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Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

What did they screw up, though?

Their psychic abilities failed? A coin flip came up tails but they bet on heads?

"Their psychic abilities failed? A coin flip came up tails but they bet on heads?"

Isn't it interesting how we want to absolve execs of all blame when they bet wrong and get unlucky, but declare them geniuses and masters of business when they bet right and get lucky?

It's easy to get something wrong, but it's hard to get it right.

A broken clock is right twice a day.

You have to be right more than twice a day to lead a company like Stripe.

Bad metaphor. There are a million wrong decisions that could be made any time at any day, and only a handful of options.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone here express the sentiment that execs and CEOs are geniuses for leading a profitable company. If anything, it seems like it’s us engineers who like to consider ourselves brilliant, and that the simple-minded management should be so lucky to have us.

Of course the stripe founders are not absolved of blame. They made the wrong call.

But overall Stripe has A+ execution -- of which very little was luck -- and the founders deserve credit for that.

Yes and we really should be crying for the software developers who worked for slave wages and had no opportunity to save.

At least they did something useful and actually earned their pay.

Like creating a company that gives thousands of people jobs? Or creating infrastructure to enable millions of web based businesses the ability to mindlessly process payments? God, I miss the old HN. This place is reddit now.

Who built the railroads? J. P. Morgan, or the millions of people who worked for him?

Not surprising to see execs and founders on here patting each other on the back and trying to convince everyone that they deserve their millions because of how innovative they are all the "value" they create. Looks like the old HN to me.

I’m neither an executive or a founder. I’m just self aware enough to know that software engineers aren’t exactly starving.

Another entry in the decades-long saga: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149257

Yes, essentially.

“Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks?

I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.”

-John Tuld, Margin Call

Imagine that they DIDN'T hire more people when they grew by 3x. See how much people complain about the grind at AWS. People are extraordinarily overworked. We'd be reading "Why I left Stripe" posts and calling out the CEOs for not scaling up properly.

Stripe was already known (in my circles at least) for being a ~grinder~ long hours type place. Not neccesarily because they're understaffed but because it was a work work work culture.

That's what I've seen (from the outside, with some friends who work at Stripe) as well - it's the old investment banking / management consulting work culture, i.e. your job is your life.

preparing for an eventual end to the free money rally instead of over-hiring isn't exactly something I'd consider to fall into the realm of psychic abilities.

is "we're a fast growing business but this cannot last indefinitely, let's not overexpand" ´really too much to ask for? It's constantly happening to tech companies because of their internal fantasies.

If they under-expand, people will similarly complain when their stock languishes compared to other stocks and the board will replace them with someone telling a growth story. The only thing the stock market rewards is growth, so is it really their fantasy?

In this case, stripe is private, so their stock performance is mostly moot.

I'm not convinced free money is as much of an issue as large consumer demand shifts after covid. Inflation-adjusted, money is still free.

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