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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: 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.

Show context
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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barmstrong ◴[30 Nov 21 04:30 UTC] No.29388977[source]▶
I'm also a founder of an $xB fintech (Coinbase!) and I have to say, this does not ring true to me at all.

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.

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jsc1986 ◴[30 Nov 21 05:12 UTC] No.29389194[source]▶
Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?

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?

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dang ◴[30 Nov 21 05:24 UTC] No.29389229[source]▶
That sounds weird to me. There was no "HN team" before I started working on HN in October 2012 - just pg, and no one would have referred to him as "the HN team".

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.

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eganist ◴[30 Nov 21 05:29 UTC] No.29389273[source]▶
> As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.

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.

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LegitShady ◴[30 Nov 21 06:39 UTC] No.29389580[source]▶
that only makes it more likely they're helping more important people more frequently and to a greater degree.
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pvg ◴[30 Nov 21 07:11 UTC] No.29389735[source]▶
By that logic, there's really nothing generous dang can do that isn't further proof of his perfidy.
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LegitShady ◴[30 Nov 21 07:44 UTC] No.29389887[source]▶
Indeed once you understand that the moderators are helping people with brand management and suggestions at the very least, and the extent to which this occurs is hidden, they lose the ability to claim neutrality and open themselves up to lots of questions about what else they're doing

That's a result of actions taken not some kind of theoretical argument.

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afarrell ◴[30 Nov 21 08:44 UTC] No.29390195[source]▶
> open themselves up to lots of questions about what else they are doing

Is there a name for this pattern?

1. Observe that a human is taking some action to more effectively do their jobs… but in a way that has some risk of being unevenly applied or also self-beneficial.

2. Conclude that this action is itself malfeasance.

3. Conclude that this person merits generalized distrust.

I see this all the time in comments on (for example) youtube. I struggle to see how social cohesion could survive in a world where more people do this: If you lose trust by doing your job well, then its harder to motivate yourself to maintain others’ trust that you’ll do your job.

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LegitShady ◴[30 Nov 21 16:17 UTC] No.29393752{3}[source]▶
It depends what you think their job is I guess. I never imagined that forum moderation would include helping brand management for forum users - in fact I'd say those two behaviours are in direct conflict with each other.

If your job is forum moderation and you do that well great. But if the same people use those same accesses to give some forum users help over other forum users without any transparency then there is no illusion of neutral moderation and this whole forum just may be undisclosed pr/ brand management whole people are discussing companies/jobs/tech in a way that might bias others.

I haven't read anything on the site providing brand management to some users. Was that disclosed somewhere? How could you trust any post talking about a new company or having to do with companies in general if some are getting assistance to boost their reception and others aren't?

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1. afarrell ◴[30 Nov 21 18:30 UTC] No.29395623{4}[source]▶
I think their job is maintaining the health and ambient trust within the social system that is HN -- keeping HN a place people generally want to keep coming back to for thoughtful conversation. Assuming thats reasonably close, lets look at the activities we're talking about:

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

So there are two categories:

1. Helping clarify each others messages.

2. Letting people know when something is happening that concerns them.

Why do they not disclose this? Suppose you have two friends Alice and Bob. Suppose Alice tells you that about something Bob said which really upset her. Would you:

A. Commiserate with Alice by telling her about something ambiguously untrustworthy that Bob said.

B. Reply to Alice by comparing Bob unfavourably to Frank.

C. Listen empathetically to Alice and then when she's vented, offer another more charitable interpretation of Bob's words.

D. Later, let Bob know that Alice is upset with him and he might want to chat with her.

I bet most folks would advocate options C and D. Yet that is is basically doing "undisclosed pr/brand management" on behalf of Bob. It is pretty much the same as what dang says he does for HN. I don't think HN discloses this for the same reason that they don't disclose a habit of holding doors open for people -- I assume they don't remark on it because it seems unremarkable to them.

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Your words like "neutral", "give some forum users help over other forum users" imply a strict duty to avoid cooperative behaviour in favour of competitive behaviour. I don't think that duty is nearly so strict.