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> What were your priors?

The better question is: Where did your priors come from?

Every big tech company invests a lot of time and money into projecting a good reputation on the internet. It's basically table stakes for competitive hiring these days. This includes everything from making a founder a celebrity in tech circles or on Twitter, to posting fake Glassdoor reviews (and getting negative reviews removed). The worst company I worked for would periodically send e-mails to everyone reminding us about the NDAs we signed and implying that they'd sue anyone who talked to the press or wrote negative things about the company online.

If you're making judgements based on the frequency of good versus bad posts, your opinions are going to be dominated by companies pushing positive PR for themselves.

The strangest thing about the negative Stripe posts is that I haven't seen many Stripe employees (other than executives) show up and say that these anecdotes are surprising. I have, however, seen several anecdotes in this thread and others noting that Stripe's hiring process is notoriously chaotic and flawed.

I don't really know the truth. I'd lean toward assuming these are abnormal experiences, but I wouldn't discard them entirely just because they're not what you expected to hear. What you expect to hear about a big company is largely a function of deliberate PR pushes these days.

Fair point on PR, but re:

>> I haven't seen many Stripe employees (other than executives) show up and say that these anecdotes are surprising.

... Do people normally do that? With verifiable, named accounts? Personally, as an employee, I would feel profoundly uncomfortable to publicly comment on such matters of my company; and may well be explicitly and clearly forbidden from doing so. Plus, most people would only really have their own experience to relate, and I at least would be reluctant to share anecdata as useful evidence.

(and then there's a matter of time and prioritization; heck, I work for IBM -- if I tried to counter every negative comment on IBM on Hacker News, that'd be my six new full time jobs, even though I've personally had brilliantly positive experience over two decades and deeply respect all of my colleagues :D )

Can / should you be forbidden from talking about your hiring process, while still employed by that company?

It seems pretty scummy to prohibit or penalize employees for talking about their initial hiring interactions with the company. Especially if they keep their remarks to the period prior to their officially being hired.

At that point... you weren't an employee. And it's pretty odd for a company to assume they have a right to your silence, covering a period before you had entered into a contractual relationship with them and they were paying you.

This is FAR beyond my area of expertise; but I think a lot of companies have some sort of... "branding" clause I'll call it these days; what your expected behaviour on social media with respect to company brand is.

Yes, I've read Snowcrash, yes we live in dystopian future; at the same time, if I try to be a devil's advocate and simplify it to very basics - if I'm running a two person shop, and one of them is saying bad things about my/our company... I wouldn't really be excited about working with them either, would I? I ran a photography side business for a while, and if my assistant had feedback to share with me, awesome; on the other hand, if they went on Tweeter and criticized our working, what's my motivation to call them up and work closely with them again? :-/

Things get far murkier at larger companies of course, and there's labour law etc, but I imagine there'd always be some tension in speaking negatively about your employer.

(Edit: As for "talking about hiring process" specifically, that may get even trickier; unless you're an HR manager actually familiar and proficient and authorized to formally represent hiring process to prospective candidates, you may cause untold amount of ruckus even with best intentions in describing your limited perspective on the hiring process to people - setting up incorrect expectations or even accidentally prejudicing against the company in any potential latter lawsuit. Just because Person A has had specific experience in hiring, in no way guarantees that Person B will, but it can and has easily been interpreted that way when Person A says "Company A hiring practices are as such").

> (and then there's a matter of time and prioritization; heck, I work for IBM -- if I tried to counter every negative comment on IBM on Hacker News, that'd be my six new full time jobs, even though I've personally had brilliantly positive experience over two decades and deeply respect all of my colleagues :D )

i've always written ibm off as large, old and stodgy. curious to hear a counterpoint if you're willing to share.

I can't speak specifically to IBM as a whole, but in my experience, there are parts of IBM that are old and stodgy (professional services around finance and government that I interacted with when I worked in those industries). There are other parts (around security and research that I worked with in other roles) that are pretty cool and innovative that are much more approachable and fun to work with.

IBM (and Microsoft, and Google, and others) are huge and it makes sense that there are pockets of awesome and awful distributed throughout them.

Let me start with general: Companies aren't people.

We tend to ascribe... personalities to large companies; explain them in single sentences. IBM is old and stodgy, Oracle has awful licensing practices, Amazon has (great cloud | shoddy warehouse employment practices | too much counterfeit goods) depending on perspective, etc. Sometimes we mix up Musk and Tesla. Overall, we tend to put a simple descriptive sentence over companies, just like we do over politics and history etc. We must, it's how we make sense of the world :).

But in a company of tens and hundreds of thousands of employees, cultures and perspectives and motivations can differ significantly. It'll be a complex landscape. Not all of IBM is stodgy anymore than all of Google is cool. And I've been amused there's a guy in Amazon who maintains PeopleSoft HR just like there's guy in Government of Canada who maintains PeopleSoft HR :-). The IBM guys designing hardware who test their work by putting radioactive material under the computer and seeing how CPUs behave? not so old and stodgy, in my mind :D . There's also some genuine good hard work on occasionally boring stuff like RDBMS engines & optimizers, compilers and OSs for obscure boxes, and I am pretty grateful to folks who write p-series firmware because watching a live production sync and migration is exciting stuff, as well as OS/390 / z/OS/VM guys who are probably chuckling at the "Virtualization" and "Cloudiness" things we all think are shiny and new and cool:). Don't know enough to speak about the quantum thing, I suspect there's a core of innovation wrapped in unfortunate marketing bollocks, as there was for "Watson" (which I find easier to think of "branding for semi-related suite of created and acquired products, some good some average some ugly" rather than "AI that won Jeopardy").

For myself, FWIW, people around me have much more immediate impact on my working satisfaction, than overall corporate average/stereotype. And I've worked with excited enthusiastic peers, been surrounded by experienced leaders who provided extensive mentorship, and done some personally exciting stuff (inasmuch as "pushing 1's and 0's around and making computers go bleep bloop" is exciting:). I've had times when I worked on personally technologically exciting things; and I've been in places and worked for clients where it's all molasses and quagmire and politics and procedures; I've tried to force myself to learn something about all, and I feel I've gained a certain perspective... but we each have our own perspective and priorities and where I've found satisfactions others would only find frustrations. But what it comes down to - I've been surrounded by sufficient percentage of people competent and motivated (even if in ways and fields that HN stereotypically would not always necessarily respect), to enjoy myself on average :).

Is IBM doing better these days? I've worked for them twice (albeit, both as an intern), and none of what I hear negative about IBM sounds very surprising. Well, I haven't really heard anyone talk about them for a decade (Oracle seems to be the new IBM).

Ever since they shut down most of their software research division (e.g. Hawthorne) , I don't even know anyone who still works at IBM.

Re. employees not showing up to defend the company: I always find it weird when people do that. There are only downsides to speaking about your company publicly.

Indeed. There's also the question of whether it's worth the effort. Most of what I've read here about companies I've worked for has been, shall we say, imaginative. Occasionally it's been downright conspiracy theory. When I've been tempted to try to set the record straight, after thinking it through I find--forgive me if this comes across as cynical--that the amount of work it would take far outweighs how much I care what strangers think about the things I work on. It's much easier, and probably healthier, just to close the tab and carry on with more important things.

(In spite of this I confess that I devoured the Stripe thread alongside a heaping bowl of popcorn. Some combination of Gell-Mann amnesia and a vulgar taste for tabloid gossip, I guess.)

It's enough to just have execs stepping in IMO, since they are pretty much top of the ladder. The only thing I'll learn from random Stripe employees is commentary in the vein of "works on my machine!"

Disgruntled ex-employees will leave bad feedback, people who have invested a lot of themselves in the company will leave good feedback (and perhaps not even see some of the problems others see).

Since there were throwaway accounts speaking negatively about the company, I was looking for the opposite, throwaway accounts (from employees) speaking positively about the company.

Not sure if they ended up posting but when I was reading the thread there weren't any.

I don't think it's strange, they don't have visibility into all teams and interactions.

I interviewed with Stripe around 8 months ago and I think the recruiters are one of the better ones. I do see a deliberate effort to make it a good experience. While prepping, I reached out to friends of friends at Stripe and they were helpful going out of their way to ensure I was prepared. Didn't get the job but they seem like a nice bunch.

My interview experience with Stripe was about the same: nice bunch, did OK on the problems but...

They were surprised that even though I said I could program in TypeScript that I didn't know any of the old style JavaScript meta magic (While I used TypeScript as a programming language, I wasn't particularly versed in web). Also, I failed the mandatory HTTP test (everyone had to do a problem related to HTTP, even they were interviewing for a compiler job). That was all very odd, and I think Google was a better fit for me anyways after going through that.

Rescinding accepted offers ever is a pretty big impact on my priors. Uber did it during the recession and that has still impact my priors around working there.

I keep careful track of companies that do this and I will never stop interviewing if I get an offer from a company that does. That is bad because it means I'm more likely to renege on their offers last minute.

> Those tiny bits of negative news just stick in your mind.

There's an interesting psychological process here that I don't think I've seen described before.

You would expect that the higher the reputation something has, the more resilient that regard is. As if good reputation means the thing has a large number of "reputation points" and can thus afford to lose some while still retaining a large quantity of remaining rep points.

But the perceived effect is the opposite. The higher the reputation the more fragile it is to bad news. When a middling reputation thing gets some bad news, we consider it not particularly newsworthy and its reputation is unchanged. But when a highly regarded thing gets tainted, the pristine edifice comes tumbling down.

I can understand why our brains would work that way: we are incentivized through our evolutionary history to be highly attuned to detect deceipt—actors that are not what they appear to be. So bad news about a good person is read as vital information that causes us to re-evaluate everything we knew about them in that light.

But it's not clear to me that that model logically scales to an entire organization. Organizations are not monolithic entities and when an otherwise great org makes a misstep, that doesn't necessarily mean it's rotten to the core.

This is a pretty well known effect in the Marketing/Comms/PR world though it is generally attributed to a narrative effect rather than detection of deceit.

The way the thinking goes is that humans are wired to tell stories and there are certain stories we are predisposed to. We like to root for “the little guy” and love to cheer on startups, especially those with sympathetic stories, founders, high competence, etc.

We also tend to dislike entities at the very top and in extreme positions of power (eg billionaires, governments, large evil corporations) for a variety of reasons.

At some point in your company’s growth your narrative arc flips and you become the bad guy. The best thing you can do as the company is to try your best to postpone the flip as long as possible, but it is inevitable. When it happens, you are on the downslope and “in the dog house” as far as the media and public perception is concerned and there’s just not much you can do about it. Sometimes the harder you try to explain yourself and fight against it, the worse it gets.

You’ll also notice founders of these companies are often totally caught by surprise when this flip happens. They’ve gotten so used to a sympathetic public and a certain mode of behavior to maintain good public perception - transparent, relatable, “aww shucks” style - and when it flips it can be confusing because this doesn’t work anymore. The perception of them has shifted from “that smart/competent startup person I am rooting for” to “the powerful billionaire CEO that crushes the little people with the raise of a finger” and so the behaviors that come naturally to them take on a different tone entirely from a perception perspective.

When this happens it’s probably time to batten down the hatches and shift PR strategies. The old way isn’t likely to work anymore; the straw has finally broken the camel’s back.

I’m no expert at what it takes to reverse this. My best guess is that you need to spend your time in the penalty box while drawing minimum attention to let the steam blow off faster and not accelerate the roller coaster ride down. Then when you come back after 6-12 months or so, do so with a changed communications strategy that implicitly takes into account the changed public perceptions around power dynamics. You’re not a beloved startup anymore but you can still be “one of the good ones” as far as big companies and billionaire CEOs.

Is there a name for this well-known effect? (seriously asking)

I just found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_effect

> There's an interesting psychological process here that I don't think I've seen described before.

That psychological process is actually ever-present, except it just that we often do not notice it until it is explicitly pointed out, like when the older fish asks the younger fish: "how's the water?" in This is Water by DFW [1].

I remember encountering it a long time ago when I came across this pithy quote for the first time: "education can take a man to any height but character keeps him there".

It turns out that there's quite a few of these that have been codified into common English expressions:

"He fell to a new low"

"She was terminated at the peak of her career"

The reason why these sentences do not seem nonsensical to our brains is because we often equate reputation with ascending a (physical) height. When someone of high repute engages in questionable behavior, of course our brain naturally associates the consequence of such behavior as a fall--similar to any accidental descent from an elevated place.

There are a lot more eye-opening examples in Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff et al [2].

1: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By

I've had Metaphors We Live By on my bookshelf for about a decade, but I never get around to reading it. I really should.

That seems more of a media effect than a brain effect.

A negative thing about a high reputation company gets published in "serious" outlets or upvoted on social media.

A negative thing about a middling reputation company is buried on page 7.

I'd say it's the "Wow, this was on the front page of the BBC" effect that triggers the brain response, moreso than the fact that it exists at all. (Coupled with the fact that you probably won't see much of what's on the proverbial page 7, ever)

My guess why higher your reputation is the fragile it becomes is because the more reputation does not necessarily make the effects of negative thoughts against the company weaker but rather makes people trust you more and willing to stick around for longer. If a well reputed company or a person does a major mishap, people are more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and have a higher chance of going back despite the mishaps as long as they are not very big or in a way that sends red flags because they trust the person or company due to having a good reputation

Then why is it so brittle in big companies? Because the mishap mentioned here of Stripe rescinding the candidate and others we tend to hear about are pretty major and enough to erode trust significantly and in turn reputation.

When smaller negative things like Amazon not donating a large amount of money to curl but it was short lived and faded easily and probably nobody remembers it but bigger bad things we frequently hear about big companies such as poor work environment in Amazon is pretty hard to forget and no amount of good reputation unless something big enough shows that it is not true it will be on the back of mind for a long time.

In smaller businesses people expect negative things to happen more frequently and nobody remembers since it is normal for people and reputation is unaffected unless something extremely bad happens.

Hence even if you have a good reputation negative things will break it more often than in smaller companies because you have far higher standards to hold to maintain while small companies dont't and their reputation does not go down as much as bigger companies

Your opinion of something and the strength with which you hold that opinion can vary independently.

You seem to think that very positive opinions can only be strongly held opinions, but GP had a generic positive opinion, weakly held due to lack of direct experience.

If the strength of your prior is held fixed, then a negative piece of news should change a highly positive opinion more.

It's not just this article, right? There was a whole thread yesterday where some throwaways claimed that maybe the twins are not so nice guys. Now I know very little about them, but I do know that they spend a lot of time polishing their image. You don't have to be interviewed in the newspaper if you don't want, but if you do, you're going to get all the coaching you can for it. They really do seem like smart people to me, but I've spent all of 20 minutes doing due diligence on them.

We have this world where things in the public space are highly polished and curated. If you have a look at some historical interviews from say 50 years ago, you'd sometimes get some person who kinda seemed like a kid in school giving his first speech. It would be clumsy, but like in school you could adjust for the presentation, maybe give them the benefit of the doubt.

In the modern world, everything is presented in the most positive light possible. Someone has sat before every public statement or interview and written down all the positives and negatives, and they've already worked out what is good to focus on, and what needs to be spun. They take an active interest in monitoring the public space for what is said about them, and they already have the rebuttals in place. It's actually quite predictable: apologize and say it was a one-off, claim that the bad thing has been dealt with, point out that the information may be wrong, and point out the ulterior motives of the person making the claim.

In light of this, it's simply hard for me to give the benefit of the doubt, and it's very similar with any other spin-heavy communications. It's a bummer, because in my ideal world people would just put stuff out like they see it and listeners wouldn't have to try to un-spin what they'd been told. I'm sure a lot of dishonest communicators hide among the honest, which is their whole game.

> What were your priors? Stripe pays well, has a great product, leadership is great, hires top-tier developers, is a great place to work, etc. (making stuff up here idk what your priors were) but all of that is erased because you saw a random article about two people having offers rescinded and you don't even know if it's true?

Unfortunately, it's like when some person gets outed for being a creep, in the genre of MeToo. One or two independent allegations, I tend to think "hmm gotta see both sides". Somewhere like 4 or 5, I certify the creep status and laminate a card for them. Granted a business is not a single person, so those numbers may need adjustment, but you really don't need much to ruin a reputation.

> .. you saw a random article.. you don't even know if it's true?

That way nothing is true until it happens to you.

> Those tiny bits of negative news just stick in your mind.

This is a big reason why most of us are terrible at "investing" in the stock market. You have a good thesis on why a company is good and it checks all boxes. With a small bad news about the CEO or something without evidence gets out and you suddenly forget your checklist and panic.

I've been hearing things on Blind as well, it's not just two data points. Additionally their change to the way they compensate developers is a massive red flag to me and screams to me that they have a penny pinching culture. Given the market for software developers as it exists today, I don't feel any need to work for companies that aren't extremely generous with their compensation.

I do have a friend that worked there until relatively recently (quit about a year and a half ago) and said things were good pre pandemic. He also told me that I should never consider working there with their new comp structure.

> No dog in the fight either here, but that's exactly what those who posted these stories recently are trying to do.

Why? Do they have nothing better to do with their time?

Maybe you can ask this person directly why they are lying:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29405734

These anecdotes are disturbing to me because they are institutional moves, meaning they are done in a formal and documented way.