[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~~).

[danrocks]

I actually replied to Patrick via e-mail; I have zero reason to be anonymous.

[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.

[xdavidliu]

Are you saying that you had 2 job offers and almost a third, or are you saying that on three separate occasions you almost got the offer but did not? Either way, what specifically did the recruiters do badly?

[simonebrunozzi]

I got two written job offers, which I refused, and almost got a third.

Main issues:

- wrong level offered (e.g. sub-director vs director) despite initial agreement;

- lowball salary offer (~30% less of what I stated I wanted to even start interviewing for the job, and ~20% less of what I was making at my then-current job)

- confusing interview process (too many things to even list them here)

- lack of preparation for the interviewers (e.g. didn't read my resume, wasn't aware of who else interviewed me and on which topics, didn't ask me questions relevant to the position, etc)

[anonymoushn]

The 2019 google recruitment process takes almost half a year and ends with a 4-day exploding offer for ~50% of market compensation.

[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.

[shawnb576]

Sorry this is BS and will lead to bad hires.

Regardless of the size of the org you need 45 mins to get good signal.

20 minutes might work for a “what questions do you have” sell call.

But any company making hiring calls on this model, that’s a yellow flag right there

[aeternum]

Op said that only 35% of interviewers stated 20min so approx 2 out of 5? 3 long rounds and 2 short 20-30 min rounds should be plenty to get a decent hiring signal.

[lmilcin]

> What size org do you manage?

At what size of org it stops being important who is going to be heading it?

[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.

[lmilcin]

You are hiring somebody who will be managing managers meaning they will probably have responsibility for at least dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of people.

As a manager/leader of that organisation they will have an important role that can mean difference between those hundreds of people bringing huge value or huge loss to the company.

So your responsibility is to figure out how much time to spend with the candidate. You can choose anywhere between "just hire first person to apply" and "spend a year grooming an employee to see if they can do the job".

And you want to tell me that 20 minutes is the right answer here? That out of entire continuum of possible choices you say that the optimal return (performance of manager) on investment (cost of conducting interviews) lands at approximately 20 minutes -- less time than you take to have a lunch?

I get that he had couple of these sessions but still... it sounds like giving the job to a first person that looks the part.

[tzs]

What I'm suggesting is that maybe what matters is the total set of questions asked by all the interviewers. Does it really matter if one person asks questions for 2 hours as opposed to 6 people asking questions for 20 minutes each if the same questions are asked?

The former gives more flexibility to alter the questioning on the fly, such as to delve more deeply into some area than had been planned. The latter gets more people to spend time with the candidate.

A mix of this could be the best of both worlds. Have several short interviews mixed with some long ones. If one of the short ones turns up something that seems worth going in depth on that can be handled in one of the long interviews.

[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.

[perl4ever]

>Describing your recruiting process as a random variable

Anyone who can do anything with zero variation should definitely drop what they are doing now and make it their new business.

[sombremesa]

I think what GP is trying to say is that your hiring process is within your control (especially this far in the pipeline), so even the worst candidate experience should fall above some baseline. You don't get much sympathy if you say "that baseline turns out to be absolute gobshite at the first percentile, sorry."

[hogFeast]

The other reply explained this but imagine you bought a soda, and you drank it and it turned out to be rat piss. You call up the company: my soda was full of rat piss. Their reply: "Oh yes, we sell lots of sodas, you couldn't possibly understand how much soda we sell so rat piss soda is a seven sigma event...bye".

If you are in software, recruiting is your business. You have no other real assets. So categorising your hiring process as a random variable makes no sense. You should have processes in place that ensure non-randomness...again, is Coca-Cola out there selling tons of rat piss, and just saying: "Tough luck guys, this is a hard business"...no. If you don't have processes to ensure that outcomes in the core parts of your business are not random, you don't have a business (I used to work as an equity analyst, I have heard this kind of thing from CEOs over and over...I never recommended investing in such business, I have never seen a company that was run that way succeed).

[perl4ever]

People report even more clear cut events regarding food products than your example, even. You know, like rat parts. Sometimes they may be hoaxes or urban legends. Not necessarily all the time.

I've seen odd things first hand with processed food from the grocery store. I've bought sealed packages of food that were all dried out and stale. Or that looked fine but gave me...indigestion. The weirdest thing I've seen recently were some mints where some of them randomly were solid chocolate, no filling. Oh, and a frozen dessert had a sealed cardboard box, but the plastic covering inside was open.

How does that sort of variation happen? I'd imagine that the better your process is, and the less variation you have, the larger proportion of your failures will be "unknown unknowns" that are just weird.

I acknowledge the conclusion that the interview process is f-ed up could well be correct.

[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.

[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.