Asking Nate About Stripe
So, take all this with a hefty serving of salt. My opinions are all formed from 2 weeks of zoom/slack/email which is not necessarily the best signal.
Does Stripe feel more unified culturally?
I think it is more unified than Theorem, but Theorem felt crazy siloed in spite of the small size. AFAIK, Theorem didn’t really have a defined culture which was probably a part of this.
Whereas at Stripe, there is a defined culture (https://stripe.com/jobs/culture). Every person joining Stripe goes through an onboarding that includes all new hires for that week. This even included the new CRO which was a surprise for me.
Ultimately, sticking to culture is going to depend on individuals, but it’s hard to expect much unification without setting the direction.
At Clever (spent 4y there before Theorem), the culture tenets were defined prior to 50 employees and I think that contributed to everyone staying aligned. Different teams had different ‘weights’ to each of them, but I think we were aligned on the whole. https://blog.clever.com/2016/05/scaling-clever-culture/
My takeaway from this reflection is that you probably cannot expect a company to culturally unified unless they either:
- are a small company (but this isn’t a guarantee - see Theorem)
- define their culture explicitly
How does the quality/scope of work compare to Theorem?
Haven’t started any real work with my team yet.
My read from docs/messages I’ve been reading is that the scope of the work is going to be far tighter than at Theorem. However, the quality of the work (at least for me) is going to be better.
As a new grad engineer, I think the opportunities you can find will pretty consistently follow:
- bigger company: smaller scope, higher weight on quality
- smaller company: bigger scope, lower weight on quality
Do you feel like you have more or less ownership over the projects you’re working on?
TBD here. I’m anticipating that I’ll have limited ownership the first 6 months and will be getting opportunities to lead some projects after that point.
Created from: Asking Successful People 202009140034
uid: 202009140035 tags: #2020recruiting