How Stripe Builds their Software | Hacker News Reader

How Stripe Builds their Software

blog.airbrake.io

61 pointsdalerus7 comments

I found this part interesting:

"We found that combining project management and engineering into a role held by one person cuts down on a lot of communication overhead. It’s always the case that the person who understands exactly what we’re trying to build is someone who also understands all of the technical details of how exactly it’s built."

I find that in my office a lot of the project management is done by professional project managers. Rarely do they understand the tech/engeering piece, and it really makes it hard to communicate deadlines or timelines.

Having only worked in three total development offices I have limited experience here. How does most tech companies handle PM work? Is it done by experienced developers? Or simply the middle-management types?

My experience has been that they are either middle-management types or developers from the company who apply for the position. I personally think the latter kind makes a way better project manager.

A good project manager has to be technical enough to understand the the details, ask the right questions, and make informed decisions, but also important to be able communicate cleary with business stakeholders in a language that non-technical stakeholders understand such as cost, timelines, priorities, and risks.

Engineering is an art, and a good PM can coordinate the artistry in a way that provides certainty and clarity to the stakeholders who only want to know when will the art be ready for public consumption, they don't want to know how the art is being made, but when will it be done and how much will it cost. There are many great artists but they only know how to communicate with other artists and talk about art, but when dealing with patrons you have to talk a little about art and mostly about business.

When a company starts talking about hiring PMs that's a sign that the business managers feel the development work needs to be more coordinated and they need more clarity about what all these developers are working at on. If a business manager were to ask a developer what are you working on, and the answer is a deeply technical component without any clear context of how that component matters in the bigger picture of the business, then that business manager will go ask HR to hire some PMs to talk to instead.

What's interesting is that Rands today wrote an essay describing why he sees project managers as invaluable. It's a good compare and contrast. I look forward to hearing what happens when Stripe gets > 150 people.

> We often do unscalable things for as long as possible and then figure out how to fix them later.

Funny... just yesterday we had pg's post about doing things that don't scale as long as you can http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

pg's advice on doing things that don't scale isn't new. He told us the same thing when I was in the YC S09 batch (4 years ago).

So, with 4 years (maybe more) of data, I am sure that the advice works really well for most YC startups. And, that's probably why pg decided to wrote an essay about it.

I'd be more interested in the content of the tasks. Development methodology is fairly meaningless unless you understand the scope of the problems people are solving.

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