet peeve. Being ghosted after being made a verbal offer, or for that matter even just after making it through multiple rounds of interviews, is just flat out rude. I keep a list of companies that behave this way towards me, so that if I am ever contacted by them in the future, I can point to their previous conduct as an explainer for why I will not be wasting my time with them a second time.

I swore off Stripe after seeing how they treated a former coworker of mine: https://twitter.com/jennleaver/status/1402972896184586244?s=... Your experience with interviewing there does not surprise me after hearing similar stories about them.

Hey, that account has gone private. Could you share a TL:DR of what happened if possible?

Adding my story interviewing at Stripe. Went for a IC engineering role. Flew out to one of their offices for the onsite interview. Ghosted after returning home.

Reading this thread makes me realise that I'm not alone in this experience.

I take it you are not from around here. People in this area are masters of flowery noncommittal. For example, you might ask somebody if they are interested in doing something and they say "Wow that sounds like a great idea." Translation: not interested.

In reading through your experience, they did not seem to give you a firm offer. Sadly this is kind of typical around here though I really wish it wasn't. I have had to translate the SFspeak to foreign companies doing business here several times who were just as confused as you.

Well, I see what you mean, having worked in the US, but this wasn't in the US. Maybe flowery noncommittal has become a global phenomenon? If so, I'll have trouble navigating it.

Please write a tutorial.

Not taking sides on this one other than to say I’ve been on both sides.

- I’ve been at “we agree on comp and the letter is coming” from a boutique consultancy only to learn “the CEO didn’t really approve funding it. But can you help us understand the market we were going to have you help us with?”

- I’ve been ready to make an offer for a funded position only to have the SVP say “Upon further consideration we have it leveled wrong” and then have to apologize to the candidate. (Who then went to the SVP to complain about me)

The lesson is these things happen in large and small companies even when everyone has the best of intentions. The situation sucks for all involved when it does. It’s not avoidable, but frequency can be managed. (Are you giving simultaneous offers for the same position?)

My only experience recruiting with this firm is being introduced to a recruiter via friend of one the folks listed in the thread. I had a quick HR screen. After 2 weeks I got a “We are going in another direction” position. Just one data point. I wish it had worked out.

Had similar experiences with two companies few months back for Senior MLE/Lead DS role. It seems practice of ghosting after selection and verbal commitment to offer is widespread. It's terrible practice they ask you to resign and join asap saying that offer will be made in few days and then they ghost. What a waste of time of everyone involved !

Stripe has been giving horrible interview experiences to LOTS of candidates over the years, and they are very unserious about how they treat potential employes. They are lucky they are hot, cause the voice is starting to spread and the pool of people willing to be dicked around to work at a company starts shrinking after you have a certain reputation.

I was interviewed for the senior software engineer role and I have cleared the first coding interview round. It was HackerRank challenge and I pretty positive that it went really well. After that HR called me about an introductory call. I've mentioned about how I got into the software engineering and what are my passion in the payment industry and how I can help stripe grow as a company. I also mentioned about the indiehackers website a lot. At first HR doesn't know anything what I'm talking. She acted like she knows about the company. Anyway after few days I got the email saying that mine got rejected. I'm still thinking about what I have mentioned wrongly to HR that she got pissed to rejected me in the first place. This may Not a relevant story to the OP but hey just wanted to splash my story on the internet.

> 10) I call up a senior leader in the office I applied to, an acquaintance of mine. His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people". I was shocked with the response.

Stripe is preparing for an IPO, so naturally they will have some chaos in an effort to balloon it as much as possible.

> Stripe is preparing for an IPO,

I was thinking the same but this interview from Stripe’s CEO says otherwise.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/11/23/stripe-very-happy-stayin...

Why on earth are you making excuses for a public company?

Damn, if that's how they treat the higher ups I can only imagine what they would do with IC's lower down the food chain. Stripe were on my "would like to someday work there" list until I read this, now it'd be no way I'd jump through any number of hoops to apply to them.

God, all the finance people in here backbiting each other makes me not want to work for any of you.

The most awkward part of the hiring process for management is when they have a good candidate, who makes it all the way to the offer stage and a better candidate emerges before the offer is accepted. Most managers will sneak the offer to the better candidate, and hope the good candidate stays on the hook while the better candidate hopefully makes it through onboarding.

Most corporate hiring processes are voodoo anyway. A consistent process based on trowing resumes down a staircase and hiring everyone on stair 4 probably will have about as much impact on workforce quality as the random, inconsistent process that is used in most companies, especially when you factor in interview content.

Stripe recruiting is terrible. It's a waterfall of red flags. I don't know how they are managing to grow and have such a great product. After their first call I decided to do not move on.

Pretty sure the “such a great product” is also just PR. I had a much easier time integrating with PayPal (of course, they have other issues not related to onboarding…), Stripe does seem to be better than Visa’s abysmal onboarding though.

I joined Stripe over the summer.

Sorry to hear about the ghosting, my interview experience was very different to yours, no re-scheduling, and my recruiter was great with respect to timely follow up.

Now that I'm at the company, I've seen how much stress folks are under to interview. Stripe is currently exploding in HC and it's definitely taking a toll on folks who are being tasked with multiple interviews per week which include not just the interview itself but evaluation/coordination/feedback/etc.

Welcoming to the tech interviewing world, this is unfortunately a common occurrence.

Didn't realize the ghosting was so common. I had a leadership development and coaching firm approach me to join them, asked me to interview, spent 2.5 hours of my time and then ghosted. I thought this was amusing as it shows piss poor leadership skills and they're supposed to be high quality coaches, sent an emailing saying as such, no reply. In addition to our "Who is hiring?", "who wants to be hired?", we should add "who was ghosted?", heh.

Shout out to Sourcegraph who interviewed me ~Q1, had a good process, and although it wasn't a fit, didn't ghost me. It was one of the better interviews I'd had in my career.

Maybe a red flag came up when checking references?

I thought about it but the recruiter said the feedback was positive, so much so that another hiring manager saw it and wanted to talk about another position.

Even if that had happened, ghosting would hardly be a good course of action, but I’m biased.

I just want to say thanks. Naming and shaming does the rest of us a favour and, hopefully, makes the whole industry better.

If turnover is high, can someone chime in with data as to why?

Are they burning people out with intensity? Firing? Quitting?

Is it 'growth chaos' around a solid product, or is the underlying tech a janky mess?

Is it just an aggressive cull of 'non working experiments' in which people get let go?

Or just a poorly operationalized HR process?

It’s a manager manager position… like not a great place to be in the organizational pyramid. You either hit exec get fired or burn out

Hi danrocks — I'm a tech culture reporter with Protocol, and I'd love to talk with you about your experience for a potential story. If you'd be at all interested in chatting, I'm at akramer@protocol.com and on Signal at 610-701-1197.

Not the same, but somewhat similar to op's predicament: I interviewed at an eCommerce company for a role that I was very suited for. Went through the loop, got positive feedback, was told I'd been chosen as the candidate, and a week later--boom, "the business decided to table the job req".

It's really taxing on applicants when the inner turmoil of a company affects job postings. A company should not post a job role only to revoke it at the final step. You shouldn't be withdrawing a req after candidates begin interviewing.

It was an expensive (time-wise) lesson for me. I really admired this company until I had my chain yanked twice with them.

Hello, I have experienced something similar recently with another tech company, where the hiring manager, HR and myself had agreed on everything including me applying for a visa au my own cost (and naturally stopping the interview process with several other companies). They weren't strangely silent for a month. I applied for the visa, got it andOl once I announced that I had the visa, they didn't want to employ me anymore, citing that the role had been "reformed".

I learnt a month later that my colleague was leaving for this company and position.

> His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people"

What isn't? I see trying to deliver value in spite of an dysfunctional organization a part of my job description.

As an individual contributor, nobody has contacted my references until they've given me a (conditional) offer letter and I've accepted.

Seems like a massive waste of everybody's time otherwise.

In the last 15 years I've had exactly one company contact my references. I went to work for them. It's rare these days, and it's a shame.

Sounds like you were spared an awful employment experience. If their recruiting process is this disorganized, imagine what your day to day will be like. In my career I've learned two lessons:

- verbal anything is worth less than 0 - Don't be the chaser, be the chased

As I've gotten older and more experienced, I've also started to reject interview processes I don't like or offer feedback if it didn't make sense. Obviously I only do this if the risk is low.

This is terrible. Tech recruiting needs some serious change.

As a positive counter point, I got last two contracting jobs by having one lunch/coffee and just talking for half an hour. No grind, no CS questions, not even checking on references... loved the experience.

When I was recruiting we only had a one hour interview. I did ask technical questions, but treated it more like a conversation and all questions were on point (related to the application, no CS algo).

Sorry to hear about this OP. I had a similar ghosting experience @ Twitter.

Interviewed for a Senior SWE position and they made me an offer - I asked for a slight increase in RSUs and the recruiter disappeared. I also sent two follow up emails that I supposed went into the void.

There are a ton of great companies / opportunities out there! Since you can pass their loop I am sure you have the right mindset and skills to pass others - their loss!

Obviously sucks, had a similar experience as an SWE intern and new grad. I even got a written offer which was then later rescinded because of COVID. They said they will honor it for the next cycle, but of course they didn't. After reaching out they wanted to do new full interview loop, and then at the end said "Sorry we don't have any headcount left for this anymore".

With labour shortage I am amazed why people even subject themselves to such treatment.

I would stop the charade at 2) and said I am no longer interested.

I was a founder of a fintech startup (Kash) and I've worked with and around Stripe for about a decade now.

I think I know more fintech startup founders than the average person. I've literally never heard any of my founder friends saying anything about Stripe or Patrick or John acting improperly. They are among the highest integrity people I know.

I had something very similar happen recently with Olive (Columbus, OH). I received a verbal offer and was told to expect it in writing in the coming days. After about a week I pinged the recruiter and was told they had decided not to proceed because of “a change in the company’s yearly plans”. It was all very bizarre.

Reminds me of the interview gauntlet Hashicorp had me do a few years ago.

I’m glad experiences like these are getting exposed, success is no excuse for rudeness.

[0]: https://blog.webb.page/2018-01-11-why-the-job-search-sucks.t...

Hiring process involving multiple decisions makers can drag on- but there’s no excuse for ghosting.

I used to ghost people dating-wise to avoid uncomfortable (it’s not you it’s your dog) conversations until I got ghosted myself. It hurt and got me to remember to close open conversations quickly, perhaps to a fault.

I feel your easily justified frustration. In a period when we complain it’s hard to hire people, companies can’t afford these big blunders.

I also have a question. Is there a reason why you didn’t do #10 as the first step? I think you would have benefited from speaking with your acquaintance before the process.

> For an engineering manager position, I only interviewed with only technical person. To me it hints that Engineering MoM is not a very technical position.

OP can you correct the typo in "with only technical person"? I can think of two very different things you potentially meant.

Just re. point 1, I read somewhere that most interviewers make their initial mind up about a candidate in the first 4 minutes, and the decision changes after that in only a very small % of cases. I realise this is for a 2nd line position, but I suspect the same holds true.

I had a very similar experience with DoorDash this year; I had been several interview rounds and met with people including c-level. The experience made me think the org must be pretty dysfunctional and I dodged a bullet.

I feel like there should be an open standard for companies to say they abide by when recruiting. e.g

1) treat with respect..

2) ...

3) We will never leave interviewees not knowing at what stage they're at

4) We will never leave interviewees not knowing when we will next contact them

That sucks man.

Can you share what kind of questions you were asked during the interview process?

Standard behavioral questions not particularly challenging. The most striking thing is that there is no drill down: questions are independent of each other and interviewers don’t follow-up on the answers, making it hard to establish a conversation.

sometimes companies can be disorganized, especially at various inflection points during their growth.

i had a similar experience with a company years ago... had a laugh about it with some friends and thanked the recruiter for their time anyway. six months later they came back and offered a more defined role, but i was already down the path with a different company.

i think, maybe, publicly shaming the company is not the best strategy. if they figure out it was you, and it does damage to their reputations, none of the people involved will ever want to work with you.

I was curious about this:

>"I get asked for references."

Is this still common? I thought these were such a potential liability in the US that nobody even asked for those any more. Is that just not true in SV maybe?

I can't imagine what circle of hell you are in if there is a position called manager of managers, but it sounds like you dodged a bullet for sure.

It’s the pre executive position and it is absolutely a shit position you don’t want to be stuck in for very long. Work work balance tends to favor more work, and not even work really just status updates and being the whipping person at hour of the night

I think it clarifies things, tbh. Managers of managers used to be called Directors and VPs, but now many companies have Directors as line managers. So at least Manager of Managers is clear in that regard.

I don't think that's the literal name of the position. This is a common term to refer to a manager with an organization of ~20-40 people, where their direct reports are primarily managers themselves as opposed to individual engineers. In most large companies this position is still called something like "Senior Manager" as opposed to Director, VP, etc.

This is what any middle management position really is. You are managing and coaching managers.

holy sh*t. pretty trippy. sucks.

maybe they just figured, look, it's go-time now. we hire at 10x the ideal rate, we'll poison the culture a bit, lose at 10x the ideal rate, but in the end, we'll see the growth we want to see, which is really all that matters at this point. we think we can take on visa/whoever, so let's go.

i applied to stripe, in part, based on their rep as....being big-ish and maybe actually doing something-ish, but still somehow not sucking. and maybe one or more of the founders being irish means they're not quite as monstrous as a typical tech company?

i talked to this recruiter person who was, somehow, amazingly human and basically just nice. i was like...what?

it was actually notable, unusual, very surprising -- not too sure how or why, but seemed almost unbelievable. _just_ shy of me thinking this person was all prozac'd up -- but it was too genuine.

i _think_ i ended up bailing right on the call b/c of....i have no idea, could have been anything. this was low-level IC/technical account manager position.

...adding, i think you (and everyone) should get at least interviewing credit for time served.

like, i just got bounced from a solutions engineer position. i re-applied to a diff position at the same company - support mgr or similar - and i kind of wish details of my interactions to date would make their way into the new application. _maybe_.

i've talked to folks who absolutely hated my guts at some places, so maybe i should want a fresh start each time thru.

and, as for ATSs, i've had more than a couple of folks get back to me after weeks or months saying, "sorry we didn't get back to you, obv this is stupid late, etc." -- for tech, process, whatever reasons.

i wonder if any ATSs actually help you decide which hires worked or not, so that they could improve their process.

like, what if your most effective hiring happened when you only pinged people back between 8 and 9 weeks after first receiving their application?

google always bragged about how awesome they were at hiring -- to the point where they were at least claiming to track some non-obvious measures of quality, etc. i wonder where they're at now. adding, the obvious -- sucky is their painful-as-childbirth all-day interviews, their 30-day long labor-ious interviews, etc.

If I can take a guess...

Recruiters are over-excited sometimes. The recruiter told you that you passed. The recruiter told you that you should expect an offer. The recruiter asked for and checked your references.

The hiring manager may have said very little to this recruiter to encourage this. We don't know whether it was "we're going to hire him" or "he's ok let's talk to a few more people".

So there may be a disconnect between Stripe and the agency they use to hire.

This makes no sense. A company like Stripe has in-house recruiters.

An external recruiter would never tell a candidate they referred they were hired without hearing it from the company first - as they’d be burned too many times by setting people up for disappointment, and it would destroy their reputation with the employer.

The references were checked by the hiring manager. The congratulations were also extended by the hiring manager. So it’s hard to pin this on the recruiter.

Also no agency was used, it was all internal.

My take on what the recruiter did was that most of his/her prospects got flat out rejections and this guy didn’t - which is the most positive signal the recruiter could ascertain from their shitty hiring managers who can’t communicate properly.

Don't see an "acceptance" anywhere. Positive feedback isn't the same as an acceptance.

I advise to check out r/antiwork. Thanks for sharing your story. Good to have these once in a while.

Honestly, is this the right forum to express this? Did you try sending the same feedback to them first?

I've been ghosted after being offered the job before and it's a very uneasy situation...

I've interviewed for a number of companies lately. They don't sound that unusual to me.

> I only interviewed with only technical person.

Is a word missing? Did you mean to say only one?

Ghosting is way too common these days. I've decided to start replying to many more of the cold emails I get. Even if the answer is "no" or "not interested". Not replying is rude except when you can't make space for it.

Recruiters have gotten strangely more persistent and aggressive recently. Somehow my corporate work email (@google.com) got into some leads database recruiters use and I get emails about once every two weeks from recruiters, which I usually ignore (or tell them to remove the address as it's for work, not personal stuff). Several that I have ignored have sent multiple repeated emails ("Just following up in case you missed it") and so on.

I used to get recruiter cold emails once every 6 or 7 months. Now it's at least once a week. I got two the other day in the same day from two recruiters at the same headhunting company with 90% of the same boilerplate text in common. Inconsiderate, I think?

I don't feel bad about not responding.

Actually if it reminds me of anything, it's 1999/2000 right before the .COM crash. That's the last time I remember it being this crazy. I remember a day in 1999 when I worked at a startup where everyone's phone (yes, we had desk phones then) all rang in sequence one after another as a recruiter made their way one by one through the company directory.

Not replying to unsolicited recruitment isn't really ghosting IMO

I'm sorry but fuck that. I get at least 5 emails from recruiters a week even though my LinkedIn profile only had job titles, tenures, and a description that reads "not interested in a new role." I've disabled InMail and hidden my email, so they instead pull my contact info from some DB. They are beginning the relationship with an enormous amount of disrespect, so they can suck a fuck if they're going to call my non-responses "disrespectful."

I feel bad sometimes about ignoring cold emails, but even taking the time to read all of them I get would require several hours a week. I am more inclined to reply if I can catch a hint of authenticity. It is usually pretty easy to tell when you're getting an automated email from a sales funnel.

Nah, I've got better things to do.

My old boss, however, has good advice on how to make them useful, for those who care to respond: https://code.dblock.org/2015/01/09/how-to-make-recruiter-spa...

You should have no obligation to reply to a cold email. Those go straight into the trash for me (or more often, to the spam filter for a permanent block). It's MY time that is being wasted.

So they breached a verbal contract here?

Companies employ the "shotgun" approach to hiring because there is essentially no existing feedback mechanism for panels to see the consequences of their decisions. Sometimes posts like this OP or some Glassdoor review will bubble up, but then the company acts on the defensive and the people who actually screwed up likely won't even ever know what happened.

Are you an IC doing tech screens? An EM or Director doing loops like those in the OP? How much feedback have you gotten in the past 2 years about the success (or lack thereof) of the candidates you interviewed, whether you hired them or not? (Here "success" is how they aligned to your evaluation-- could be they had _financial_ success or _career_ success choosing some other job).

EMs will sometimes try to keep tabs on "false negatives," and at the Director / VP Level there's more formal analytical effort (though a lot of it is trying to hit quotas, even if those quotas are bloated or poorly defined). But this aggregate information very rarely bubbles down to the panel and in particular the individuals who interacted with the candidate.

Why keep so many people in the dark? For one thing, if results were disseminated, then salaries / offers would leak too, and then the engineering org becomes much more expensive. (Ironically, the employee stock pool is tiny, and engineering salaries are often not the biggest cost to a Co. The issue here is more about the C-levels having so little understanding of the job market. That's why Steve Jobs wanted a no-poach-- he had no idea what his coveted Safari employees actually did).

Moreover, panels suck. They get stuff wrong all the time. I have never been on a panel that has not moved the goalposts at least 3-4 times between candidates as the panel tries to figure out what the panel even really wants. If ICs and the panel got to know about the outcomes of their actions, they're going to question what happened. And the higher-ups don't want to spend time having that debate.

How can we prevent outcomes like those illustrated in the OP?

If you're a recruiter, stop shotgunning candidates. Try to figure out what your client really wants, and poke half the passives you might otherwise. For actives, give _useful_ feedback, even if it's just verbally. If bombing one leetcode is all it takes relative to the rest of the pool, that can be good for a junior engineer to know.

If you're an IC doing interview loops, do a quarterly review of the candidates you interviewed and the panels you were on. Insist to your manager that you want to do this as part of your 1:1s. Think critically about the loops and discuss with others.

If you're a Director / VP / C-level, stop treating candidates like toys. You earn outsized compensation because you're supposed to be a force multiplier-- you're supposed to assemble an amazing team. If you fell into a goldmine of an opportunity, be extra generous to candidates. You're going to build a good team out of luck, not your own ability, and you'll thank yourself later for not being a sore winner. If your funnel sucks (e.g. you're a tiny unknown start-up), expect to need to improvise, and don't blame candidates for your own bad luck.

"After passing the loop ... have the hiring manager tell me they'd be calling me after a week"

That's when you know you're just the backup option. If you passed their hiring loop, and they like you, and they have actual budget + headcount, you're hired. They don't need to wait a week to call you back, and they know that; once they have confirmed good references, they should be sending you an offer immediately, not after an arbitrary amount of time.

Or, in this case, an infinite amount of time :D

Make this story 1/4 as long.

Interviewed. Passed. Congratulated. Asked for start date. Ghosted.

My partner interviewed with Stripe (admittedly not for an engineering role but for an adjacent role) and had a very positive experience. They start in a few weeks. It's fun to idly observe companies interview processes and Stripe's seemed super upstanding and robust. Very responsive all round with a solid offer and flexibility on start time.

FWIW they interviewed with 3 other companies at same time — all ~$10B-ish companies — and 2 of them were very negative experiences (slow to respond recruiters, written offer not aligning with initial salary expectations, ...)

Could you have perhaps been too accommodating? By being a little bit "harder to get"[1] you may be able to weed out[2][3] recruitment opportunities that aren't serious and would just be a waste of your time to follow through on. Neither party should be expecting the other to just drop everything they're doing and reschedule on a whim. If that happens again, you should probably call it out (professionally) and state that you're happy to continue discussions but only when they're ready and serious about hiring.

Recruiters will hand out accolades, false hopes and more just to keep you engaged until the moment someone else (preferred candidate) has been picked by the client. Then you get ghosted because you're no longer making the recruiter money or because you're now the backup option in case the preferred person cancels before starting or soon after starting, and they would prefer you remain available "just in case you're needed".

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/smarter-living/benefits-o...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26408181

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071362

Did it strike you that:

* You're applying for managers of managers role

* Which means you're probably going to need to know how to deal with ambiguity and difficult people situations

* So if your response to not getting what you want is writing a 500+ word rant on a public forum, is this also how you plan to respond when you run into a complex people issue on the job?

> You're applying for managers of managers role

> Which means you're probably going to need to know how to deal with ambiguity and difficult people situations

I wonder if organizations would be better if we all did that? The Internet would be a much more fun place, I believe.

I also believe a bit of self reflection is perhaps in order.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com