holy sh*t. pretty trippy. sucks.maybe they just figured, look, it&#x27;s go-time now. we hire at 10x the ideal rate, we&#x27;ll poison the culture a bit, lose at 10x the ideal rate, but in the end, we&#x27;ll see the growth we want to see, which is really all that matters at this point. we think we can take on visa&#x2F;whoever, so let&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;d up -- but it was too genuine.i _think_ i ended up bailing right on the call b&#x2F;c of....i have no idea, could have been anything. this was low-level IC&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;ve had more than a couple of folks get back to me after weeks or months saying, &quot;sorry we didn&#x27;t get back to you, obv this is stupid late, etc.&quot; -- 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&#x27;re at now. adding, the obvious -- sucky is their painful-as-childbirth all-day interviews, their 30-day long labor-ious interviews, etc.

It is unprofessional but not surprising.Once you are rejected, the recruiter probably has moved onto the next project and forgot about you.

I thought about it but the recruiter said the feedback was positive, so much so that another hiring manager saw it and wanted to talk about another position.Even if that had happened, ghosting would hardly be a good course of action, but I’m biased.

Maybe a red flag came up when checking references?

It is a business convo, after all.Being ghosted is normal and expected.If I&#x27;m ghosted, I will follow up a couple times and leave it be.People are busy with their own lives, so I&#x27;m not offended in any way.Not ghosting would have been nice. But being nice is not expected.People here are so offended about being ghosted for some reason. I thought HN crowd would be pretty good at doing business. Being ghosted is the norm.

Didn&#x27;t realize the ghosting was so common. I had a leadership development and coaching firm approach me to join them, asked me to interview, spent 2.5 hours of my time and then ghosted. I thought this was amusing as it shows piss poor leadership skills and they&#x27;re supposed to be high quality coaches, sent an emailing saying as such, no reply. In addition to our &quot;Who is hiring?&quot;, &quot;who wants to be hired?&quot;, we should add &quot;who was ghosted?&quot;, heh.Shout out to Sourcegraph who interviewed me ~Q1, had a good process, and although it wasn&#x27;t a fit, didn&#x27;t ghost me. It was one of the better interviews I&#x27;d had in my career.

Welcoming to the tech interviewing world, this is unfortunately a common occurrence.

Maybe a hot take: if you have a Manager-of-Managers role, you aren’t a startup any more.

I’m a manager of managers at my current big tech employer and here we are still required to be quite technical. I’d think that a startup 1&#x2F;25 the size would benefit from this approach, hence my surprise. I don’t know how to do pivot tables though.

&gt; To me it hints that Engineering MoM is not a very technical position.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&#x27;m also in Cloud Security&#x2F;SecOps looking to make a switch to Offsec&#x2F;Pentesting.  Would be great to connect and learn about your experience switching. My email is in my profile if you are willing to reach out.

I recently got a new job after around 6 months of searching and I was appalled by the practices of many well-known tech companies. Ghosted by multiple places, bait-and-switched multiple times (I was in secops&#x2F;SRE and trying to move to appsec&#x2F;offsec), you name it. It’s wild how unprofessional recruiters can be.I did have some great experiences though; in particular Box, Airbnb, and Datadog.

As someone who had kids in their 40s: this is the correct observation.

Odds are they won&#x27;t just take you back even if you give 2 weeks.

So if you get terminated one week in now you can’t go back bc you burned the bridge by not giving the notice? Sounds like fantastic plan!

There&#x27;s no bite to the company to decide not to hire you&#x2F;fire you even if you have an offer from them.

What does this have to do with giving notice? You don&#x27;t give two weeks notice without a written offer.

It&#x27;s how it has to be.This is why you don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;m 40 and retire. I can&#x27;t imagine doing this for another 30 years .

Were you not able to communicate every few days of the stay? 15-20 days with no contact is a long time and you put the recruiter in an unfortunate position as they must have been advocating for you. You can’t have known in advance that they would send rude emails in response to silence.

I have a third pov of this, I was interviewing for a large financial company in an SE role, everything went well, the team seemed really good and projects were interesting, good quality of interviews too.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&#x27;t too bothered but it took me back a bit.

You most all the time or at least most of the time!

Sometimes a recruiter or hiring manager leaves the company halfway through the hiring process, leaving the candidate in a limbo.It&#x27;d be funny (in a sad way, I suppose) if the same becomes true on the other side...&quot;sorry, my online assistant just quit so my resignation at the current firm never got filed.&quot;

this. I recently went through the job-hunting process, and employer&#x27;s behaviour was terrible (on average, there were some good ones).I don&#x27;t think they understand that if they set the bar that low, then we&#x27;ll all accept that and behave similarly badly.Like loyalty - employers stopped being loyal to their employees, so employees stopped being loyal back. Every time I see an employer moan about how employees don&#x27;t care any more, I feel schadenfreude.We mirror the behaviour we see, because game theory.

Agree. Having been ghosted in the past by potential employers I have zero qualms now about doing the same in return

I understand the sentiment but there is a difference between ghosting the during recruiting process and ghosting after committing to the job.

According to the papers, candidate ghosting has been happening more and more often.  With such a senior, high-paid position as that, it doesn&#x27;t really apply, but I can&#x27;t help but feel a bit of schadenfreude at employers lamenting ghosting candidates, after themselves being the ghosting party so routinely.

Generally, no matter how amicable the relationship, if the terms aren’t in writing, then they are subject to change. Figured this out after a friend of mine who was renting a room in my apartment ghosted me for 3 months of rent heh.

Very sorry that you had this experience but yes NEVER consider a job offer finalized until a contract has been drafted and both parties sign. Until then it&#x27;s all basically vaporware

&gt; ... and give me something in return (say, a signing bonus that is actually paid upon signing instead of weeks after I start)Is this common in the USA? In the UK I&#x27;ve never been offered or heard of anyone receiving a bonus for signing a contract. Does anyone have a different experience?

I had a somewhat opposite experience: went through an interview process, accepted and then the company drug its feet about a start date which ended up taking weeks longer than expected after several delays for simple things like ordering equipment and other things which pointed to &quot;we don&#x27;t have our act together&quot;. I was committed and had already left my previous position and exited other interviewing pipelines.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&#x27;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&#x27;t done until I start.When you can&#x27;t expect the other party to hold up to their side of the bargain because there are bad actors out there, it doesn&#x27;t make sense to trust them or tell them what&#x27;s going on until after everything is settled... and even then when litigation is such a concern...

This is so satisfying to hear. Always happy to see management and recruitment  types being used up and hung to dry.

A job applicant doesn’t have a hiring department with a codified process and team so it’s not quite symmetric.

It&#x27;s a much bigger deal for the other party tough. The employee is typically more dependent on having a job than the employer is dependent on having an engineer. Granted a staff level engineer is not quite the same, especially for a small firm.What&#x27;s lamentable is that ghosting has become part of our culture. People think it&#x27;s the done thing, so they do it. Just as with dating, how hard is it really to keep track of who you owe a response and send them a short piece saying you&#x27;re no longer interested? It&#x27;s especially grating in your situation where you know there&#x27;s no reason why they don&#x27;t just tell you they have a better offer.I think that&#x27;s the key actually. People don&#x27;t like the icky feeling of negotiating, where you often keep cards to yourself. When game ends and you get your desired outcome, you continue to feel bad about it. And you certainly don&#x27;t want to be called out and have to defend yourself, even if picking a better offer is perfectly fair.

Ghosting is really the worst. And it doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s a romantic relationship, friendship or professional interaction. Why can&#x27;t people see themselves on the other side of the line?

Two in the ANS is as good as one in the BIS

Had the opposite experience recently as an EM. Spent a few months trying to find a staff-level engineer. Found a great candidate who worked for a FAANG, worked to get our budget up to his expectations, sold him on the team, and he accepted our offer with a start date 6 weeks in the future so he could have time to wrap up his work. Fine, I&#x27;m just happy to have filled the role after an arduous search. A few weeks go by, and he hasn&#x27;t responded to my &quot;we&#x27;re excited to have you join the team, etc&quot; email or any HR emails about filling out his paperwork. I call and email, the recruiter calls and emails, nothing. We never hear from him again..He&#x27;s been active on social media so we know he&#x27;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&#x27;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.

I went through the hiring loop recently when switching jobs.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.

This was fuckedcompany.com back in the 90&#x27;s, though companies and their lawyers didn&#x27;t appreciate the satire.

Blind is still an alright forum for a gut check I think?

I was ghosted so many times. Finally landed a job with like-minded professionals.
It would be nice to have a curated list of companies to avoid or perhaps companies that have decent interview practices.

So they start the interview by lying to you in case they need it later?

If somebody is a no-hire, what favour are you doing them by extending the interview loop to the end? You&#x27;re just wasting their time at that point. (Though I&#x27;ve never heard of an interview slot being cut short like that based on a couple of questions. If the interviewers are habitually preparing for that, it is just insane.)

I once interviewed someone, who clearly had no programming experience. 
They had someone else complete the screening take-home coding exercise for them.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.

Yes. When I was very inexperienced I still remember being interviewed by an extremely big dog in the open-source world (he was VP of engineering at a very successful startup). I was probably about a 3&#x2F;10 in terms of quality of interview answers, and unsurprisingly didn&#x27;t get the job.Despite that, he still managed to make me feel good about the whole experience. At some points in the interview where I was close&#x2F;slightly off he&#x27;d first coax &quot;that&#x27;s quite similar to X or Y, don&#x27;t you think?&quot; then if that didn&#x27;t work he&#x27;d coach &quot;here&#x27;s how X works, elegant explanation, ok, let&#x27;s talk about Y&quot;.I remember this vividly years later with a smile. Just like I remember all the negative experiences where people were dismissive or ghosted.

That&#x27;s unacceptable, in my opinion.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&#x27;t spend an hour productively with each candidate. And certainly not by making them feel like it&#x27;s an extended failure. On the super rare occasion that someone was gigantic &quot;no&quot;, it&#x27;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&#x27;s the only time I&#x27;ve cut a round short.

&gt; It manages your expectations and they can end the interview early.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&#x27;t sound good. If they said 20 minutes it shouldn&#x27;t take much more or much less than 20 minutes.

This was also said in the post-loop interview. After I was approved and congratulated. Makes zero sense in my book.

Hm, sometimes when I’m interviewing someone who I know is a “no” it feels like I’m leading them on if I go through the full interview. I thought it would be more respectful of their time to let them know that early, but maybe I am wrong about that?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.

Yes, I&#x27;d like to order a few truckloads of people like this guy for the workplace please.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 ending an interview early is a no-go. However if it&#x27;s an onsite&#x2F;process with multiple interviews, I think the fairest approach (and I&#x27;ve done this in the past) is to manage expectations ahead of time that the full interview sequence only happens if you pass each one.This way you don&#x27;t waste the candidate or your time if it&#x27;s clearly a no after interview 1. They feel a bit bad because they obviously didn&#x27;t pass, but if you&#x27;ve communicated ahead of time it&#x27;s not a rug-pull.

That is extremely unprofessional and a bad look for the interviewer. I have done over a 100 interviews including some really bad ones, never have I ever cut one short. When you are interviewing you are representing the company, whenever I interviewed someone even if I knew it was going to be a clear no, I tried to make them feel good about the process as what that person is going to go out and say directly reflects on the company and future hires. 20 mins of your time is a drop in the bucket in terms of impact of getting a bad reputation, not only are you potentially shooting yourself in the foot with other candidates but leaving a bad taste in the mouth of the one you are interviewing who might in the future would otherwise reapply at a different stage in their career if&#x2F;when they become a stronger candidate.

that&#x27;s unprofessional and shitty behavior. if the interview isn&#x27;t going well and you want to cut it short, you can find some spine and say so.

I run a fast growing, succesful business. I only schedule first interviews for 30 minutes anyway and rarely use the whole time. It&#x27;s just my nature, I get to the point of things quickly.

To the first point, of “I only need 20 minutes for this” that’s a classic get out of jail free card if they’ve decided you’re not a good fit or things aren’t going well. It manages your expectations and they can end the interview early.

You should have no obligation to reply to a cold email. Those go straight into the trash for me (or more often, to the spam filter for a permanent block). It&#x27;s MY time that is being wasted.

Agreed. Promising to meet or get back to someone and then never communicating again is ghosting, but you haven&#x27;t promised to reply to every spammer who gets your contact info.

Not replying to unsolicited recruitment isn&#x27;t really ghosting IMO

I feel bad sometimes about ignoring cold emails, but even taking the time to read all of them I get would require several hours a week. I am more inclined to reply if I can catch a hint of authenticity. It is usually pretty easy to tell when you&#x27;re getting an automated email from a sales funnel.

They are just playing the numbers. The dev interview gauntlet is tough, and even the recruiters know it. I made it past some tough technical screens, and the recruiter for a newly ipo’d (well known company) was happy I got that far and flat out told me ‘I have to fill 30+ roles, I have no idea where I’m going to find these 30 people’. I didn’t make it any further, and apparently I made it further than a lot his other prospects. So imagine their frustration. They are trying to throw as many candidates against the wall because very few ever make it through.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).

If I may: &quot;Like flies to shit.&quot;

Recruiters have gotten strangely more persistent and aggressive recently. Somehow my corporate work email (@google.com) got into some leads database recruiters use and I get emails about once every two weeks from recruiters, which I usually ignore (or tell them to remove the address as it&#x27;s for work, not personal stuff). Several that I have ignored have sent multiple repeated emails (&quot;Just following up in case you missed it&quot;) and so on.I used to get recruiter cold emails once every 6 or 7 months. Now it&#x27;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&#x27;t feel bad about not responding.Actually if it reminds me of anything, it&#x27;s 1999&#x2F;2000 right before the .COM crash. That&#x27;s the last time I remember it being this crazy. I remember a day in 1999 when I worked at a startup where everyone&#x27;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.

Nah, I&#x27;ve got better things to do.My old boss, however, has good advice on how to make them useful, for those who care to respond: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.dblock.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;09&#x2F;how-to-make-recruiter-spam-useful-my-canned-response.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.dblock.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;09&#x2F;how-to-make-recruiter-spa...</a>

I&#x27;m sorry but fuck that. I get at least 5 emails from recruiters a week even though my LinkedIn profile only had job titles, tenures, and a description that reads &quot;not interested in a new role.&quot; I&#x27;ve disabled InMail and hidden my email, so they instead pull my contact info from some DB. They are beginning the relationship with an enormous amount of disrespect, so they can suck a fuck if they&#x27;re going to call my non-responses &quot;disrespectful.&quot;

Ghosting is way too common these days. I&#x27;ve decided to start replying to many more of the cold emails I get. Even if the answer is &quot;no&quot; or &quot;not interested&quot;. Not replying is rude except when you can&#x27;t make space for it.

That&#x27;s not making excuses as much as providing an explanation for it imo

I am not, I was making an observation about the &quot;It&#x27;s a mess and a revolving door of people&quot; comment. The recruiting practice that OP described is not acceptable for any company, public or private.

Why on earth are you making excuses for a public company?

Based on this interview, not sure who will be able to afford to buy $STRP when they do decide to go public. Nice for them, sad for the rest of us.

&gt; Stripe is preparing for an IPO,I was thinking the same but this interview from Stripe’s CEO says otherwise.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;23&#x2F;stripe-very-happy-staying-private-co-founder-john-collison-says.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;23&#x2F;stripe-very-happy-stayin...</a>

&gt; 10) I call up a senior leader in the office I applied to, an acquaintance of mine. His answer: &quot;don&#x27;t come. It&#x27;s a mess and a revolving door of people&quot;. I was shocked with the response.Stripe is preparing for an IPO, so naturally they will have some chaos in an effort to balloon it as much as possible.

Sounds like nonsense to me. I don’t even understand the chain of events that could lead to that.

The one named anecdote I&#x27;ve heard about Stripe was from someone who got fired because they said something negative about Elon Musk on Twitter.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;isosteph&#x2F;status&#x2F;1459566899151396867" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;isosteph&#x2F;status&#x2F;1459566899151396867</a>

This is almost point-for-point identical (minus the offer talk) to the other Stripe interviewing stories I&#x27;ve heard lately. (Context: Management positions. Not sure about IC roles).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&#x27;ve seen has been shared under anonymity or strict confidentiality. I assume Stripe knows they&#x27;re a hot commodity and therefore can get away with negative interview practices.

Standard behavioral questions not particularly challenging. The most striking thing is that there is no drill down: questions are independent of each other and interviewers don’t follow-up on the answers, making it hard to establish a conversation.

That sucks man.Can you share what kind of questions you were asked during the interview process?

Describing your recruiting process as a random variable...wut? Does the hiring manager make decisions randomly? Someone calls up, the hiring manager gets out the lucky 8-ball, and it comes out &quot;give a 29th percentile recruiting interview&quot;, and the manager just straps on the Biggles goggles to bomb the candidate. Why even say that to someone who is pissed off with your recruiting process? Just don&#x27;t say anything.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.

I also hire a lot of people and I tend to agree with you. It’s hard to think that I misunderstood the process, however, when a start date was mentioned.

What size org do you manage?  At some point your choice is to either talk to candidates for shorter times or delegate the entire decision to managers under you.  While 20 min definitely isn&#x27;t enough to fully evaluate a candidate it can be enough time to assess potential gaps you see based upon the feedback of the rest of your team.  It can also be enough time to make an intro and make it clear to the candidate that someone very senior values their role.

&gt; I interview a lot of candidates. I just can&#x27;t imagine to make a hiring decision for a dev, let alone a manager that manages other managers, based on 20 minute discussion.But what if others in their 20 minute discussions with the candidate ask the questions you would have asked if you had spent longer interviewing them?If the hiring decision is based on the feedback from all the interviewers I could see having many of those interviews be short interviews where the interviewer just concentrates on finding out one important input for the group decision working, provided that there are enough interviews to cover all the important things and if there has been some planning on the part of the company to coordinate who covers what in the 20 minute interviews.I have no idea if Stripe does the necessary coordination to make that work, but the fact that several of the interviewers started out mentioning they would only need 20 minutes suggests that it was some sort of organized thing.

Only some of this could be explained by &quot;several sigma&quot; of bad luck. The rest is either the candidate misunderstanding&#x2F;distorting the process or a structural hiring problem.I interview a lot of candidates. I just can&#x27;t imagine to make a hiring decision for a dev, let alone a manager that manages other managers, based on 20 minute discussion.

Even though I did not accept Datadogs offer, I can only confirm this - my interview experience at Datadog for a software engineer position was truly amazing. I could feel they care.

2 is such an obvious thing for a tech company to do. How can a candidate know the exact best team for them to apply to? This is the purpose of the recruiting team.

Incredibly ironic comment - I interviewed at datadog for an engineering position and left feeling atrocious about it.They gave me a large and complex take home assignment which I put a significant amount of time into, and which I felt I did a very excellent job with. They declined afterwards without a word. We didn&#x27;t discuss it, no feedback was given. Just unmatched on the hiring platform we were using.I am an experienced developer at a reasonably prominent company and I know I wrote the code well for that assignment. The fact that they would assign something so time consuming and then take no time to go over it at all and reject it so out of hand left me with a very very bad taste in my mouth.

Can confirm, at least for France - the interviewing experience at Datadog was amazing. Everyone was very humane and very responsive. I accepted the offer.

Datadog gave me a take-home assignment, which I could have done sloppily in one day or done well in two days. They added &quot;we respect your time, so don&#x27;t spend more than 3 hours on it&quot;. Then they rejected my solution because I didn&#x27;t guard for all kinds of invalid input that was never mentioned anywhere.

I had a funny experience with DataDog. I applied to a new grad position. Few months go by, and then I receive an email to schedule an onsite, well that seemed odd since I hadn&#x27;t done any coding test, recruiter call or anything else. I scheduled an on-site and went there. I tried asking what the normal process is, and everyone just kept replying &quot;you are on the last step&quot;. So I just ended up going through the interviews. Then couple days after received an email that someone had checked the paperwork and said that they had thought I was someone else lol

Hey Patrick,You might look to improve y&#x27;all&#x27;s process by looking at datatdog&#x27;s interview process. I have never felt more appreciated and well treated than interviewing there.1) they always give feedback2) 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&#x27;t seem to care about getting people to work at stripe, only getting people to work in their org which didn&#x27;t have open positions for X.3) incredibly quick and responsive through the process. My recruiter at stripe did this!Love what you&#x27;re doing for science,
Take care

I&#x27;m not defending Stripe here but this is a rediculous take. Perfection is unachievable.

you&#x27;re supposed to be able to build an amazing team with an amazing funnel.I think it would be hard to scale a business to the size of Stripe without those things. It&#x27;s fair to say that, no matter what else you might believe, pc has managed to do that. Ergo, by your own logic, he has earned his comp.

&quot;several sigma bad&quot; is really still not OK.  As a founder, you earn vastly vastly outsized compensation because you&#x27;re supposed to be able to build an amazing team with an amazing funnel.  You deal with payments and fraud, so you know that &quot;several sigma bad&quot; is not acceptable.  Your employees and investors deserve a refund.

I seriously doubt they&#x27;re as bad as google recruiters. I had almost 3 job offers from them over a period of ~10 years, and I finally decided I will never interview there ever again.

Stripe recruiters were the worst I&#x27;ve dealth with in the past twelve months.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&#x27;re growing they can do whatever.

It sounds like it&#x27;s a failure of coordination more than anything; a broken system not a person acting in a way that should lead to termination (unless they are unwilling to fix said system over time).

I think if they cared to look at their internal data they&#x27;d be able to figure out who he was without much trouble at all based on this thread and his recent post history here (named &#x27;Dan&#x27;, interviewed recently for manager-of-manager position, lives in ~~place~~, currently works for ~~someone~~).

hey danrocks, bear in mind if you discuss details of your experience with pc, you run the risk of outing the senior leader you consulted in step 10.You may wish not to do this. As much as the feedback would probably help Stripe and possibly even yourself, given the post you&#x27;ve written, it sounds like it may put someone else&#x27;s career on the line.

Spot on. Patrick and Brian Armstrong are on PR damage control 101 and one of the multiple reasons I left this manipulative industry.You caught Patrick on his false argument.Patrick did not mention the number of Manager of Managers that interviewed at Stripe this year, did not address the &quot;I will only need 20 minutes for this&quot; culture and did not apologise for the ghosting.The PR spin:&gt; professionally and respectfully, and our recruiting team cares about fixing our process failuresIf Patrick is interested in fixing anything is up to him and he absolutely does not need an email from OP for this.The fact Patrick is asking for OP to doxx Stripe’s hiring managers should tell you anything you need to know about how Patrick operates.Publicly, Patrick cannot afford Stripe to begin to develop the slightest trace of a bad place to work and a bad reputation for such a niche recruiting position as engineering Manager of Managers at Stripe is damaging.Patrick is asking OP to doxx the senior leader in the office OP applied to.&gt; His answer: &quot;don&#x27;t come. It&#x27;s a mess and a revolving door of people&quot;

I’m not convinced this several sigma explanation applies:- 35% of interviewers did the 20 min thing. Why haven’t you said you’re going to investigate this specific issue yet? You should have enough data to now go back to the team and find out if this is a real issue, rather than waiting for op’s email.- this was a senior manager position and already in the offer stage. So you can’t compare that sample size to the top of the funnel.

The most important part of an apology is, imo, sincerity. I think Patrick is chiming into this thread to perform damage control, not to sincerely apologize.This, to me, is evident in the fact that OP interviewed for a specific, high level position, and named specific, repeated bad processes that go beyond Patrick&#x27;s generic &quot;We interview a lot of people so some people are going to have a bad time.&quot;Patrick has more than enough information to start fixing things on a systemic level. Instead, he optimizes for the appearance of contrition without committing to fixing any of the specific problems mentioned.

Humans make mistakes, and Patrick apologized on the behalf of this experience.While there may be opinions on whether or not this “makes it right”, apologies in today’s world should still carry some worth.

I&#x27;m sorry; that&#x27;s bad. Can you email me with details so that we can investigate what happened? (patrick@stripe.com; others welcome to do so too.)More than 10,000 people have interviewed at Stripe so far this year, so &quot;several sigma bad&quot; 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.

Having other offers or an existing job is sufficient

I wish I had the finances to be able to deliver this burn.

Them: &quot;I will only need 20 minutes for this. &quot;Me: &quot;I only need a few seconds. Either you are more perceptive than anyone else I&#x27;ve ever met or you or as arrogant as anyone I&#x27;ve met. Either way I&#x27;m not a good fit. Thank-you and good luck in your search!&quot;

I think it clarifies things, tbh. Managers of managers used to be called Directors and VPs, but now many companies have Directors as line managers. So at least Manager of Managers is clear in that regard.

This is what any middle management position really is.  You are managing and coaching managers.

It is actually the name of the position. Engineering MoM. It&#x27;s funny and leads to some weird Google searches.

I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the literal name of the position. This is a common term to refer to a manager with an organization of ~20-40 people, where their direct reports are primarily managers themselves as opposed to individual engineers. In most large companies this position is still called something like &quot;Senior Manager&quot; as opposed to Director, VP, etc.

It’s the pre executive position and it is absolutely a shit position you don’t want to be stuck in for very long. Work work balance tends to favor more work, and not even work really just status updates and being the whipping person at hour of the night

I can&#x27;t imagine what circle of hell you are in if there is a position called manager of managers, but it sounds like you dodged a bullet for sure.

Could you have perhaps been too accommodating? By being a little bit &quot;harder to get&quot;[1] you may be able to weed out[2][3] recruitment opportunities that aren&#x27;t serious and would just be a waste of your time to follow through on. Neither party should be expecting the other to just drop everything they&#x27;re doing and reschedule on a whim. If that happens again, you should probably call it out (professionally) and state that you&#x27;re happy to continue discussions but only when they&#x27;re ready and serious about hiring.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&#x27;re no longer making the recruiter money or because you&#x27;re now the backup option in case the preferred person cancels before starting or soon after starting, and they would prefer you remain available &quot;just in case you&#x27;re needed&quot;.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;18&#x2F;smarter-living&#x2F;benefits-of-being-scarce.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;18&#x2F;smarter-living&#x2F;benefits-o...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26408181" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26408181</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29071362" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29071362</a>

This sounds like typical tech infighting, sadly. We shouldn&#x27;t normalize this stuff, but we do. I really hope more companies hold their leaders to a governing, conscious culture that they actually follow themselves.

That&#x27;s sad. Sorry that happened to you. I hope you guys are still moving forward and building.

As much as the parent comment strained credibility, this double-down (posted exactly 10 minutes after the original) breaks it. Seriously, how many $XB fintech founders are out there, waiting to tell their salacious tales about one of the most transparent and accountable individuals on HN?It&#x27;s OK, come out $XB fintech founders, it&#x27;s safe for your temp accounts here...at least until the moderators get here and start checking the IP addresses.

You were brain raped. Bill Gates was famous for this. There was even a Silicon Valley episode about the practice.

There are so many founders of $XB fintechs in this thread, I want to start one! Thanks for sharing.

+1. Also a founder of an $XB fintech. Exact same story. Patrick + John dangled an acquisition to get a look inside, and ended up re-trading on the terms. Then proceeded to target 2 of our team members to recruit. Fast forward a few years, and now they have deployed a team to directly copy one of our products.Amongst their L2 team, Patrick and Will are described as the &quot;killers&quot;. I guess maybe a bit of duplicity is required to build a company of that size...

Because of the power dynamic they have to do this.  It is sad, but having been in a similar situation with a billionaire, you can&#x27;t say it with your name attached.

That sounds like a pretty fair position. It does seem difficult, on the other hand, because I don&#x27;t think we really have mechanisms to protect whistleblowers as a society. The options seem like stay silent, speak out anonymously (clearly subject to abuse), or speak out publicly with the threat of retribution. None of these feel like great options.

Totally agree, it kind of sucks to have to do this. But this is sadly the world we live in. People like the Collison&#x27;s and Stripe have immense power to ruin people and companies, and there are a lot of ruined bodies in their wake. So there is zero chance myself or anyone will do anything publicly.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&#x27;m 100% sure they will privately agree with what I&#x27;ve posted.

Dislike? Sure. See the need for? Also true.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.)

Disagreed. It’s clear it’s a throwaway and they’re saying unsubstantiated things, but the readers can make their own minds up about what to believe in and what not to. I like HN to get the insider scoop, precisely this type of comment. I’m not gonna hate on stripe or PC, but now I’ll know to look a little more carefully at someone asking questions about my future company (lol) to see what their intentions maybe. What’s wrong with that?

Sorry but even if the anonymous OP allegations are all completely true, so what? I don&#x27;t see anything there that Stripe did that was illegal - only aggressive&#x2F;predatory along the lines of what happens daily in business. You could probably google up multiple examples without ever leaving the first page of results.If I were a Stripe investor I would honestly be validated that the leadership is acting so boldly in the company&#x27;s favor.

I am not sure about &quot;HN code of conduct&quot; here, but personally I dislike serious allegations posted anonymously and without any proof to back it up.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&#x27;t answer any more because I am being throttled by HN for posting &quot;low value content&quot;).How hard do you think it is to create multiple fresh, throwaway HN accounts to post &quot;corroborating&quot; 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.

HN routinely shadowbans and apparently shadow-pins with at least some frequency per this very thread. It&#x27;s not an organisation that warrants assuming good faith.

It isn&#x27;t dang&#x27;s fault that Patrick has a Google Alert or daemon running for his name (or just has a lot of employees who notify him whenever it comes up). It&#x27;s not direct control of HN, it&#x27;s Patrick being enterprising.dang has done nothing to deserve bad faith, and while I don&#x27;t like Patrick, either, it&#x27;s best to keep the knocks on the right doors.

Stripe is a YC company. If Stripe becomes a shit show, YC may lose money. How is it a conspiracy theory to suggest that both YC and Stripe might want to exert some control over bad PR?Let&#x27;s not forget that HN&#x27;s primary function is to attract people with ideas for YC to turn into companies whose equity generates money for YC. And we&#x27;re not talking chump change like a couple million. More like billions. What&#x27;s a little push back on negative comments to save a couple billion dollars?

&gt; Patrick has almost direct control over YC and HN, you&#x27;ll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.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 &quot;almost direct control&quot; of HN and the press.

Their recent 1yr equity periods to screw employees out of upside caused me to lose interest (even though that equity will still likely be very valuable). I really disliked how they tried to spin this as something good for employees.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.

Almost everyone at YC worships Elon, you can see it on Sam Altman’s face when he interviewed him on YouTube.

Probably what parent is referring to: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;isosteph&#x2F;status&#x2F;1171236137932771328" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;isosteph&#x2F;status&#x2F;1171236137932771328</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;isosteph&#x2F;status&#x2F;1459566899151396867" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;isosteph&#x2F;status&#x2F;1459566899151396867</a>

Elon is no angel, but I gotta say it would shock me if he was such a huge loser that he would complain about something like this

I&#x27;m beginning to think that we should extend Godwin&#x27;s Law to include Elon. Just about every online conversation nowadays eventually deteriorates into a discussion about how terrible Elon is.Btw, I&#x27;m exaggerating, but still.

Firing doesn&#x27;t seem like a proportional response... But representing herself as a Stripe employee after flaming on the internet isn&#x27;t a good look for their business.

Don&#x27;t forget the female engineer they fired for calling Elon &quot;a little shit&quot; on twitter. I don&#x27;t know if it would be worse if it turned out to be because Elon complained or because he is their hero.

&gt; We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.Isn&#x27;t the comment about things you (purportedly) did personally? Have you &quot;reached out about an acquisition, mined them for information playing along and then ghosted&quot;, or no? You clearly don&#x27;t deny it but you object that you hadn&#x27;t &quot;heard&quot; about bad things they claim... you did? For things you&#x27;re the subject of, shouldn&#x27;t it be easy to confirm or deny them just based on your own memory? It&#x27;s not only a bizarre defense on its own, but it&#x27;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&#x27;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:&gt; I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith.&quot;Some&quot; leaves a lot to the reader&#x27;s imagination. Which ones are the ones that are true?

I&#x27;m sorry but no. Patrick, we met with you once, Gaybrick and Claire multiple times and opened up a data room to you all. I then emailed you (and the others) three followups over a couple weeks only to see them opened but never replied. Your team then sent targeted cold emails to multiple people on our team. I&#x27;ve validated this experience with multiple founders.You also had Moritz and Sequoia renege on Finix&#x27;s term sheet after they already had it signed and wired (I guess props to Sequoia for branding it as &quot;giving it away&quot;)[1]. You&#x27;ve also had your team get diligence materials from Sequoia and nuke deals.You&#x27;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&#x27;t believe that the conspiracy theories are purely in &quot;bad faith&quot;....And yes - this is out of place in HN comments, I&#x27;m sorry. But sadly there aren&#x27;t very many other options.[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;09&#x2F;sequoia-is-giving-away-21-million-to-a-payments-startup-it-funded-as-it-walks-away-from-deal&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;09&#x2F;sequoia-is-giving-away-21-...</a>

When you’re in top position on a Stripe-related post, that has nothing to do with your karma score. It’s because dang has a pin button that he usually uses for himself, but very often is used for exactly the situation you describe when it comes to YC portfolio or celebrities showing up or something (without visual feedback of such a pin, as every single other website with the capability provides). It’s pretty obvious if you keep an eye out for itThis 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

Say &quot;Bloody Mary&quot; ten times in the mirror at midnight and she will appear...

I honestly do not see your participation in this thread as good faith. You apologized to the candidate in public—- good start, now do something of consequence in private.  But any further involvement from you (especially trying to out the OP) is simply fanning the flamewar.  Even HN moderation is helping fan the flames by adding stats and other commentary.  This is why I find YC so utterly untrustworthy.

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.

Props for attaching your name to your comment, something I wish the throwaway OP also did, though in the spirit of believing the victim, I can understand why they didn&#x27;t.That said, with threads like this, there&#x27;s also value in letting people come forward with their experiences (positive or otherwise) to see if there&#x27;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&#x27;t put a finger on as I&#x27;m not inside). I&#x27;ve seen less of this with Coinbase talent.

I’ve personally conducted business with Patrick, and integrity isn’t a term I’d associate with him. Most polite term I can think of would be “shrewd”.

Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?The point is not that they have direct control over YC or HN, it&#x27;s that they have massive indirect control over the organization and have done a wizard&#x27;s job of making themselves untouchable in the media.Some context: 
I&#x27;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&#x27;s possible more was done for Stripe.It&#x27;s not direct influence, but rather indirect impact. So again I ask -- Did Patrick request that you write this post?

Japan has a long tradition in coopetition. SV has adopted many Japanese traditions. Unfortunately some people seem to take competition too seriously, ruining the culture. It seems some are suggesting Patrick and John take competition too seriously. Whether the allegations are true or not, it can unfortunately be damaging.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&#x27;t trust.Trust is what underlies communities like this, even if people are competitors.

Sure, but you run Coinbase. It wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if people with less soft power than you had negative interactions.

Have you considered that he might just avoid sharking out on people he considers friends, or people with too large a platform?Genuine question.

I&#x27;m too am also a founder of an $xB fintech, and I have to say I disagree with your assessment. The initial poster was right on all counts.

Not to fuel the fire here, but from the startups perspective I&#x27;m not sure there&#x27;s much functional difference between a company attempting to acquire a startup and then deciding to go it alone, and using the acquisition process for research on their future products other than intent.No matter what if you do the DD process on an acquisition you&#x27;ll certainly apply those learnings to your future efforts.There&#x27;s even a PG blogpost about it.
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;corpdev.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;corpdev.html</a>Side Note: I&#x27;m always amazed to find people that run large companies posting on hackernews. Doubly amazed that two companies I&#x27;m interviewing for are mentioned in the same post (about interviews no less.) :DSmall world.

You TWO could be the same person?  Just a wild guess...

&gt; any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences... and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly)Spot on. Nor should anyone expend disproportionate energy in bringing down common causes of quality issues to zero. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apenwarr.ca&#x2F;log&#x2F;20161226" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apenwarr.ca&#x2F;log&#x2F;20161226</a>&gt; I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this.You must be new here.

&gt; most rational explanation for OPs issue is that references were checked and came back luke warm&#x2F;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&#x27;m guessing, but benign explanations are more likely&gt; also, &quot;discussing details of an offer&quot; is not the same as receiving an offerAll reasonable things to happen, for sure. Would other HMs in the same building show interest after bad references? Debatable.I accept all outcomes - all except ghosting.

You know the best you could have done is say nothing. People like this, best way to prove them wrong is to show there&#x27;s nothing. Even a &quot;oh it&#x27;s true but we ll try to change&quot; helps more than doing exactly what the OP did with his catch-22: if you defend here, he&#x27;s proven right.

I don&#x27;t think Coinbase and Stripe are in the same business but...&gt; As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn&#x27;t have to (very positive sum thinking).I&#x27;m not sure why this is positive or signals a high-integrity person. If he doesn&#x27;t have to tell you, he probably shouldn&#x27;t. He runs a private company and that&#x27;s what he should care about.Or maybe he did that, so that in the future you can kick back and write this comment?

&gt; Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn&#x27;t have to (very positive sum thinking).I used to get very frustrated at a previous job (realestate.com.au) that they would treat their main competitor in such a venomous way.If the features looked similar then they &#x27;copied&#x27; if they launched a feature first then denigrate it until you can launch the same feature. There are only so many ways you can do a real estate (car, job) ad portal. Especially if you&#x27;re following best practice UI&#x2F;UX guidelines.I get being competitive, but you can be competitive and still be civil. Making the other company to be an arch-villain is such small-minded zero-sum thinking.Sadly there were also many things where they could have worked on collaboratively to make everyone&#x27;s lives better (e.g. Rental standards and processes), but this is impossible when you frame the competitor in such a negative way.

I agree with you but after being an employee of a dozen of companies and founded some, I started the Stripe&#x27;s application processe and after a waterfall or red flags I decided myself to do not continue. I couldn&#x27;t ignore my gut feeling clearly saying me that there is the place to have a good salary in a very miserable, unhealthy and unstable job.PS: I don&#x27;t know how they are managing to have such a good product.

This is the first time I’ve seen a post with anything negative about Patrick and having a Coinbase founder come out of the woodwork to make a post like this defending all of this with nothing more than conjecture sends a completely different message than you think.

Funny that you think your endorsement works in their favor. Coinbase is not entirely kosher in the crypto industry so there&#x27;s that.

I know so many people who have been screwed over by Coinbase, it&#x27;s complete lack of customer support, and dark business practices (it&#x27;s borderline criminal at this point). The fact that you&#x27;re associated directly with Coinbase does not benefit your reputation nor does it add any weight to what you&#x27;re saying - it in fact does the opposite.

&gt; There are plenty of more reasonable Occam&#x27;s razor explanations (…). You always have to assume ignorance over malice first.That’s Hanlon’s razor: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hanlon&#x27;s_razor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hanlon&#x27;s_razor</a>

I have never interviewed at Stripe, but I did interview at Coinbase in mid-2020 and it was among the best interviewing experiences I&#x27;ve had. The hiring manager for a TPM role (NM) was awesome, as was the entire loop. I didn&#x27;t end up with an offer (I suspect that I flubbed one of the interviews) but left with a mostly positive experience (aside from what seemed like an implied offer from the recruiter, which I consider to just be miscommunication).As opposed to K (another SF-based exchange), which took a month to set up the loop in the first place, had one-way video during interviews (candidates on, interviewers off), and took 3 weeks after the interview loop to send an offer which I declined for another company (65% of CB&#x27;s pre-offer, not that it mattered based on the other stuff).These experiences make a difference and really help sell the organization to a potential hire.

This is biased because they are your acquaintance. Because they act a certain way in your circle doesn’t mean they aren’t being a bad actor in others.Your post makes it clear you’re very out of touch with the reality of interviewing. I’ve had this same stuff pulled on me at Google, Amazon, and multiple other companies. Being offered a position and then getting surprise interview and then ghosted. It’s draining and demoralizing, and a major waste of my time.

Strange that the downvote button was hidden on this post. I had to manually submit the GET request.

&gt; You always have to assume ignorance over malice firstAt a certain valuation (namely, well before yours or Patrick&#x27;s), ignorance becomes malice. With the resources Stripe has, it is outrageous that there have been a non-zero number of cases where for example references haven&#x27;t been checked before an offer letter was sent. That Patrick is ignorant about this, as you claim, is even more damning, as it suggests no one knows what is going on at Stripe.So I guess thank you for your scathing review of Stripe&#x27;s hiring process, and for giving us the notion that Coinbase is probably an equally toxic workspace?

I&#x27;m also a founder of an $xB fintech (Coinbase!) and I have to say, this does not ring true to me at all.I&#x27;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&#x27;t have to (very positive sum thinking).He has direct control over reporters and YC? I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;m guessing, but benign explanations are more likely- also, &quot;discussing details of an offer&quot; is not the same as receiving an offerAnyway - 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&#x27;s all help each other improve here, and assume positive intent.

I can&#x27;t comment on Stripe, but I had a similar experience with a B2B $XB company, but a bit worse. So I can sympathize going anon.I agree that the public has a rosy view of a lot of these $XB founders, when in reality it&#x27;s lies and back stabbing behind the scenes.

I was fortunate to work with pc&#x2F;jc&#x2F;will in ~2016-18, and my experience has been the opposite. They were super professional and in the time that I&#x27;ve worked with them seemed like genuinely good people. They can be tough negotiators which hey, sucks if you&#x27;re on the other side of the table, but that&#x27;s exactly what you want out of a good leadership team. And a lot of stuff slips through the cracks, but I&#x27;m not sure what else you&#x27;d expect from a company that went from 0 -&gt; $100B in a decade.I can see how the intersection of these two properties may sometimes look like what you&#x27;re describing, but from everything I&#x27;ve seen (which isn&#x27;t too much, but it&#x27;s enough) your interpretation of the facts really doesn&#x27;t seem accurate.(As a disclaimer, I do have a horse in this race because I have some stock, but I&#x27;m pretty certain I&#x27;m being objective about this)TL;DR: me and you are looking at the same screen but aren&#x27;t watching the same movie.

“$X billion fintech” was my interpretation

A billion dollar fintech company, the X being how many billions.

Ex-Borg financial technology... Resistance is futile!

$XB is the symbol for a new cryptocurrency called XBitCoin, it’s a fork of Bitcoin Cash.

&gt;&quot;I run a $XB fintech, ...&quot;I&#x27;ve seen this term a couple of times no in this post. Might you are someone else explain what a &quot;$XB fintech&quot; is?

OK I&#x27;ve saved the HTML of this page... just in case :-)

Honestly to be the kind of person who runs a company like Stripe you have to be a bit crazy.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?

From this thread:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29389350" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29389350</a>

market cap or &quot;valuation&quot; company, x is a place holder so $1,2 or 3 billion

Could you elaborate what &quot;$XB fintech&quot; means? Couldn&#x27;t google answer myself.

Gawker did come back FWIW.Not that I&#x27;ve heard a peep from them since they re-launched.

Gawker were scum. The worst of the worst in “journalism”. Their whole business model was based on creating outrage and division. They don’t deserve an inch of sympathy.I do miss Mike Arrington&#x27;s Techcrunch, though

I&#x27;ll stick to NYT and WSJ breaking real stories, thanks.Gawker&#x27;s issues were entirely of their own making. What was their big scoop? That Thiel was gay? At least Gizmodo did some coverage on a pre-release iPhone 4 before being exiled.

&gt; On HN and silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine.That&#x27;s why we still need a thing like Gawker to come back. Almost all of SV hated on Thiel for standing behind Trump but when it came to him bringing down Gawker nobody left a finger in Gawker&#x27;s defense, and so that here we are, a multi-trillion dollar industry with no internal means to self-regulate ourselves.

&gt; have a huge amount of reporters and power brokers under their controlExtraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all that... Can you list this &#x27;huge amount of reporters&#x27; that Stripe has &#x27;under their control&#x27;?

We are approaching this wrong. We should not look at ghosting as a personal attack. If you want a fiend to bring to yhe interview get a dog, comes to mind.Also compare how a lowly cook handles interviews at a new dinning place. It&#x27;s none of the entitled BS but oh a new adventure...lets see what happens.

I was also on that contract and can verify this. Here’s an odd wrinkle: just prior to that contract, Patrick wanted to purchase bitcoin from me (this was back in 2013) remotely, with me sending him the bitcoin first and him paying when he had time. He also wanted the terms to be that if the USD price of bitcoin went down before he paid me, that he would pay the lower price(!) and he would choose the time of repayment. I declined to do anything other than an in-person cash transaction. Later, I heard he had previously purchased some from another friend and then ghosted him for many (&gt;6?) months despite persistent requests for payment.

He tricked me into working for a month without a contract and then wouldn’t answer my calls when I asked him to sign the terms we agreed upon. I had to show up and sit on their couch until he showed up to write me a check to go away. He’s a slippery character.

I am also a founder of a $XB fintech startup.

Inspired by this comment, I have created a tracker in the Open Market Research project <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OpenMarketResearch&#x2F;Labs&#x2F;issues&#x2F;new?labels=0001+Broken+Companies+Hiring&amp;template=report_broken_companies.yml&amp;title=%5B0001%5D%3A+" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OpenMarketResearch&#x2F;Labs&#x2F;issues&#x2F;new?labels...</a> Please feel free to share any comments or suggestions.

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&#x27;t hear anything about this online, they&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;re having major retention issues - so I&#x27;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.

It happens. In the mid 90s I interviewed with a windowing pc operating system company in the pacific northwest. Next day the guy calls me, says they&#x27;re really excited to have me on board, they&#x27;re discussing the best team for me to join. Then nothing. Meanwhile I visit my friend who is working for a web browser start-up in Mountain View. He suggests I interview there. A couple months later after I&#x27;d started work at that place, the first guy calls me, says they&#x27;re ready to rock and roll. I tell him it&#x27;s been a while, and where I&#x27;m currently working. He doesn&#x27;t see too happy. Worked out well for me though.

+1 to this as someone who is currently on the border of doing too many interviews. At worst, it can have a cascading effect because recruiters then scramble to find a different interviewer, scheduling things last-minute that then may be canceled last minute. I don&#x27;t know what the solutions are other than inviting fewer candidates to interview.

40 per quarter is very high. In ~2012 Twitter was doing 8 per week for ICs, which is also way too high.

I&#x27;ve done 4 interviews&#x2F;week for a while. It&#x27;s not that bad (but I genuinely enjoy it).

I myself did 40 interviews last quarter and it was very hard to keep all conversations engaging and interesting. Fortunately having a modicum of standardizing feedback + topics to be covered helps, but I agree with your point that over-interviewing is bad for business.

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

The best time to look is when you have a job.You beg for acceptance when you need the money. Companies smell your desperation. When you have a job, you can be picky.

Me too that&#x27;s just masochism to me. Begging for acceptance in a constantly shifting system with no feedback is my hell. I will only do that when highly motivated.

I switch jobs every 2-3 years, historically. Not because I inherently want to, but because that has historically been when I&#x27;m ready for a new challenge. But when I start interviewing, it&#x27;s with a lot of intent to move, if the situation is right.

Some of my friends make it a priority to switch jobs every 2-3 years, they think that&#x27;s the fastest way to get ahead. I don&#x27;t necessarily agree or disagree with that, but if that&#x27;s one&#x27;s priority, one would practice interviewing so one can ace the &quot;real&quot; interviews when it&#x27;s time.

I&#x27;ve pursued a different strategy, which I feel is more effective once one has built a track record. I haven&#x27;t had an interview where I was a cold intro to the management of the company in more than a decade. If there&#x27;s already a pretty good feeling of mutual fit before the interview, the interview becomes more of a formality than a test.I wouldn&#x27;t be in an interview where I&#x27;m trying to impress the interviewer because that would imply that I&#x27;m shooting in the dark for the job, and I frankly don&#x27;t have the time for that. Not trying to say my time is oh so special, but I have 4 young kids and a track record.If I had to find a job today, I would use my network to source opportunities and also would find ways to reach leaders at companies I admire. I&#x27;m senior in my career now, but this is what I did when I was at the mid-level, too.

Interviewing is a skill like any other. You have to practice to be good at it, and actual interviews are good practice.But I wouldn’t go out and interview a lot unless I was planning or willing to leave.But once a year it’s probably a good idea to do it to keep from getting rusty. It also helps keep a healthy perspective that you actually can change jobs if you wanted to.

I hear of people interviewing regularly and I honestly don&#x27;t get it. I couldn&#x27;t be motivated to go through the process without the intent to leave my job and take one at the new company. It&#x27;s very binary for me, I&#x27;m either definitely looking or not looking.

I was interviewing with Stripe about a year ago and had a very similar experience.I also heard that attrition is really high and work-life balance non-existent.So maybe I was lucky in this case.

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&#x27;t go into details about the questions because there&#x27;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 &quot;I will only need 20 minutes for this&quot;, while emphasizing it is an important leadership position that they are hiring for. So 20 minutes is all needed to identify &quot;important, critical leaders&quot;? 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 &quot;I only need 20 minutes for this&quot; 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 &quot;I need to ask you two questions and need 20 minutes for this&quot;. Then proceeds to ask two random questions about platforms and process enforcement, then hangs up the call after I answer. Tells me he&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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: &quot;don&#x27;t come. It&#x27;s a mess and a revolving door of people&quot;. 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&#x27;m not joining, then.I am ok with passing loops, being rejected, I&#x27;ve seen it all. But being ghosted after acceptance is a first. What a bizarre place this is.

Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe