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Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe

1703 points danrocks | 1 comments | 30 Nov 21 00:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.227s | source

Recently I interviewed with Stripe for an engineering MoM (Manager of Managers) for one of their teams. I interview regularly, so I am used to many types of processes, feedback mechanisms, and so on. I won't go into details about the questions because there's nothing special about them, but I wanted to share some details of my experience for people thinking of interviewing there.

1) About 35-40% of the interviewers started their questioning by saying "I will only need 20 minutes for this", while emphasizing it is an important leadership position that they are hiring for. So 20 minutes is all needed to identify "important, critical leaders"? What a strange thing to say - also a GREAT way to make candidates feel important and wanted!

2) There is significant shuffling of interviewers and schedules. One almost has to be on-call to be able to react quickly.

3) For an engineering manager position, I only interviewed with only technical person. To me it hints that Engineering MoM is not a very technical position.

4) Of all the people I spoke to, the hiring manager was the one I spoke the least with. The phone screen was one of the "I only need 20 minutes for this" calls. The other one was quite amusing, and is described below.

5) After the loop was done, the recruiter called me to congratulate me on passing, and started discussing details of the offer, including sending me a document described the equity program. Recruiter mentioned that the hiring manager would be calling me to discuss the position next.

6) SURPRISE INTERVIEW! I get a call from the hiring manager, he congratulates me on passing the loop, then as I prepare to ask questions about the role, he again says "I need to ask you two questions and need 20 minutes for this". Then proceeds to ask two random questions about platforms and process enforcement, then hangs up the call after I answer. Tells me he'd be calling in a week to discuss the position.

7) I get asked for references.

8) After passing the loop, have the recruiter discuss some details of the offer, have the hiring manager tell me they'd be calling me after a week, I get ghosted for about 3.5 weeks. References are contacted and feedback is confirmed positive.

9) I ping the recruiter to see when the offer is coming - it's not coming. They chose another candidate. I am fine with it, even after being offered verbally, but the ghosting part after wasting so much of my time seems almost intentional.

10) I call up a senior leader in the office I applied to, an acquaintance of mine. His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people". I was shocked with the response.

11) I get called by the recruiter saying that another director saw my feedback and is very interested in talking to me and do an interview loop.

Guess I'm not joining, then.

I am ok with passing loops, being rejected, I've seen it all. But being ghosted after acceptance is a first. What a bizarre place this is.

1. readonthegoapp ◴[30 Nov 21 01:05 UTC] No.29387518[source]▶
holy sh*t. pretty trippy. sucks.

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.