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Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe

1703 points danrocks | 3 comments | 30 Nov 21 00:30 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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.

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temp7536 ◴[30 Nov 21 02:45 UTC] No.29388310[source]▶
For those who have worked around and at Stripe for the past decade, this is not a surprise. Stripe, and especially the founders, have a quite a poor reputation for screwing over people in and around their orbit.

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.

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pc ◴[30 Nov 21 04:12 UTC] No.29388863[source]▶
I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith. (We obviously don’t control HN or YC or journalists. If or when my comments on HN are ever ranked highly, it’s because they’re upvoted. The internal claims about Stripe are also inconsistent with the data around things like retention. Etc.)

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.

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dataflow ◴[30 Nov 21 04:25 UTC] No.29388947[source]▶
> We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.

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?

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jimkleiber ◴[30 Nov 21 04:32 UTC] No.29388993{3}[source]▶
The challenge I see with some phrases like "mined them" and "ghosted" is that they can be very subjective statements. The person on the receiving end may perceive the actions as such, whereas the person on the giving end may seem them differently.

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.

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dataflow ◴[30 Nov 21 04:47 UTC] No.29389066{4}[source]▶
But in that case he could just deny them and then mention that if it came across differently, he'd love for them to reach out. Not just skip to the second part!

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?!

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jimkleiber ◴[30 Nov 21 05:01 UTC] No.29389138{5}[source]▶
I think in the example of stealing a car is more binary: stole it or did not steal it. Maybe it could have been borrowed the car or something, but there would probably still be a more objective person in car event.

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.

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cycomanic ◴[30 Nov 21 05:34 UTC] No.29389295{6}[source]▶
I don't think ghosting and mining is so vage in this contex. It means engage in acquisition talks without actual intent to acquire, but instead to gain information. If you are the person doing this you will very clearly know what you are doing. Viewing in this context the comment is quite correct it is an odd denial, it sounds a bit like PR speak to me.
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1. jimkleiber ◴[30 Nov 21 06:20 UTC] No.29389491{7}[source]▶
I'm imagining if this had been a comment from a spurned romantic partner. "He cheated on me and took advantage of me," posted anonymously to a web forum. If I were the person being accused, and assuming I had been romantically involved with many people, I may have no idea who is accusing me or which specific instance they meant. Maybe I'm aware that I cheated on one person, but I may not even know if that is the person making the accusation? If I've only been romantically involved with one, then it may be quite obvious to me who it is and maybe even the specific incident to which they are referring.

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.

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2. cycomanic ◴[30 Nov 21 07:27 UTC] No.29389814[source]▶
But in your example if you never cheated on a partner you could easily sy "I've never cheated on someone". So if you're saying stripe has had so many interactions with companies they don't know if they "cheated" in this specific case, that implies they had least cheated in some cases, because otherwise they could simply deny that they ever cheated.

Because the accusation was more specific than "I felt taken advantage of" it was they engage engage in acquisition talks with the intent to gather confidential information, not the intent to acquire.

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3. jimkleiber ◴[30 Nov 21 15:34 UTC] No.29393219[source]▶
I think most accusations of intent are extrapolations of actions, which one side makes and the other side may not see the same way.

> engage in acquisition talks with the intent to gather confidential information, not the intent to acquire.

Going back to the dating analogy, if I go on 5 dates with someone and then we don't go on any more dates, that person may assume I had no intention to pursue a long-term relationship with them and was just using them, maybe for sex or company or whatever. However, perhaps I was trying to determine whether I could make a long-term relationship work—maybe I initially didn't think it would work but only went on the next 4 dates because I really really wanted it to work.

All I'm saying is that people can glean different intentions from the same action and it can be really hard to know whether our actions have caused pain to people.

> that implies they had least cheated in some cases, because otherwise they could simply deny that they ever cheated.

Again, the tricky part is Stripe may _think_ they have cheated in one case but in that case, the other person may not have even seen it as cheating. Eg, maybe I'm in an exclusive relationship with someone and my ex comes into town and we get lunch. I feel tremendously guilty for doing it and confess and apologize to my current partner. And the my current partner looks confused and laughs saying they're grateful I went to hang out with my ex. A different partner could split the relationship with me immediately and say I'm evil for having that lunch.

To one side it may seem _obvious_ that a transgression was committed and to the other side, it may be _oblivious_.