[pc]

I'm sorry; that's bad. Can you email me with details so that we can investigate what happened? ([e-mail]; others welcome to do so too.)

More than 10,000 people have interviewed at Stripe so far this year, so "several sigma bad" 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.

[tempomania]

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.

[dangsnightmare]

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 "I will only need 20 minutes for this" culture and did not apologise for the ghosting.

The PR spin:

> professionally and respectfully, and our recruiting team cares about fixing our process failures

If 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.

> His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people"

[bryant]

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've written, it sounds like it may put someone else's career on the line.

[austenallred]

It sounds like it'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).

[bigbillheck]

I think if they cared to look at their internal data they'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 'Dan', interviewed recently for manager-of-manager position, lives in ~~place~~, currently works for ~~someone~~).

[ulfw]

Stripe recruiters were the worst I'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're growing they can do whatever.

[simonebrunozzi]

I seriously doubt they'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.

[milofeynman]

Hey Patrick,

You might look to improve y'all's process by looking at datatdog's interview process. I have never felt more appreciated and well treated than interviewing there.

1) they always give feedback

2) 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't seem to care about getting people to work at stripe, only getting people to work in their org which didn't have open positions for X.

3) incredibly quick and responsive through the process. My recruiter at stripe did this!

Love what you're doing for science, Take care

[windowshopping]

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'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.

[fafle]

Datadog gave me a take-home assignment, which I could have done sloppily in one day or done well in two days. They added "we respect your time, so don't spend more than 3 hours on it". Then they rejected my solution because I didn't guard for all kinds of invalid input that was never mentioned anywhere.

[european321]

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'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 "you are on the last step". 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

[bambataa]

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.

[Gehinnn]

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.

[jakub_g]

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

[lmilcin]

Only some of this could be explained by "several sigma" of bad luck. The rest is either the candidate misunderstanding/distorting the process or a structural hiring problem.

I interview a lot of candidates. I just can't imagine to make a hiring decision for a dev, let alone a manager that manages other managers, based on 20 minute discussion.

[danrocks]

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.

[aeternum]

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'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.

[tzs]

> I interview a lot of candidates. I just can'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.

[hogFeast]

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 "give a 29th percentile recruiting interview", 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'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.

[jiux]

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.

[teachrdan]

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's generic "We interview a lot of people so some people are going to have a bad time."

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.

[andrewzah]

And that’s a bad thing? I’d do the same thing if I had a successful company that got referenced somewhat regularly on HN.

I assume plenty of other people do that, e.g. Steve Klabnik with rust articles. Unless they’re just always on HN…

[stewvsshark]

Talk about great HR support

[choppaface]

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

[RhodesianHunter]

I'm not defending Stripe here but this is a rediculous take. Perfection is unachievable.

[onion2k]

you'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'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.