So now I'm going to have to shift my priors, and it may well be unfair to the firm. For one, I don't know if the allegations are true. I also don't know whether this is a one-off, or whether this happens all the time and this is the tip of the iceberg. I do know that whatever I hear is going to be deeply invested one way or the other.

Specifically about the rescinded offers, the only acceptable reason to do that is when the person has gotten the offer in bad faith, eg they lied about their CV or claimed to have done something they provably hadn't. Other than that, someone who's gotten an offer may well have started moving house, taking their kids out of school, gotten their spouse to quit their job, and all sorts of hard-to-reverse decisions. It's an utterly crappy thing to have happen, and any company that does it should be outed for it.

Now that other anecdotes are coming out of the woodwork, it seems maybe it may not be an exception but a broken internal process which needs fixing. That said, we don’t know the full picture and whether the incidence is within range or outside the range for their industry. That’s not yo say there shouldn’t be improvement. The industry and the company may very well benefit from a change in practices.

I was told (and this was reflected in the interview prep materials they provided) that bringing my own IDE and screen-sharing was the norm, although they would be prepared with a collaborative online editor as backup. It would be a collaborative session where the interviewer would work through the problem with me (obviously with myself in the driver's seat).

I was reasonably excited. Finally, a tech firm that didn't cargo-cult leetcode hazing.

And then came the interview.

I leave it to the reader to guess at the nature of the problem (hint: it starts with 'l'). The interviewer also seemed entirely unprepared and surprised that I was prepared with my own IDE. They were also unwilling to collaborate, and unwilling to accept how I approached solving the problem (I like to write experimental pseudo-code out first as I think through things, especially when in an environment where drawing things out isn't easy. I let them know that was what I was doing and explained my thought process as I wrote it, and yet they kept interrupting and explaining that I could clean that code up... code that was not meant to be "final" or "complete"...)

It was just a terrible experience from beginning to end. From the recruiter presenting an interview plan that was clearly not in line with reality, to the interviewer being unprepared for what their own interview prep materials described (BYOIDE!), to the interviewer's unprofessional and very unhelpful demeanor (if day-to-day engineering at Stripe involves being berated at every step as you prototype a solution to solve a leetcode problem before preparing to write the actual solution...well, maybe they should fix that)

Wow. Similar thing happened to me with Stripe. It was a system design interview. I had already seen a very similar problem and aced it with Amazon. This person just kept saying "we don't have time for this, we need to get through this whole system" - wouldn't even let me finish my thought. It was arbitrary whether they wanted me to dive into a section of the system more or if I was boring them (and they did not seem excited/engaged to present this interview) and taking too long explaining my decision.

Stripe was the only company I didn't pass (and I passed multiple FAANG interviews) and it was the only company who told me twice that the role I was applying for either was filled or "shifted priorities" and they would scramble to find me another role with another hiring manager. And I am certain it was because of this one system design interview that we just did not click on.

Anyways there was a tooling communication problem. Clearly Facebook was new to the coderpad thing, they should have come out and said so, they should have communicated that you won't be able to execute, etc.

After experimenting with BYOIDE, we've stuck with online code style platforms (monotype fonts, no language-based Word-style auto-correct). This helps people focus on the problem, not the code itself, in my experience.

I’m not sure I follow here. For me, programming is an iterative process: write a small chunk, test it out, write the next bit, and so on. Not being able to execute code seems like it would make that process harder, and force interviewee to essentially come up with the code “fully formed” all at once, which is hardly a useful or realistic skill.

I guess it's yours hiring process, so whatever, but you could probably be filtering out people with very good and desirable programming habits.

I've also had some serious problems with (senior) coworkers who "assert their code works" when it's riddled with bugs or flat out doesn't work, so maybe it's my trauma refected here

> I hope I’m never asked to write executable code in it because as an editor, it’s terrible.

Well, I typically offer coderpad for anyone who would rather not share their screen.

Not my call; it’s an org-wide setting (we use coderpad with SSO that lets the company control some of the settings).

If someone suggested using their own IDE and screen sharing instead, I would 100% let them do it.

> Otherwise you might as well use Google docs. Coderpad has other useful features like syntax highlight, autocomplete (I think?), and the private interviewer notepad with timestamps.

I always say that isn't the case at the top of my interviews, because otherwise it's a handicap for people interviewing remote.

I hope Stripe takes a deep look into how their employees reach out to people and trace down every hiring related emails.

Patrick - I would start a task force for this internally and hold people accountable for being assholes. No matter how your people are busy, I rank my own time higher and wasting it pisses me off to no end.

No dog in the fight either here, but that's exactly what those who posted these stories recently are trying to do. You saw some bit of news and then totally changed your perception. That's how this thing works. Those tiny bits of negative news just stick in your mind.

What were your priors? Stripe pays well, has a great product, leadership is great, hires top-tier developers, is a great place to work, etc. (making stuff up here idk what your priors were) but all of that is erased because you saw a random article about two people having offers rescinded and you don't even know if it's true?

What if all of the above priors were true and it was also true that two people had offers rescinded? Do they not have top-notch leadership because two people had offers rescinded? Is that enough to sway your opinion?

Best course of action here IMO is to wait and see more evidence. If you had a weak opinion either way why have one. If you had a strong opinion is this strong evidence to change all of your priors? Plenty of companies rescind offers, they just aren't making it to the front page (Google, AirBnB, etc.).

The better question is: Where did your priors come from?

Every big tech company invests a lot of time and money into projecting a good reputation on the internet. It's basically table stakes for competitive hiring these days. This includes everything from making a founder a celebrity in tech circles or on Twitter, to posting fake Glassdoor reviews (and getting negative reviews removed). The worst company I worked for would periodically send e-mails to everyone reminding us about the NDAs we signed and implying that they'd sue anyone who talked to the press or wrote negative things about the company online.

If you're making judgements based on the frequency of good versus bad posts, your opinions are going to be dominated by companies pushing positive PR for themselves.

The strangest thing about the negative Stripe posts is that I haven't seen many Stripe employees (other than executives) show up and say that these anecdotes are surprising. I have, however, seen several anecdotes in this thread and others noting that Stripe's hiring process is notoriously chaotic and flawed.

I don't really know the truth. I'd lean toward assuming these are abnormal experiences, but I wouldn't discard them entirely just because they're not what you expected to hear. What you expect to hear about a big company is largely a function of deliberate PR pushes these days.

>> I haven't seen many Stripe employees (other than executives) show up and say that these anecdotes are surprising.

... Do people normally do that? With verifiable, named accounts? Personally, as an employee, I would feel profoundly uncomfortable to publicly comment on such matters of my company; and may well be explicitly and clearly forbidden from doing so. Plus, most people would only really have their own experience to relate, and I at least would be reluctant to share anecdata as useful evidence.

(and then there's a matter of time and prioritization; heck, I work for IBM -- if I tried to counter every negative comment on IBM on Hacker News, that'd be my six new full time jobs, even though I've personally had brilliantly positive experience over two decades and deeply respect all of my colleagues :D )

It seems pretty scummy to prohibit or penalize employees for talking about their initial hiring interactions with the company. Especially if they keep their remarks to the period prior to their officially being hired.

At that point... you weren't an employee. And it's pretty odd for a company to assume they have a right to your silence, covering a period before you had entered into a contractual relationship with them and they were paying you.

Yes, I've read Snowcrash, yes we live in dystopian future; at the same time, if I try to be a devil's advocate and simplify it to very basics - if I'm running a two person shop, and one of them is saying bad things about my/our company... I wouldn't really be excited about working with them either, would I? I ran a photography side business for a while, and if my assistant had feedback to share with me, awesome; on the other hand, if they went on Tweeter and criticized our working, what's my motivation to call them up and work closely with them again? :-/

Things get far murkier at larger companies of course, and there's labour law etc, but I imagine there'd always be some tension in speaking negatively about your employer.

(Edit: As for "talking about hiring process" specifically, that may get even trickier; unless you're an HR manager actually familiar and proficient and authorized to formally represent hiring process to prospective candidates, you may cause untold amount of ruckus even with best intentions in describing your limited perspective on the hiring process to people - setting up incorrect expectations or even accidentally prejudicing against the company in any potential latter lawsuit. Just because Person A has had specific experience in hiring, in no way guarantees that Person B will, but it can and has easily been interpreted that way when Person A says "Company A hiring practices are as such").

i've always written ibm off as large, old and stodgy. curious to hear a counterpoint if you're willing to share.

IBM (and Microsoft, and Google, and others) are huge and it makes sense that there are pockets of awesome and awful distributed throughout them.

We tend to ascribe... personalities to large companies; explain them in single sentences. IBM is old and stodgy, Oracle has awful licensing practices, Amazon has (great cloud | shoddy warehouse employment practices | too much counterfeit goods) depending on perspective, etc. Sometimes we mix up Musk and Tesla. Overall, we tend to put a simple descriptive sentence over companies, just like we do over politics and history etc. We must, it's how we make sense of the world :).

But in a company of tens and hundreds of thousands of employees, cultures and perspectives and motivations can differ significantly. It'll be a complex landscape. Not all of IBM is stodgy anymore than all of Google is cool. And I've been amused there's a guy in Amazon who maintains PeopleSoft HR just like there's guy in Government of Canada who maintains PeopleSoft HR :-). The IBM guys designing hardware who test their work by putting radioactive material under the computer and seeing how CPUs behave? not so old and stodgy, in my mind :D . There's also some genuine good hard work on occasionally boring stuff like RDBMS engines & optimizers, compilers and OSs for obscure boxes, and I am pretty grateful to folks who write p-series firmware because watching a live production sync and migration is exciting stuff, as well as OS/390 / z/OS/VM guys who are probably chuckling at the "Virtualization" and "Cloudiness" things we all think are shiny and new and cool:). Don't know enough to speak about the quantum thing, I suspect there's a core of innovation wrapped in unfortunate marketing bollocks, as there was for "Watson" (which I find easier to think of "branding for semi-related suite of created and acquired products, some good some average some ugly" rather than "AI that won Jeopardy").

For myself, FWIW, people around me have much more immediate impact on my working satisfaction, than overall corporate average/stereotype. And I've worked with excited enthusiastic peers, been surrounded by experienced leaders who provided extensive mentorship, and done some personally exciting stuff (inasmuch as "pushing 1's and 0's around and making computers go bleep bloop" is exciting:). I've had times when I worked on personally technologically exciting things; and I've been in places and worked for clients where it's all molasses and quagmire and politics and procedures; I've tried to force myself to learn something about all, and I feel I've gained a certain perspective... but we each have our own perspective and priorities and where I've found satisfactions others would only find frustrations. But what it comes down to - I've been surrounded by sufficient percentage of people competent and motivated (even if in ways and fields that HN stereotypically would not always necessarily respect), to enjoy myself on average :).

Ever since they shut down most of their software research division (e.g. Hawthorne) , I don't even know anyone who still works at IBM.

(In spite of this I confess that I devoured the Stripe thread alongside a heaping bowl of popcorn. Some combination of Gell-Mann amnesia and a vulgar taste for tabloid gossip, I guess.)

Disgruntled ex-employees will leave bad feedback, people who have invested a lot of themselves in the company will leave good feedback (and perhaps not even see some of the problems others see).

Not sure if they ended up posting but when I was reading the thread there weren't any.

I interviewed with Stripe around 8 months ago and I think the recruiters are one of the better ones. I do see a deliberate effort to make it a good experience. While prepping, I reached out to friends of friends at Stripe and they were helpful going out of their way to ensure I was prepared. Didn't get the job but they seem like a nice bunch.

They were surprised that even though I said I could program in TypeScript that I didn't know any of the old style JavaScript meta magic (While I used TypeScript as a programming language, I wasn't particularly versed in web). Also, I failed the mandatory HTTP test (everyone had to do a problem related to HTTP, even they were interviewing for a compiler job). That was all very odd, and I think Google was a better fit for me anyways after going through that.

I keep careful track of companies that do this and I will never stop interviewing if I get an offer from a company that does. That is bad because it means I'm more likely to renege on their offers last minute.

There's an interesting psychological process here that I don't think I've seen described before.

You would expect that the higher the reputation something has, the more resilient that regard is. As if good reputation means the thing has a large number of "reputation points" and can thus afford to lose some while still retaining a large quantity of remaining rep points.

But the perceived effect is the opposite. The higher the reputation the more fragile it is to bad news. When a middling reputation thing gets some bad news, we consider it not particularly newsworthy and its reputation is unchanged. But when a highly regarded thing gets tainted, the pristine edifice comes tumbling down.

I can understand why our brains would work that way: we are incentivized through our evolutionary history to be highly attuned to detect deceipt—actors that are not what they appear to be. So bad news about a good person is read as vital information that causes us to re-evaluate everything we knew about them in that light.

But it's not clear to me that that model logically scales to an entire organization. Organizations are not monolithic entities and when an otherwise great org makes a misstep, that doesn't necessarily mean it's rotten to the core.

The way the thinking goes is that humans are wired to tell stories and there are certain stories we are predisposed to. We like to root for “the little guy” and love to cheer on startups, especially those with sympathetic stories, founders, high competence, etc.

We also tend to dislike entities at the very top and in extreme positions of power (eg billionaires, governments, large evil corporations) for a variety of reasons.

At some point in your company’s growth your narrative arc flips and you become the bad guy. The best thing you can do as the company is to try your best to postpone the flip as long as possible, but it is inevitable. When it happens, you are on the downslope and “in the dog house” as far as the media and public perception is concerned and there’s just not much you can do about it. Sometimes the harder you try to explain yourself and fight against it, the worse it gets.

You’ll also notice founders of these companies are often totally caught by surprise when this flip happens. They’ve gotten so used to a sympathetic public and a certain mode of behavior to maintain good public perception - transparent, relatable, “aww shucks” style - and when it flips it can be confusing because this doesn’t work anymore. The perception of them has shifted from “that smart/competent startup person I am rooting for” to “the powerful billionaire CEO that crushes the little people with the raise of a finger” and so the behaviors that come naturally to them take on a different tone entirely from a perception perspective.

When this happens it’s probably time to batten down the hatches and shift PR strategies. The old way isn’t likely to work anymore; the straw has finally broken the camel’s back.

I’m no expert at what it takes to reverse this. My best guess is that you need to spend your time in the penalty box while drawing minimum attention to let the steam blow off faster and not accelerate the roller coaster ride down. Then when you come back after 6-12 months or so, do so with a changed communications strategy that implicitly takes into account the changed public perceptions around power dynamics. You’re not a beloved startup anymore but you can still be “one of the good ones” as far as big companies and billionaire CEOs.

That psychological process is actually ever-present, except it just that we often do not notice it until it is explicitly pointed out, like when the older fish asks the younger fish: "how's the water?" in This is Water by DFW [1].

I remember encountering it a long time ago when I came across this pithy quote for the first time: "education can take a man to any height but character keeps him there".

It turns out that there's quite a few of these that have been codified into common English expressions:

"He fell to a new low"

"She was terminated at the peak of her career"

The reason why these sentences do not seem nonsensical to our brains is because we often equate reputation with ascending a (physical) height. When someone of high repute engages in questionable behavior, of course our brain naturally associates the consequence of such behavior as a fall--similar to any accidental descent from an elevated place.

There are a lot more eye-opening examples in Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff et al [2].

1: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By

A negative thing about a high reputation company gets published in "serious" outlets or upvoted on social media.

A negative thing about a middling reputation company is buried on page 7.

I'd say it's the "Wow, this was on the front page of the BBC" effect that triggers the brain response, moreso than the fact that it exists at all. (Coupled with the fact that you probably won't see much of what's on the proverbial page 7, ever)

Then why is it so brittle in big companies? Because the mishap mentioned here of Stripe rescinding the candidate and others we tend to hear about are pretty major and enough to erode trust significantly and in turn reputation.

When smaller negative things like Amazon not donating a large amount of money to curl but it was short lived and faded easily and probably nobody remembers it but bigger bad things we frequently hear about big companies such as poor work environment in Amazon is pretty hard to forget and no amount of good reputation unless something big enough shows that it is not true it will be on the back of mind for a long time.

In smaller businesses people expect negative things to happen more frequently and nobody remembers since it is normal for people and reputation is unaffected unless something extremely bad happens.

Hence even if you have a good reputation negative things will break it more often than in smaller companies because you have far higher standards to hold to maintain while small companies dont't and their reputation does not go down as much as bigger companies

You seem to think that very positive opinions can only be strongly held opinions, but GP had a generic positive opinion, weakly held due to lack of direct experience.

If the strength of your prior is held fixed, then a negative piece of news should change a highly positive opinion more.

We have this world where things in the public space are highly polished and curated. If you have a look at some historical interviews from say 50 years ago, you'd sometimes get some person who kinda seemed like a kid in school giving his first speech. It would be clumsy, but like in school you could adjust for the presentation, maybe give them the benefit of the doubt.

In the modern world, everything is presented in the most positive light possible. Someone has sat before every public statement or interview and written down all the positives and negatives, and they've already worked out what is good to focus on, and what needs to be spun. They take an active interest in monitoring the public space for what is said about them, and they already have the rebuttals in place. It's actually quite predictable: apologize and say it was a one-off, claim that the bad thing has been dealt with, point out that the information may be wrong, and point out the ulterior motives of the person making the claim.

In light of this, it's simply hard for me to give the benefit of the doubt, and it's very similar with any other spin-heavy communications. It's a bummer, because in my ideal world people would just put stuff out like they see it and listeners wouldn't have to try to un-spin what they'd been told. I'm sure a lot of dishonest communicators hide among the honest, which is their whole game.

> What were your priors? Stripe pays well, has a great product, leadership is great, hires top-tier developers, is a great place to work, etc. (making stuff up here idk what your priors were) but all of that is erased because you saw a random article about two people having offers rescinded and you don't even know if it's true?

Unfortunately, it's like when some person gets outed for being a creep, in the genre of MeToo. One or two independent allegations, I tend to think "hmm gotta see both sides". Somewhere like 4 or 5, I certify the creep status and laminate a card for them. Granted a business is not a single person, so those numbers may need adjustment, but you really don't need much to ruin a reputation.

That way nothing is true until it happens to you.

This is a big reason why most of us are terrible at "investing" in the stock market. You have a good thesis on why a company is good and it checks all boxes. With a small bad news about the CEO or something without evidence gets out and you suddenly forget your checklist and panic.

I do have a friend that worked there until relatively recently (quit about a year and a half ago) and said things were good pre pandemic. He also told me that I should never consider working there with their new comp structure.

Why? Do they have nothing better to do with their time?

Maybe you can ask this person directly why they are lying:

https://hackernews.hn/item?id=29405734

Now, getting that money is another story...

Can you elaborate on this?

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/can-employer-legally-wi...

The thing is, there are lots and lots of companies who don't have these types of problems; that don't treat candidates poorly, follow thru with the offers they make (I can't believe I'm typing that!).

Hiring is already a power dynamic slanted for the employer... this shit just seem excessive and like 0 fucks are given.

As a job seeker, don't waste your time interviewing at companies that have these fundamental problems just getting in the door. The odds will never be in your favor, but these types of problems make for a much larger mountain to climb.

Knowing these things, and how good Stripe is at PR, I wouldn't be surprised if things on the inside are actually a dysfunctional mess. I hope not.

If the actual number of candidates affected is small, then it would be cheap to make it right for them. You could find a team that can take the engineer (we're not interchangeable parts, but Stripe is a big company), and/or offer monetary compensation for the opportunity cost.

[0] I'll reserve judgment about higher level management. I don't know if the norms and circumstances are different. Obviously this also excludes failed background checks, candidates being dishonest, etc, etc.

But you're right - rescinding job offers is an absolutely vile business practice. Imagine resigning from your job after accepting an offer from Stripe, and then they just change their minds. Gross.

Companies usually fuss about it, but I insist, and among quite a few orgs over the past 25 years I've never had one pass because I refused to sign prior to background check.

Lesson learned.

https://www.dfeh.ca.gov/fair-chance-act/

https://www.nelp.org/campaign/ensuring-fair-chance-to-work/

I think one key thing in that California law is the notion of the “conditional job offer.” This law doesn’t effect the dynamics of the offer letters we were discussing at all. If you make an offer and there are still conditions pending, you’re obligated to let the candidate know. I cannot imagine CA is doing that differently.

I get your point, though, that doing the criminal portion of the background check after extending the offer is now not just normal, but mandatory, in CA.

There must be something that both are signing right? With pay rate, hours and benefits written down.

Typically, for a white-collar job, you'd interview and receive a job offer contingent on background check and verifying previous employment. That offer would have a salary and start date and that's about it. HR might hand you a benefits package at the same time.

Sometime on or before the first day of employment, you'd be asked to sign NDAs, confirm legal eligibly to work, and similar paperwork, but almost never a contract.

Senior leaders often have contracts because their terms are more complicated - golden parachutes, etc.

Employment is "at-will" in most states. Employers are obligated to pay for work performed, but you can be terminated at any time (and you can quit at any time).

Some high-level jobs will also have a written contract but it's not normal for a typical salaried or hourly position, unless there is a union involved.

I'm very confident that most people have to a sign a piece of paper listing their pay etc on them before beginning their job.

For at will employment they can change your pay at any time. You're also free to leave at any time of course.

Most people don't sign a contract between employer and employee in the US? So you don't even have any kind of confidentially agreement?

This is like HR 101

Otherwise I think that they are an unwarranted intrusion, but our HR and Legal say otherwise.

BTW another thing about people who handle the money is that they are required to go on vacation.

Obviously they’d be foolish to give notice until the check comes back clean but it’s typically a same day thing.

Never had a problem with a background check that didn’t come up in a reference check anyway. Personally I don’t even care about them except for people who handle money, and would rather only do them for those jobs.

In my case one major red flag was "having to fly somewhere before I have an official offer", and I can only imagine the new zoomer crowd leans much more in that direction. FANG doesn't respect your time or effort at all, they think you should be honored just to be in their presence. That shit doesn't fly anymore.

I told someone who then said "well... that's not the way you get a job!" And I said "but... I didn't want a job. They called me. They wanted a worker, but wouldn't do me the courtesy of basic information before I was to drop whatever I was doing and come running to them on their timetable".

If I weren't busy with the familoids at home I'd love a free plane trip and fancy hotel stay. Er, in non-pandemic times at least

That + never ending pandemic + etc

But also, it's really shitty to fly somewhere only to get rejected. Been there, done that.

It's extremely unhelpful if one company is still in the "screening" phase because they take months to progress, while others are already extending offers. The options then are that you wait and risk letting go of other offers, let go of Google, or join a new company and leave within months. All of these options look terrible to me.

Then the recruiter will help connect you with teams that have open head count. If there's a mutual fit, the company will make a formal offer.

It also has the added benefit of improving internal cooperation, trust, and mobility. Many big companies suffer from the attitude of "Oh, those doofuses in department X can't be trusted to get anything done right". [1] When you have a common hiring process, you know that everybody in the company passed the same bar you and your teammates did, and your baseline assumption should be that they're as competent. And similarly, transfers get pretty easy because everybody has already passed a common hiring bar, so you know that the candidate is already qualified technically, you just need to judge if they're a good fit for your team.

Time to find a mutual fit can vary a lot. It was really quick (like a couple days) my first time around, because I was early enough in my career to be pretty adaptable, had a very in-demand skillset (Javascript), and had multiple teams - Search, GMail, Docs - all vying for me. It was a lot slower (month+) my second time around, because I interviewed in April 2020 as the world was falling apart from COVID and teams kept disappearing as they got canceled or their headcount got cut.

[1] https://i.insider.com/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000000?width=589&for...

Of course it doesn't make any sense for small companies.

Then got and excited call from my recruiter and was told I'd get an offer and that there was a match for one of the teams I interviewed for. The catch? Downleveled to SWE I, despite saying earlier in the process that I would not take it for career development and salary range reasons.

They were willing to set up another round of interviews to get more data, but at some point you just have to call it. End-to-end, this took around a month and a half. This was with my positive references allowing me to skip the phone screen.

I've had positive experiences interviewing with Microsoft and Amazon, no experience with other big tech.

Several companies fight this with a standard interviewing pipeline, of course most candidates will be displeased if they spend 1 month interviewing and then get dropped into a random team.

Just look at what was happening at Cisco with caste based hiring.

You're not interviewed by teams with open headcount. I never met my interviewers again.

You don't really expect any new hire SWE to be able to do the job on day 1 - Google has so much bespoke internal technology that it takes months to become productive. So the fit conversations aren't really just another round of interviews - they are more of a "mutual fit" assessment (interests and background). Often it's more of a sales pitch ("here's why you should join our team").

Do any of the other FAANGs (MAGMAs??) do the same now?

And to answer a question from a neighboring comment, it's exceedingly rare for a match to not happen. There are way more teams with open headcount than candidates looking, so teams and managers go out of their way to woo the incoming folks. I don't know exactly what happens if one spends two months fruitlessly, presumably somebody from the bootcamp program would have a long conversation with them about their general fit at the company.

Ehhhh...you say that, but it definitely goes both ways. It's not meant to, but hiring managers at Meta absolutely do evaluate the bootcampers who reach out to join, especially for more popular teams.

This is also why honest feedback for rejections should be required (by law? probably not. maybe by social pressure) so candidates know that the decision wasn't just a fluke

When media outlets report on HN threads we normally downweight those pretty heavily since they're just recycling content/discussion that already appeared here. In this case I'm downweighting it less than we normally would, in keeping with the core principle that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are part of the story [1].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hackernews.hn/item?id=29394740

Stripe replied to my post, I replied with the details, and moved on. I hope they improve their processes and the rest of the tech industry follow suit.

From my perspective, the proof of the pudding is whether the HN discussion is substantially different from the previous one. In this case it isn't. The themes are the same and the comments look interchangeable, not counting the throwaway account drama in the previous one.

(Submitted title was "Stripe applicants say that the company is rescinding offers after it makes them", which was either editorialized, against the site guidelines, or later changed by the publication.)

'Stripe is on a hiring spree. But it's also rescinding job offers and angering engineers.'

I thought I was landing my dream job at the time. Every conversation on tech websites had nothing but praise for the company and everyone applauded me when I got the job. But secretly, it was terrible. Organizational chaos, constant verbal abuse from executives (while they put on a friendly face for public PR), the most exploitative management practices I've ever seen.

The weirdest part was that the company was full of good people. We all joined thinking we were going to do great things, but we all mutually understood that it was a mess and that the management situation was not good at all.

But the catch is that it's really hard to say anything negative about a beloved tech company. The few times I tried, people scoffed at my complaints because they had only heard great things about the company. When everyone is bombarded with positive news and conversation about a company, they assume that anyone diverging from this narrative must be wrong, lying, or deserved whatever treatment they got. It's a bizarre phenomenon.

It gets even worse, though, because I quickly realized that my own resume and professional reputation now depended on the positive reputation of this company. I felt like I also had to say good things about the company in public, or else risk damaging my own professional reputation in the process. Would anyone want to hire me if they knew I was part of such a poorly-run company?

So, most of us quietly put up with the company for long enough to cash out our signing bonuses and vesting schedules (all of which were weighted for retention) and to avoid having too short of a stay listed on our resumes. Then we got out and moved on, relying on the positive reputation of the company to help others assume we were coming from a great company.

Whenever I see universally beloved companies like this with scattered anecdotes of chaotic or terrible behavior behind the scenes, I wonder if it's the same story: Beautiful company on the outside (due to PR) with built-in protection against the negative stories leaking because nobody on the inside wants to ruin the good reputation of the employer that is currently boosting their own personal reputation.

Or maybe Stripe is really a great company inside and these are isolated anecdotes from a few incompetent middle managers. The thing is - It's impossible to know due to all of the mixed incentives shaping the public narrative.

If there are 500+ more great engineers itching to get every open position, what incentive does the company have to pay well, have a smooth and respectful hiring process, treat employees well and respect their personal time, etc? Incentives guide outcomes far more often than any principles of niceness and fairness. They're often actually incentivized to do the opposite, especially in hiring. So what if we jerk people around and ghost them randomly in the hiring process? The only result for them is a slightly less unmanageably huge pile of applicants. If anything, it improves the applicant quality from their perspective - they're filtering out people who have standards and self-respect, who would probably just leave later anyways when you start treating them badly, and keeping the people who will stick around for any kind of abuse you dream up.

If you want to be happy, get a job at a boring-sounding company that nobody has ever heard of. Far more likely to have good hiring practices, pay, and working conditions. People being impressed by the name of your employer only really lasts a few seconds anyways.

>[T]he situation in which the sufferer looks completely calm on a superficial level while in reality, they are frantically trying to keep up with the demands of their life.

It's pretty common in places like the one you described. Pristine external presence makes constructive feedback ungrateful or contrarian, leading to everyone struggling in silence. I think the terminology is most associated with Stanford, since students work for several years to get entry, only to realize that it can be a harsh environment.

We've a SaaS business that processes through Stripe around $200k per month.

Dealing with their sales team has been frustrating. We've been trying to switch to interchange fees or reduced fess for a couple of years already. At first, we've been told to reach first $80k per month, then $100k per month, then having more than 3 months above $100k per month, then having less international cards.

It feels the goalpost keeps moving. Meanwhile we've been charged with an extra 1% fee on subscriptions, something we never agreed to and we would have made different architecture decision if we knew subscription mechanisms would be extra.

All of this is fine as it's just business. However lack of transparency and misleading statements are super not okay. And it seems just the way Stripe does business across their organization.

/end of rant

If I have an interview, all code that day is going through.

I don't think anyone should have fondness for their employer -- it's a business relationship -- but you also have an ethical obligation to do what you're being paid to do. Otherwise, don't agree to do it in the first place.

I disagree with this view. My employment is a simple arrangement: entity X pays me $Y to be their employee. To some extent, they can tell me to do things and I'll do things in response. It's up to me to find a new employer if I'm unhappy with what they're telling me to do (or the salary, etc), and it's up to them to have a convo with me or fire me if they're unhappy with what I do. If he hasn't gotten fired or even spoken to by his manager for his work, then his work is satisfactory.

The comment I responded to was not talking about rigor. They said they weren't doing the code review at all.

> How does neglecting code review to interview elsewhere compare to neglecting code review to get other features out for the same employer?

If my employer pays me to prioritize new features over code review, then any bugs that arise are their responsibility.

If my employer pays me to do a code review, I take the money, and I don't review the code, then I'm responsible. My employer assigned the right amount of resources to code review, and I was dishonest about actually doing it.

> How about for a different employer that you're also being paid by?

I don't understand this one. You mean if you're a contractor and are neglecting code review to work on another contract?

If you're a contractor, it depends on whether you're being paid for time or whether you're being paid for good code.

If you're being paid for time, the above applies as well. If you're being paid for good code, then it's always your responsibility to review the code.

I’m basically allowing their code base to slowly rot from neglect while interviewing to leave as soon as I become decently good.

This seems to be one implementation of that, which seems to have worked out a little better than anonymous comments? It also does a better job of distilling the major issues at play here, in my opinion:

> The technical manager who signed the offer before it was rescinded feels more frustrated about the lack of recourse than the actual loss of the job.

This is the crux of the issue. It's not about whether it's legal or moral to rescind offers or how the job market looks, but the emotional distress caused by having quit your job, or having informed family and friends of a new job, and then having to tell them that it's actually not happening.

As humans we should always strive to minimize this kind of terrible experience, or at least make amends in spades if we subject someone else to it. A company that goes above and beyond would give a candidate, say, six months of standard severance pay for this situation if it was absolutely unavoidable that they had to rescind someone's offer. Of course, the best course of action would be to give them an immediate appointment to a similar job in another division, or at least a fast-track interview for the same.

----------------------------------------

[1] https://hackernews.hn/item?id=29388832

Scaling HR must be less of a priority & nightmare when the entire company is engineering focused. Human touch get lost with such growth.

If basics like this are mismanaged for HR, how does basic operations of other non-engineering functions look?

As a small employer myself - I’m CEO, Dev and HR. We’re only 7 now - no way I’ll be doing same past 10 for example.

Of the two remaining examples, only one person received a written offer. The other received a verbal offer, but it was rescinded before a written offer was made.

The former recruiter for Stripe said that Stripe had a "hire and fire mentality", but they appeared to be referring to their own firing, not to the topic of the story.

The former recruiter also said that Stripe's recruiting process was disorganized, and shifted priorities a lot. Changing priorities or directions is the exact reason given for both rescinded offers mentioned in this story.

Given the above, is there any reason to believe there is anything more to this story than that Stripe's hiring arm is really disorganized, and some people got offers who should not have, and those offers had to be rescinded? That is to say, what is the basis (at this time) for concluding they have a policy of making offers and then rescinding them?

Well if they had a policy of not rescinding offers like this (which AFAICT every other major company does), this wouldn't have happened.

Giving any sort of offer, verbal or written, and then rescinding it is super scummy behavior and I will probably not apply to Stripe in the future until this is resolved

This to me is the correct interpretation. Even if affected me personally.

I had a "we want to make you an offer" call with recruiting, with no mention of comp, and they asked for references. That was the first mention of reference checks in the process. I got cold feet because of the churn with the actual role they wanted me to perform, the lack of communication on pay, and the extra time and effort to line up references some of whom were still working at the same company as me. There were enough red flags for my comfort level to end the process at that point without involving other people in my network.

Back to the article, maybe the offers are being rescinded after reference checks? I understood that reference checks were falling out of favor because of liability for the person or company giving the feedback, but yet they seem to be coming back.

I blamed covid at the time, but in retrospect none of the other places I interviewed had similar issues. If a candidate doesn't pass the interview, just reject the candidate!

Reminds me a shady startup company I interviewed with 10 years ago. They kept lying about their financials and kept hiring people, knowing they gonna run out of money within 2-3 months. Their plan was getting these people on board, pay them salary for a couple of months, then announcing they company needs to raise more money, asking everyone to work without a salary for the time being. Everyone left 2 months after that.

I saw this happen as an intern at Microsoft when BlackBerry was shut down.

I also saw it happen to some friends in the games industry. In one case the department shut down on a friends first day of work and they were promptly out of the job after moving across the country.

It’s still a shitty thing to do though.

A problem in the dynamc described in hire-to-fire is that people are waiting to be unemployed before looking for new jobs, so they have no leverage on the hiring discussion. From a reputation perspective, if you are in a role now, I think it's pretty reasonable to assert that for you to move, firing you before 18 months is going to cost them at least a year's salary in severence. If you think this is just an exec level strategy, a company can make its roadmap and quarterly commitments or numbers without a director or VP, but it can't make them without a key engineer to deliver on it.

It depends on what you do, but if you can make a company money or shorten the time between an investment and return on it, learn to be more strategic on the way in.

assuming this is false. The leverage is 1) They do not get to begin to enjoy the value you bring (ie, they push that value generation of some employee out into the future) and 2) You will continue to hunt for a best offer

It is a trick of human psychology to think that future value has no present value.

But I also think it is important to distinguish between Stripe the product and Stripe the company (and subsequently its hiring practices). Based on what I've heard, developers love Stripe, and they are popular in YC too for obvious reasons. PG's essays have often mentioned the Collisons [2], and Patrick Collison is admired (presumably) universally for his smarts [3]. All the above mentioned praise stems primarily from two things:

a) Stripe having a well-functioning product

b) The Collisons being incredibly smart and driven individuals

Both of these factors in conjunction imply that Stripe will be heavily admired. The love for Stripe is therefore a manifestation of that implication, and I dont think there is some PR machine working tirelessly to polish the Stripe brand.

It is a fallacy to extrapolate the sentiment surrounding product and founders to assume that Stripe will automatically be a "good" company.

Needless to say, my heart goes out to those who had offers rescinded. As others have mentioned, an offer can set in motion events that are seemingly irreversible. I hope Stripe uses this as an opportunity to reflect on their hiring systems and fix them to be more waterproof.

[1] https://hackernews.hn/item?id=29387264 [2] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html [3] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stripe-ceo-patrick-col...

Edit: fixed grammar

It has almost the same number of votes and comments as https://hackernews.hn/item?id=29401454, which is 8 hours older and 14 spots higher on the front page. Maybe there are way more dislikes, and the algorithm doesn't like that?

I have over heard that snap, lyft, coinbase, and stripe are doing one year grants. Avoid them like the plague!

It's obvious that Stripe is becoming a huge company in terms of valuation, company size and impact. At a high level, all of us should be pretty excited about this. They've done an incredible job building things that developers want and love to use.

Unfortunately, that also means we shouldn't be shocked when some of the people/processes for hiring don't align with the same values and dedication to high quality work that we've come expect.

One of the dirty, little secrets of tech (particularly enterprise tech startups) is that some of the most culturally toxic and mediocre employees (from a quality of work and/or ability perspective) are in HR.

Hopefully the fact that this story is getting so much traction here and elsewhere will motivate the founders and leadership at Stripe to get into the weeds about how teams in charge of hiring are seriously jeopardising the key to the company's success: The people they employ.

On a semi-related note, this entire thread and the all of the adjacent coverage of this story should be a huge cautionary tale (and opportunity) for current and future founders: The most important thing our companies will do is hiring. That means the processes, culture, and work ethic of the teams doing the hiring deserve an ungodly amount of scrutiny.

This kind of crap happens all the time in this industry. We should be all be honest about that before shitting on Stripe, John, Patrick, etc. If they can become complacent, it can happen to any of us as well.

As a side note, HR employees (especially at low or entry level) who don't fit this stereotype should compensated, praised and recognized internally. In my experience, most companies with toxic HR teams tend to reward those who are very good at kissing ass and/or mirroring back what VPs' and Directors' won't shut about at all-hands, LinkedIn, etc.

The time to search for your next job is always. Give a crappy code review and spend that time taking a recruiters call.

Complete anecdata, but engineers have been some of the best treated employees at the companies I've worked at.

For some FANG companies that even works for promotions, they won't give you a promotion, but if you leave you can be re-hired at the next level after ~1-2 years.

The problem is that the day you are promoted, you don’t actually make that much more in TC because so much of it comes from equity, which is only updated once a year and stretches for four years. Thus, it takes up to four years to hit the steady-state comp at the new level. In contrast, new hire packages need to be competitive for folks who have already been at their level for many years.

As soon as you have done that, they give far less consideration to you.

New recruits can get a far better package than people already there. Your replacement will get paid more than they were willing to pay you.

Oh, but they are that stupid.

What does this mean? Like, open a PR with bad code?