Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe

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.

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

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

Once you are rejected, the recruiter probably has moved onto the next project and forgot about you.

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 .

Got a text months later from the recruiter who told me the whole group that I interviewed for was gone. So bizarre.

The point though is the recruiter reached out to me, which was nice.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

That is stressful. To put it mildly.

This said, having a kid is the toughest and most rewarding job you will ever have. If you don't like kids in general, sure, avoid them. Some of us do.

She's 21 now, applying to grad school for applied math, and (being slightly biased) is the most wonderful kiddo in the world.

As for FIRE type scenarios, unless you have an inheritance or a pre-existing nest-egg of some sort, yeah, kids tend to deplete cash flow. I'm 56, and if I'm lucky, I may be able to retire in my 70s. Part of that is due to the company being killed by our bank, all assets sold off, because they panicked. Leaving me with a giant hole where my retirement (and kid's college fund) was. Started over at 51, at (somewhat less than) 0. Do not recommend this.

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...

We spent the whole hour interview making zero progress on the task assigned. I kinda wish I had setup some kind of get-out-of-jail situation so that I could have saved everyone the time, but I sat though the whole hour just out of the embarrassment of ending things early.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

So maybe I was lucky in this case.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

Most of the sessions are collaborative solution design exercises. The interviewer can drive the solution, if necessary, and hopefully it's at least educational. The remaining session is a behavioral interview centered on the candidates accomplishments. It's usually possible to set least draw out what the candidate is proud of from their career.

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

Care to elaborate.

If I do end up FIRE, I imagine I could always have a family in a cheaper country. 2 million in FAANG RSUs can easily raise a family outside of America.

Also no agency was used, it was all internal.

For all I know, one insider holding a grudge could be creating multiple accounts claiming to be leading large companies and thus not being able to divulge their names.

I personally back my posts by my real name and I think this is fair. If I did not feel safe posting something important, I would make sure to include proofs. If I can't include either, I keep my mouth shut.

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.

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.

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.

As a bystander you have no way of knowing who is right. There is a huge disparity between the person being slandered and the person trying to post slander.

The person being slandered can't defend themselves due to either volume of it or just impossibility of proving you haven't done something.

On the other hand person posting slander can quickly create multiple usernames and crate a lot of "content" looking like a discussion.

An exception could be a criminal case (when it might be ok to both stay anonymous and not have a proof, because of an important reason like public safety). But even in such case Police or whatever other official will try to confirm the claim in some way.

---

emodendroket: I can't respond because I am being throttled by HN (for apparently posting low value content).

Again: how do you know these are actually separate people? Without any real name on it there is no way for you to know.

Do you think trolls haven't thought about it?

Hard to give proof on this, so I understand how everything needs to get taken with a grain of salt. The only thing I can say is to talk (or just email) any fintech company founder in the states and I'm 100% sure they will privately agree with what I've posted.

Anyone who can do anything with zero variation should definitely drop what they are doing now and make it their new business.

> We shouldn't normalize this stuff

You literally normalized it in your comment.

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.

Especially considering these are corroborating messages (two of them), I am quite fine with this.

As a leader of a competing company, attaching your name to messages like those would be quite the bold and risky act (and likely not in line with duties to investors and shareholders, etc.)

I'm not trying to be slanderous or have a hit piece. They've clearly been immensely succesful (much more than me!). However, there is a veneer around Patrick and Stripe that needs to be broken. So many founders and employees look up to a false image that has been purposely crafted and is completely false. I'm not going to say that Patrick and John are bad people - but they're definitely not good, honest or kind. And they are definitely not who their online profiles, hn and the media would portray. Is an anonymous post the best way to show this - absolutely not, so down for other ideas.

Or do you have some way to definitively prove that you are not on pc's payroll?

Paranoia goes both ways, and I think it's sufficient to just have the reader use their best judgement...otherwise we'll just always be in an endless spiral of "no puppet no puppet you're the puppet."

[0] https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/11-big-things-the-35b-st...

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'd be funny (in a sad way, I suppose) if the same becomes true on the other side..."sorry, my online assistant just quit so my resignation at the current firm never got filed."

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.

And please don't write condescending, inflammatory remarks. It offers nothing.

I don’t hold anything against these recruiters anymore. They find decent people with good work experience, but even that is not enough for these companies anymore. I try to be as cool as I can with them because for better or worse, they might be the only person in that entire process that succeeds if you succeed (your only friend, believe it or not).

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.

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.

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

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

I assume plenty of other people do that, e.g. Steve Klabnik with rust articles. Unless they’re just always on HN…

However, with forums, I'm not sure how that would work. Maybe having verified accounts reporting on behalf of anonymous accounts, because the current way, I just have to trust an anonymous account and with how easy it is to defame people anonymously because of no ultimate accountability, I tend to view anonymous posts skeptically. With the journalist way, there isn't anonymity but rather veiled identity, because it's ultimately traceable.

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.

By example, if I walk through a maximum security prison with no power, holding ten pounds of cocaine, typically I will get murdered. This doesn't mean that murder is a thing we should consider to be normal.

Typical is about commonality. Normal is about evaluation of decency.

Consider most topics in a theater of war to see the stark difference between what is common and what is decent.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

I’ve also heard (via HR) about candidates being surprised to not get the offer in cases where I kept the interview going and pretended things were going well.

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.

I don't know what happened, just trying to point out that it is possible that a person felt slighted by certain actions and the person doing them may have no idea the other felt slighted and the person hasn't told them directly. But maybe they did, I don't know in this specific case.

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?

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-...

Be it professional or social, many people are disadvantaged in their ability to express their opinions freely without retaliation, and any “you have nothing to hide or you’re just a coward” attitude only comes off as insensitive to others.

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

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.

Say if someone claims you stole their car (and the alternative could be that you borrowed it with someone else's permission, and they had no idea, so they felt it was stolen), would you reply with "I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who feels I stole their car", or would you first say "I never stole any car, please reach out to me if you know of any such incidents"? Wouldn't it be incredibly bizarre to ask them for a discussion session without first rejecting the premise?!

And yes, I still name the company when I tell the story of my worst experience interviewing at a company, 30 years ago.

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.

You beg for acceptance when you need the money. Companies smell your desperation. When you have a job, you can be picky.

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

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.

Whereas with ghosting, it could be not replying an email, could be not replying a text, could be some other thing the person missed and doesn't even know they missed. So it's hard to deny if the person isn't even aware they did it.

With mining, it could have been asking questions either live or in an email and not knowing the other person felt tricked into sharing more than they had wanted to.

I've taught a class called Emotional Self-Defense and one of the things I see the most is that the "attacker" often doesn't know they're attacking and the "victim" assumes it should be obvious the person is attacking.

What I'm saying is that he may not have any idea that his actions caused that much pain to the person. I had an ex girlfriend who said to me once, "and you don't respect my boundaries!" And I said what? And she said "yeah, 3 weeks ago when you were juggling the soccer ball and you kicked it to me, I said I didn't wanna play, and then a few minutes later you kicked it to me anyway." I was dumbstruck. I had no idea that she felt so angry/violated by me kicking the soccer ball with her the second time. If I had known, I almost certainly would have stopped. I just didn't receive the signal that strongly.

So I'm saying that may be the case here, too. It's also hard sometimes to tell someone in power that what they're doing is hurting or angering oneself.

And that's all kinda beside the point - note that the bad part isn't even the ghosting itself for us to quibble over, it's fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition, with or without ghosting. That should be far less blurry and easy to deny head-on, whatever you think of the ghosting.

We mostly use that mechanism for tedious moderation announcements ("All: please don't bash each other with clubs, even if you feel strongly about $topic") and for cases where project creators/authors show up belatedly in threads to discuss their work—those are extremely high-value comments that would otherwise get overlooked. Occasionally I use it if a thread is mostly aflame about some controversy and some commenter points out how the whole thing is inaccurate. We don't use it to systematically privilege high-karma users or YC founders relative to other users—that wouldn't be in the spirit of the site guidelines at all, and we take those pretty seriously.

Note that I did not say whether this was a good or bad thing, I just think you’re overthinking billion dollar fintech startup scarcity given a single bitcoin is basically a billion dollars. Those folks are also more likely to identify themselves as fintech during an introduction in my experience, and Stripe undoubtedly plays in the crypto pool, so it fits

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> We mostly use that mechanism for tedious moderation announcements ("All: please don't bash each other with clubs, even if you feel strongly about $topic") and for cases where project creators/authors show up belatedly in threads to discuss their work—those are extremely high-value comments that would otherwise get overlooked. We don't use it to privilege high-karma users or YC founders relative to other users.

Do you have the denominator (with root-level comments) for the 41 top comments by any chance?

Thanks for the edit with added context. Any chance of an indicator that a comment is pinned so that people can transparently see when this is done? It's predictable that your moderation comments would be pinned, but even pinning a founder's comment to apparently contextualize a potentially misleading headline adds substantial mass to the claim that certain moderation actions might be done for the benefit of the company or companies involved in the thread.

Framed another way: if PC's context for the article was relevant, it would've achieved critical mass on its own. Helping it with a pin could be perceived as moving the needle for gain.

A simple "pin" icon (or emoji, or however you feel is best) may not resolve whether this is a "proper" use of moderation tools, but it will at least make it transparent when it happens, which adds credibility to the HN platform.

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.

You don't get left alone in a meeting room for 45 minutes and then when the recruiter comes back, you say "Uh, no-one showed up", and they say "oh well"?

That is not "typical" treatment.

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?

> And note that the bad part isn't even the ghosting to quibble over, it's fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition.

Even "fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition" could be anything from sending one email with 3 questions to five intense 2-hr interviews over 3 months. One person who feels very secretive and protective of their business knowledge (even some people in startups who don't even have companies yet but just ideas) can feel very violated by one email with one question, whereas other people may not believe they were being fished for info after 3 months of interviews.

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.

This whole discussion is about intent, which you can (and honestly, must) address separately from how you imagine your actions might have been perceived. See below.

> Even "fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition" could be anything from sending one email with 3 questions to five intense 2-hr interviews over 3 months.

This is irrelevant, the question is about intent. You should not have a hard time making it crystal clear whether that was your intent or not, regardless of whether you spent 10 minutes on it or 10 days. The only reason you wouldn't be able to make your intents clear is if you're doing things so borderline deceptively that you honestly cannot tell if they're clearly ethical or not, in which case that fact would sufficiently speak for itself.

P.S. I see you're repeatedly leaving parallel replies, I don't know why you do that (can't you just edit your comment?) but they drown out mine and divert the conversation, so I'm not going to reply to them and have 3 parallel conversation tracks, sorry about that.

I ran a workshop with abut 35 people in the audience. For about 15 mins, I had them sit quietly as I asked them "how do you feel when you think about this? How do you feel when you think about that?" And so on, and had them reply in their heads.

At the end of the session, I opened up group reflection. One woman shot her hand up and said "I feel like you manipulated us." And i asked if others felt this way, and maybe 5 others raised their hands and started talking about how my questions manipulated them. And then this other guy raised his hand and said how for the first time in months, these questions helped him stop thinking about politics and the chaos in the world and quieted his mind and thanked me. A few others agreed with a similar feeling.

So my one action caused (at least) two very different responses in the same group and I would likely have had no idea if they didn't tell me how they had received it.

The HN team originates in April 2014, when I became public as a mod. (That's not early in YC btw.) In that case you're talking about me (and possibly Scott), and while I guess it's dangerous to make strong claims about some meeting I don't remember, there's no way we would have "explained how the ranking algorithms worked" in such a way that you could game HN. That's precisely what we would not have done. I've worked way too hard on that shit to blab about it and see all that sand run through my fingers.

I also doubt that we'd have told you "the best times of day to submit"—people ask us that all the time and the stock answer is we have no idea, there are all sorts of dodgy analyses out there, and you can take your pick.

As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, yes—I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.

I would agree one could deny the intention first, yeah, I might actually do that. "I didn't meant to ghost you but perhaps that's what happened or how it landed for you. Maybe you think it should be obvious to me but I feel unclear, will you share more with me about it?"

*edit: I'm not trying to leave the parallel replies, I guess I'm more used to replying on Twitter where I just add another reply to my reply if I forgot something, instead of editing the previous reply, and HN was stopping me from replying to my own reply. So I'll try to edit here, I wasn't sure what the HN preferred way was to do this, so thank you for helping me adapt better.

The only kind of sense this could make is as a tautology. If the commenter is a "victim" then you've already decided to believe him or her. But what evidence do you have to support this belief?

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.....

Fact: dang's helped me a few times with this when I've goofed with my own comments, and as best as I can tell, I'm not a founder of any kind.

Genuine question.

Edit: Apologies if this came off as accusatory. Was trying to make the point that they don't have control of the media, but instead are just flawless in their use of it.

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.

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.

Interviewing isn't just for fun, and even if you don't get the job, you can go through the interview to practice, and hopefully to figure out what went wrong.

If after 20 minutes they just say 'I think this is a no so go home' I wasted a lot more than 20 minutes and got nothing out of it.

Thanks for the reply - you had me wondering for a minute what the hell I wasn't remembering.

>"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?

As such, you rebutting with "I never ghosted you" would not be equivalent in any shape or form to "I reply to every single email in your inbox" (or whatever) for you to feel you might somehow be accidentally telling a falsehood if you happened to miss some email in your inbox. "I never ghosted you" in this context would be a direct rejection of the purported intent—i.e. the accusation you were purposefully ignoring someone's emails because you were actually trying to fish information out of them—because, absent the intent, that accusation wouldn't have been made to begin with. You can make the lack of intent explicit if you want, definitely, but it's already implicit in the accusation, and so would be in implied in the rejection of that accusation.

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.

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

Most people can't stare at the News source for an hour straight without getting a headache, let alone a rich investor type. They wouldn't find much of value in what's been publicly released of it, anyway (the released source is ancient and includes little as far as quality control goes).

If what you're saying is based in truth, you were probably just getting tips from someone with a strong financial incentive to have brute forced their way into understanding the site the manual way (throwing posts at it) rather than someone who had any genuine inside knowledge.

Edits on your posts, recommending the best times of day to submit, explaining how HN algorithms work broadly, are accessible to everyone; these are discussed frequently on HN, and were all accessible to me even before I was a YC founder. I'm also certain the HN team wouldn't need to email Patrick about something like this being on the front page; when my company (~150 employees) is on the front page I get a bunch of messages about it from all sorts of different angles; certainly many of the thousands of Stripe employees use HN and would be capable of sending a Slack or text.

To me it seems the notion that Patrick has "indirect control" over parts of HN is a longer way of saying he has respect. I think Patrick may be the most universally respected founder in Silicon Valley, and perhaps doubly so amongst engineers. I am not surprised at all that people upvote his comments, as he's both the person speaking from authority, and they're usually well reasoned - I use them as a model for how to respond well (something I have not always done).

I'm not saying you're being untrue about your experience (and I don't think OP was being untrue about theirs), but the notion that Patrick as at the helm of an evil empire stealing from companies and manipulating folks to keep it quiet just feels farcically different from reality across the dozens of Stripe and YC/HN touch points I have.

We obviously never intentionally ghost companies, “mine them for information”, etc. The ecosystem is small and we wouldn’t be able to invest in and acquire companies if we didn’t have a reputation for good behavior. (And we’ve invested in dozens.) But maybe some communication got dropped in some particular case or something? I don’t know.

Hahaha. Or something like that.

How is it reneging on a term sheet if they wire the money? That's fulfilling the terms of the term sheet (despite the fact that term sheets aren't binding), no?

They really are your only friend in the hiring process. Knowing this gives you a lot of leverage.

Frankly, I'd love if someone were to extricate their accusation as you did, making it easier for me to parse the different actions and intentions. I really liked how you phrased it: "you saw and yet deliberately ignored my emails because you were actually trying to gain information while pretending to want to acquire us." I feel more confident in rebutting different parts of that—e.g., "I saw the emails and deliberately did not reply to them but not because we were pretending to acquire you, but actually we were in a legal process where we couldn't share more at the time" or something like that.

Sometimes if someone accuses me of something, I'll even try to ask for clarification on what they mean by ghosted, or I'll rephrase it as you did, to try to gain more clarity. Maybe it should be obvious to people what ghosted and fishing means, but I find clarifying can at least help me and the other person know if we agree what the definition is and what we both think happened.

*edit: @dataflow, I really appreciate you going back and forth with me on this. I think I learned a lot, about how I try to pull out the intention from the action, and how others may see intention and action intertwined. I'm gonna let my brain digest this as I sleep, if you want to continue, I'd be glad to pick it up in the morning :-) Thank you!

*edit2: ohhh and for helping me get better at using the edit feature and not creating parallel threads, I'm not sure if what I'm doing now is more helpful, but I at least believe I'm being more helpful :-D

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.

Anyway, I sent this to the comment author via email, but the best I can do in public is link to https://www.blackburncenter.org/post/on-believing-victims

Context: I run r/Relationship Advice.

However, I imagine Stripe has interacted with many many companies regarding these things, but maybe not.

I think I've just been in too many conflicts where the other person thinks I intentionally hurt them and I didn't see it that way, or conversely, I think I did something to hurt someone, apologize, and they are confused because they didn't feel hurt at all.

Regardless of the size of the org you need 45 mins to get good signal.

20 minutes might work for a “what questions do you have” sell call.

But any company making hiring calls on this model, that’s a yellow flag right there

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?

Part of that is understandable. They probably didn’t do a great job interviewing you. It’s probably exasperating.

But I can’t imagine someone who gets so easily frustrated writing about an interview would be great to work with. Because you could’ve just as easily criticized the interview process without bringing the exasperated tone along the way. With clarity and a measured response. But you wear your heart on your sleeve and it’s one of clear annoyance.

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.

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

And when they pin comments, it's pretty obvious. dang often points it out: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

YC isn't trustworthy, sure, but HN is.

Is it? To me it reads just like a blow-by-blow description of the situation. There is almost no personal commentary, other than a couple that aim (and probably fail) at being funny. But to each his/her own, I guess.

* 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?

Why restrict ourselves to positive integers here? Hell everyone can be an $XB fintech founder!

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-...

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.

Also, we I like to always keep in mind that sometimes resentment dominates the desire to share a certain story, and without knowing anything about the transaction referred above, I'd say it's quite clear that temp7536 has at least some resentment or envy over Stripe's success.

Final thought (not referring to Stripe nor Sequoia in particular): yes, most companies, and most VCs, are sharks. I was recently reminded of that twice, and probably lost large sums of money in the process (again: nothing to do with Stripe nor with Sequoia). I think it's a rule that have always applied to life, in general, and it won't stop being applied just because we have the internet.

I simply hope that things like the Panama Papers, Wikileaks, and such, will eventually bring more financial transparency to the world, and make it harder for these sharks to keep feasting on their prey.

Thank you for this. This sentiment applies to so much online, especially in the field of online content, social media posting and conversion rates.

What feels like it should work is not the same as what actually works.

This site was posted on here at some point and it made me mad because everything the guy recommends sounds awesome, but where is any proof that it actually improves sales? https://examples.roastmylandingpage.com/

Humans are complex beasts and sometimes the exact opposite of the obvious is the right solution: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-11573666

The CEO responded. He doesn't agree that this is norm, but he can't, can he?

One person, one story, n equals one. 1 does not equal 10,000. Worse, hiring has x^n variables. He could have nailed the interview, astonished absolutely everybody into hiring him, only to be outcompete the very next day by the guy who wrote the book on managing managers at financial institutions.

The attempt to amplify this as something oft-repeated at Stripe lacks evidence. “I've heard this” and “I've heard that” about Stripe is hearsay, secondary, questionable at best.

Doesn't this post strike you as mildly disgruntled?

The point is that your reply would need to address the lack of ill intent no matter how you word it. I find "I never ghosted you" and "I never intended to ghost you" both adequate, and you can disagree on either of them, but that's not the point. The point is "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate. It comes across as a completely ridiculous reply that very obviously fails to deny what is clear to everyone to be the heart of the accusation: the ill intent. Which makes it hard to interpret an omission like that charitably.

Edit: Sleep well!

Thanks for digging into it; you didn't have to.

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...