Stripe Built One of Silicon Valley's Best Engineering Teams (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Stripe Built One of Silicon Valley's Best Engineering Teams (2013)

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20 pointstosh8 comments

> One thing that's worked well for Stripe is bringing on people who didn’t have an immediately obvious role in the organization. If you can think of one thing this person can do, then there’s probably ten more you're not thinking of that he/she can do two months from now. Focusing on hiring to fill a role could make you more likely to sacrifice quality just to get someone with the right skill set.

Essentially DDR state hiring policies that ensured "work" for everyone. Was this part of the reason for the many tech layoffs the last few years?

The above attitude is an optimal one if you have a ton of cheap capital - AKA low interest rates.

Once investors start demanding a high return on capital, or it's hard to even get your hands on capital, then the optimal approach is to only hire people you could already have utilized at 100% yesterday.

Another factor affecting the optimal hiring level is how easy it is to fire someone. If it's really hard, you have to price in the fact that you'll eventually be stuck with a good employee with nothing to do - or a dud who isn't cutting the mustard - for a number of months, while you bleed cash to pay this person.

If it's completely effortless to fire someone, then there's little harm and future planning involved in hiring someone if you need them and have the money right now and the hiring friction drops to zero.

The optimal outcome for society as opposed to the companies is going to be some mix of the above factors, but probably skewing towards low-ish interest rates and easy-ish firing.

do you really believe in this comparison? you think that Stripe is trying to create a charity work program?

best engineering team sounds so general as to mean nothing. like were they really good backend rails and or java devs who had a lot of experience implementing backend credit card APIs?

Just in general I have yet to see what is so technically impressive about Stripe. Seems like their success is because of very good technical writing and self-perpetuating hype about their own technical competence (?).

> Do unconventional things like offering to meet candidates on weekends.

> Each candidate must pass the “Sunday test.” If this person were alone in the office on a Sunday, would that make you more likely to come in and want to work with them?

YIKES If your business is built on people working on the weekends, you’re not prioritizing being productive during the week!

Overall, this sounds like a paid-for flattery piece that is trying to resonate with the try-hard “hustler” crowd.

This, and other “advice” in the article, is all terrible. When it starts to approach being not crazily, it is completely ambiguous. The specific recommendations are all counter-productive. I would venture a guess that stripe’s success did not come from these things.

I've done this before. It's been situations where there's a tricky problem and it's critical to the business

A colleague was working on some critical control code that involves math I didn't understand.

He was committed to figuring it out. I suspect his motivations included 'why isn't this working?', 'I want to deliver this critical piece of the product', and 'I'll be thinking about it all weekend anyway'.

I came into the office to use the gym and found him working there; we got to talking about the problem. Long story short, my workout was about 90 minutes longer than normal, and he delivered the feature on monday.

I totally agree that the company culture shouldn't have this vibe check. However, I do acknowledge that sometimes we, as part of our human code, just CANT rest until we figure it out. IMO a nice middle ground would be getting paid a little extra to solve it on sunday :)

Greg Brockman later became the president of OpenAI

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