When Stripe concocted a document to deter 50% of its job applicants
Stripe is no longer a small duck in a large pond; the payments fintech has more than 8,000 employees and has 266 unique open job listings currently available. It's no doubt inundated with applicants for those roles, which is fine. In the past, though, Stripe tried to actively deter people from applying.
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Speaking on a recent podcast, Stripe's global head of product, Eeke de Milliano, said that she worked with co-founder Patrick Collison on the construction of the fintech's first culture guide. She said that Collison wanted to share the document with applicants and "ideally, half of the candidates who read it [would be] like, ‘I’m out, I don’t want to be a part of this.’"
De Millianio said that the document was "eviscerated" on sites like Hacker News when it was first released. Outside of mocking the fintech's propensity to refer to its staff as 'Stripes,' the mockers most often said that the document raised a "big red flag" regarding work-life balance. It seems that this was Collison's desired effect.
An archived version of the document shows that Stripe said its employees were expected to work "some late nights, some weekends" and that they should be "paying attention to email even during off-hours." Applicants were also asked to consider whether they want to work at a place that "could never be described as a cushy job." Although the document said you didn't need someone else to lose for you to succeed at Stripe, it also said "you will almost always see someone working harder, staying longer, or being more successful."
Stripe has since rewritten its operating principles to be less alienating, and has removed mentions of work-life balance. De Milliano said that "at some point, companies kind of outgrow that stuff;" she says that it's hard to maintain such an intense culture as you scale "and you have to be okay with that."
Work-life balance is not unanimously better than it was before the principles were changed, however. Reviews for Stripe on jobs forum Blind say "not all teams are created equal" and work-life balance is "team dependent." At the extreme end, a review from one software engineer in January said that he is working "16 hours a day."
The change hasn't been unanimously popular, either. In one of the most liked reviews for Stripe on Blind, one project manager in 2020 said the old principles "used to make perfect sense," but their replacements are just "techbro babble."
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