What I Miss About Working at Stripe

Fuck the mission. Fuck the culture. You are doing nothing but shoveling money into founders, investors and shareholders pockets.

I am not saying you should not work hard and aim for achievements, heck, even help the world get a little better (in some cases).

But don’t kid yourself. Sure, culture and mission is needed in a company. But they are not for your benefit. Be the lemming, if that suits you. If you own or have a finacial stake in the company sure, grind-to-win applies to you. For everyone else sorry, but you are a special kind of retarded to trade your actual life (you only have one, remember) for the benefit of others who couldn’t care less about you.

It’s actually possible to do great work at 40 hrs or less per week. If you need more, you’re not doing it right.

This article is personally very worrisome to me.

I think this is pretty much what most start-ups in the tech sector expect, it's similar to the over-optimisation problem in that because this technique has worked for some very successful companies then obviously every other tech-start up needs to overwork their employees and requires employees to dedicate their life to "the mission".

It's difficult because it's very infectious and it's extremely stressful to everyone who doesn't fit in with the expectations. I've had work experiences where I'm paired with very over-achieving engineers and managers might fall into the trap of comparisons: "Well he gets things many things done in a day and very quickly, why can't you also do that? We really want people to be motivated, to put in those extra hours if needed". And it's a difficult conversation because, how do you tell your boss you're not really interested in working those extra hours? That you don't really value productivity as much as they do, that well... that you have a life that you want to enjoy.

Building up unrealistic and unsustainable expectations is not okay. It's not okay to cry at work because of how stressful a deadline is. I mean, let's be honest here, this person was working at Stripe she's not a nurse that has someone's literal life in their hands. It's not okay to work 15 hours a day, our bodies and minds can only do so much.

And all of this for what? To "increase the internet's GDP"? Might as well just start a war while we're at it, that will for sure increase some countries GDP as well. Seriously, we are people not machines. It's good to be passionate, but where we put our passion is very important.

It's interesting how this personality type of ultra-neurotic who is confusing fulfillment with work, as follows, is the ultimate carry for almost every team in the Valley;

"It’s more about missing that universal agreement that it’s really, really cool to devote yourself fully to your work."

"But I do think work can be a source of real meaning in life. But, we’ll only ever get out what we put in."

"And of course I believe you can love something without it having to hurt. But I’ve never truly loved anything that didn’t move me to my core."

And then she gets her vacation cancelled for her by her manager. You got absolutely railed for your time and confused it for camaraderie.

In life, you get less than what you put in if you're working on the wrong things. You get what you put in if you aren't working on the right things. And you get more than what you put in if you're working on the right things.

When I interviewed at Stripe last year, some people made weird, obliquely braggy comments about how compulsively they worked. Other folks were great, though.

Overall, it felt like a once-decent culture rapidly turning rancid.

> nobody wanted to be the first person to leave the office, even on Friday.

This is just a terrible workplace smell. Especially at a company that lacks a compelling mission, that is just another payment processor trying to get their 2-3% cut from as much of the market as possible.

People, please don't expect to find your life's meaning working at Stripe. For fuck's sake.

Seems like a self-promoting post, I wouldn't really trust it, because when I looked them up this turned up:

> Brie Wolfson @zebriez helping founders craft company culture via @koolaidco, musing on http://founder-fodder.ghost.io used to @stripe

It seems to be tailored for the founders looking for ways to get more free work out of their employees, through "culture".

Maybe I'm cynical, but the whole thing reads like they didn't ask for high standards, care and respect in your work, but that they just asked for more of your time at no additional cost.

There are studies showing that output quality degrades with more crunch, overtime, and fatigue. Getting a good night sleep has more impact on software defect than writing software proofs.

So if you cared about quality, you'd take that into account as well, and you'd respect people's time.

Or if I'm less cynical, maybe it's true the author experienced coworkers that were truly good at their jobs, and put care and pride in their work, but unfortunately at the same time had bad respect for their own worth and time. If that's still the only place that felt that pride and care, I can see missing it, and almost not being able to seperate one from the other. In reality, having both is even better, and that's what should be the gold standard, working with people who respect their work and their worth equally.

I'm sad to see all the hate this article's getting in the comments, but also can't say I expected anything else.

Most of the hate I'm seeing here is focused around work-life balance, but even the author acknowledges that "I don’t think people should cry or feel like impostors or skip their vacations regularly." There's so much more here! Kudos to Brie too for really putting herself out there like this.

Taking apart what the article mentions, the fulfillment she felt at work came from:

- A sense of shared mission: of the mission statement, "it was a little abstract, but we believed in it enough to recite it with pride"

- Being pushed to do better: "My work was meticulously but warmly critiqued by my peers and leaders alike, and my work got better and better because of it"

- A community and culture: "It felt like magic, but there was deep thought, care, and intention behind everything. I had a tingly feeling that I was part of an organization that had cracked something about creating a great culture"

Forget work -- think about a side project, a hobby, a sport -- anything that you've applied yourself to. Does it feel good to hold yourself to a high standard, in the company of other peers who are into the same things?

That sounds like something we can all get behind!

Stripe may not have been perfect, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

Tell me you have Stockholm syndrome in as many words as you can…

Being proud of your work because of what you deliver with it is great. Being proud of canceling holidays because your manager says so is slavery with extra steps.

I found this article profoundly sad. It's good to be passionate about your work, but this person seems to have been exploited. They had their vacation cancelled by management, were working 15 hour days, and spent late nights working and crying, and to what end? To manage API stability of an online payments platform, making a few other people rich? They are clearly a capable, intelligent person, but have had their energy funnelled into a personally destructive endeavour, and look back on it wistfully.

Imagine if they taken their same zeal and contributed to a real community, creating both personal reward, real purpose, and value for the individuals around them.

> Once, my manager asked me to reconsider the vacation I had been planning because my team needed me. “If you go, who will cover your work?” I looked around at my colleagues who were also regularly working 15-hour days and decided to stay put. I’m proud of that choice.

Nope.

I've worked at a company that people really love to praise and it's by far the most challenging place I've worked. In my couple years, I've had 6 managers and been re-org'd almost every year.

The tooling is terrible, we constantly thrash priorities, the "culture" is non-existent beyond emojis. Getting stuff done is often met with hostility by other teams, or even worse, bad-faith requirement tail-chasing.

Rant: At one point, they locked down everyone's ability to review code and had everyone fill out a google survey with questions like "name 2-3 people who you trust to review code". The people with the most nominations became the only ones that could approve code reviews. To get into this club, you had to provide 10 example PRs that demonstrated your worth, and being a certified code reviewer even made it into the eng ladder as an expectation (I can only imagine the amount of wasted work people put in creating/finding/reviewing "complex" PRs). Eventually the backlash caused them to relax the system but it shows how they treat the old guard against the new folk (in their eyes reliability problems are due to the new people, not the broken systems that can't scale beyond 3-4 people). Everything is code-gen'd and checked into source control due to some insane invariant, trying to reason about infrastructure outside of the 1-2 major usecases (ruby monolith api or java payments code) is a punishment reserved for the new hire or in the worst case the "runner", who has to carry the world on their shoulders because the eng organization runs off of reactive-jira-wackamole (enhanced by slack integrations!) competing against a bi-annual waterfall planning (that your manager needs to deliver or else .. nothing happens, we fudge the OKR scores and do it all again). God forbid any non-tech org need eng help, that's not going to happen so they build their own mini-kingdom with competing tooling and n+1 SaaS integrations.

I've been oncall for major systems that power the internet and our oncall/runner toil is the worst I've seen, we pathologically throw humans at problems because tech leadership can't commit to a smaller set of priorities as the can has been kicked one-too-many times. The product is great and the company is well run fiscally but I believe the eng org requires a major shake up.

> nobody wanted to be the first person to leave the office, even on Friday.

This doesn't sound like a healthy symptom of a positive workplace culture. I guarantee that for some people, this perspective could be flipped on its head, and rephrased as a fear of being seen as the first person to leave. Other parts of the article reaffirm that, e.g.:

> My heart would beat out of my chest before heading into an exec review.

> Once, my manager asked me to reconsider the vacation I had been planning because my team needed me. “If you go, who will cover your work?”

If this is what gets your juices flowing right now, good for you. But personally? I work hard, hard enough to justify a vacation without the accompanying guilt trip, and with sufficient diligence to make a difference and explain my decisions to leadership. Then I go home.

I couldn't make it through. I felt deeply uncomfortable hearing her working 15 hour days to make the executives millionaires. I'm sure she was well compensated too, but it made me feel physically uneasy. Something feels quite wrong with our society at large.

This is obviously going to be controversial but the people talking about how this is abuse or slavery or exploitation are missing the point.

The author knows how it sounds. And yet...

> "it felt good to care about anything that much"

Purpose is fleeting in modern existence. Religion is waning. Spirituality is trivialized. Both for excellent reasons. So many people in the world are just surviving, while others are going through the motions of modern existence, as if on a treadmill. Achieving milestones but without feeling connected to them. Chasing Instagram highlight reels.

But we still have a human desire for impact, achievement, and purpose.

In Silicon Valley - the place, the culture, the TV show - the term "Changing The World" has been completely squeezed of it's meaning and replaced by grifters who are only seeking a quick buck. Maybe it always has.

But there are those places - and Stripe is one of them - that can lay honest claim to having done something legitimately groundbreaking and impactful to the world.

And to those that worked there, it gave them a *MISSION*, and *PURPOSE*.

There is no need to scoff at that. If you found your own purpose without working 15 hour days and making your boss a multi-billionaire, that's wonderful. If you haven't, but think you'd never do it at this cost, that's also a valid choice for you.

But for this person, it was the right choice. And it was/will be for many others also.

I see OPs point. But I disagree with both the premise and conclusion.

Maybe it's because I come from a Mediterranean country, but I don't think we should tell people, and American even less, to invest even more time and effort in their job.

Sure, people need to feel fulfilled and with a mission. There are many ways to do it outside work, starting with family, friends, and community.

Also I find this advice a bit rich. Sure, it might have worked well for a twenty-something (I presume) early employee at a rocket ship. What about people later in life with families to support? what about all those who poured their souls into their starts just to get unceremoniously laid off?

Caring about your job can be an immense source of satisfaction and part of a well balance life. But let's not kid ourselves, the relationship between companies and employees is very asymmetrical. If you bust your ass working you might get a raise or a promotion, and make someone else a few million. If you lose your job, your life might get wrecked, and the company wont even flinch.

I read the article, wanted to comment, decided was better not to, went out for a run, and now I have decided to write something about it.

I found it a very disturbing article. Someone with a background in clinical psychology might want to explore the transference that seemed to happen in the author when she mistook a company she worked for, where she was apparently chastised, made to cry, and asked to skip vacation by appealing to her sense of guilt and importance, for a higher calling.

It is the kind of letter I would expect a North Korean army private to send to Kim Jong-un after coming back from three months of isolation in military barracks.

I also appreciate that there are people who are dedicated to the cause of corporate growth for reasons other than making bank, because I will never be one of those people.

Well written - I’m also a former stripe although a far more cursory one, and I quite often miss my former team.

I’ve tried very hard to keep my current company from becoming a “lgtm” company — but my god do you need a lot of resources to pay enough engineers to do anything other than “lgtm”. If I could have raised 1/5th as much for my startup as the impact I’ve had at large corporations, I’d probably be able to pull it off. Alas.

The fundamental conflict between a founder and employees is the difference that founders/investors are only rewarded when things get done and there is external success (customers, acquisitions). That's company success.

There are many reasons that mindset is hard to spread among employees. Starting with: employees are more risk averse and don't want to be paid only when the company closes sales; they want a monthly paycheck. And ending with: as a company grows, the level of "information" of the company grows; it becomes too much for specialist employees to understand the full context of the organization, industry, business model, financials, customers, product, design etc.

It's very hard to spread the 'founder' mentality to employees. Many people in this thread seem to suggest that it's morally wrong for employees to have a 'founder' mentality because they don't have the same level of equity stake.

The reality is, it's much harder for any company to succeed without people putting care into the results. And if a company doesn't succeed, they have to layoff employees.

Fully appreciate the dedication to something useful, that's entirely understandable ...

... but these people need to go on missions to build hospitals in poor places, join the Coast Guard or otherwise put this kind of extra energy where the resulting surpluses don't just go to line some guys pocket.

A little bit culty to say the least.

Without getting into the Religion/Spirituality argument to deeply, seems like there are some things missing here, including a lot of 3rd spaces.

Better yet, ship these people off to Ukraine. Probably not suited to the 'front line' but surely the administrative engine could use some help I'm sure.

The author clearly values hard work. She felt meaning in her work and reflected on that. The idea that all hard work or, God forbid, a hard working culture is toxic is probably why it's so much harder to achieve big things in the modern world. Hard work isn't always burn out and hard work isn't always bad.

More often than not its during the hardest working times that you learn or achieve the most.

One added piece of context: the author now runs a consultancy on the "important, but often non-urgent, work of culture-building" (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brie-wolfson-17758724).

So that (at least partially) explains the stance on culture she espouses.

Serious question but do any of these people have families? If I regularly worked 15 hour days my wife would leave me without a second thought

There are countless startups with similarly intense work environments but where the startup fails in the end. In that situation, the story here would sound straight up depressing.

The only reason this story is even publishable is because of the success stripe. The general lesson here is that people’s emotional recollection of experiences (and also peoples reaction to the story) depend on the final outcome of the experience.

Most of the comments here fall into two camps: work can be inherently meaningful, or work is transactional. I think most of us would agree that there are certain goals worth sustained sacrifice. The question is: when is work worthy?

There are life experiences such as team sports that are opportunities for great personal growth with objectively silly goals (throw the ball into the hoop). For many young adults, the experience of being part of a passionate and dedicated community is itself intoxicating. It can be work, a religious group, or a Discord server. It may not matter what the goal is, the goal is the group. As people develop deeper attachments, have a family, this goal of belonging seems less important. We begin to reexamine the goals we have aligned our life around.

Eventually, it is human to question every goal. Why did I want to squat 400 pounds? To increase the world’s GDP? Why did I want to reach the moon? To reduce suffering? We may reject this line is thinking, or we look to those who have asked this question before us, and we find an explanation that lets us move on.

How does somebody work 15 hour days making blog posts (Stripe Press)?

Maybe I'm being elitist, but I pegged the long working hours and collaboration more with the engineering side of Stripe.

I tried the 'change the world'. I got so messed up at that job and ultimately the market went with product Y instead because it was an easier sale to the bean counters.

Then I went to just a job to pay the bills after leaving the Bay Area. I took a few seconds off the time of the average of something used by a lot of people and saved a ton of cumulative time for humanity.

But...the road to hell is paved with good intentions. My original "make the world better software" had a side effect I didn't know/understand in that the savings came at a indirect cost, people wouldn't get something subsidized anymore (because my efficiency removed the need to give it away). Imagine improving say the food supply chain at grocery stores and making groceries cheaper, but at the cost of less goods damaged and then donated to food banks. Indirectly people suffered, maybe died.

Tried to make the world better = Killed people for money.* Didn't care = Saved the equivalent of 80 lifespans at least so far.

*For legal reason I want to clarify indirectly. Not through negligence or malice. Improved efficiency reduced companies donating excess.

I get that being passionate about a job, bringing all your skills and all you have to a cause you believe in can create a fire. And isn't that a goal of life? To have a fire, a purpose? So kudos to her for finding that. That being said, a culture that demands that kind of hours is a culture that limits who will work there. Forget having young children. Forget having a time-consuming hobby outside of work. Forget even having a good social life. For some people, that is a worthwhile trade-off. For others, it isn't. Those others might be the very kind of people who could contribute a lot to your company, but they won't work there for long.

I think companies who encourage that kind of work environment are, to some degree, missing the forest for the trees. They get a lot of hours out of their employees, but they can only hire from a small section of the population. Potentially valuable employees are not available to such companies, and I think often this hurts the companies in the long run.

I’ve had moments at work - under super stressful conditions - where people pulled together to get something done, and they are some of my fondest work memories. A perfectly executed project is probably beautiful to someone and it’s low stress, for sure, but it’s not memorable or exciting. Just need to find balance.

This reminds me of things that people experience in war times: „Fighting together, being there for another, don’t let your brother down, this is hell but together we made/make it“

I mean this not in a sarcastic way. War is hell, brutal, bone crushing and miserable, but you will never make a deeper connection with people you fight with [0]

You sit there with your buddies, some food and fight the „enemy“ (api failure) together and win, exhausted but happy … together.

There is time in your youth, time for the „good old days“, BUT don’t make it a habit, this will cost you … your health, your private life, your time and it’s only job at a company that can change. A company that can fire you in an instant.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_junger_why_veterans_miss...

So, you miss burnout? lol

Meh, I don't want to speak on behalf of someone else and say she's brainwashed, has Stockholm syndrome or anything of that sort. If she's truly happy with that kind of work environment then I wish her the best of luck finding another environment like that, and all of us to whom this sounds like torture can be glad that there are plenty of workplaces that don't function like this.

There's no need to be presumptuous, different strokes for different folks.

ITT: Gatekeeping what people are allowed to enjoy

Comments here are predictable and depressing. Some people just want to do great work for the sake of doing great work. If you have to be the most compensated person in the company to care, that’s fine too. But it doesn’t mean everyone else does or a workplace is “toxic”.

I've been sitting with this for a little while, and I think I've figured out what I want to say.

The first thing is that I 100% identify with and understand what Op's written here. It does feel amazing to be a member of a committed, like-minded group of people all working as hard as they can towards a common, worthy goal--especially when you haven't found a lot of acceptance previously in life. I found this working on US presidential campaigns (etc), all of which were life changing for me in every way I can think of. It's exhilarating in a way I find hard to describe, but I recognize it in this post.

The second thing is that these experiences are, similarly, 100% exploitative. Presidential campaigns aren't good working environments. They're not good for people--even people who enjoy them and seemingly thrive are insidiously destroyed by them. Relationships are very hard. Balance with other aspects of your life (like parenting) is impossible. Taking care of yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally is laughable. Toxic behavior and substance abuse is rampant. More often than not, people use campaigns and "the mission" as excuses to be their worst selves: which means anything you can imagine that might mean (implementing dark patterns, abusing people, workaholism). You are wildly overworked and underpaid. Your relationship to work is forever warped by the workload, the mission, and the experiences (highs, lows, etc). No other job is like it.

Which brings me to the last thing, which is: at least presidential campaigns are for a good cause (well, half of them anyway ;). Stripe seems fine and I enjoy all the posts I read from them, but they're a payments company. We (and by "we" here I mean humanity) don't need young people mortgaging every other aspect of their lives for years to get a payments company off the ground. This goes for ridesharing companies, search engine/ad companies, social networking companies, probably 99.999% of what SV works on (maybe there's a climate change or refugee startup out there that's worthy, hard to know).

We don't need it, and we don't need the fallout from it. We don't need to warp people's sense of work. We don't need managers extorting their ICs with "who will be responsible for your work while you're on vacation" (the answer is "the person who built my team with redundancies so we don't burn out", btw). We don't need to reduce our understanding of our lives to who we are and what we do at work. This isn't a war; it's not us against the fascists. It's a payments company.

I'm pushing 40 at this point (what a wild thing to say haha), and to my fellow near-middle-agers out there, I will say it's up to us to not do this to the next generation. Don't let people work 15 hour days, ever. Don't let people work on weekends. Ensure they take vacations, even if they're just staying home and taking longer showers. Don't text/Slack/whatever them outside work hours. Hold the line when your manager tries to do this to you. Talk about it openly; make this the culture where you work.

If you're looking for an experience like Op describes, this is what community is for. Find a hackerspace, find an activist community to volunteer in, mentor a child. You can find communities of capable, like-minded people without the annihilation of the rest of your life. It's not a necessary component.

sounds like stockholm syndrome

Is this thinly veiled attempt at dissuading people to not work for this company. Or this has to be a parody of tech culture.