The better question is: Where did your priors come from?

Every big tech company invests a lot of time and money into projecting a good reputation on the internet. It's basically table stakes for competitive hiring these days. This includes everything from making a founder a celebrity in tech circles or on Twitter, to posting fake Glassdoor reviews (and getting negative reviews removed). The worst company I worked for would periodically send e-mails to everyone reminding us about the NDAs we signed and implying that they'd sue anyone who talked to the press or wrote negative things about the company online.

If you're making judgements based on the frequency of good versus bad posts, your opinions are going to be dominated by companies pushing positive PR for themselves.

The strangest thing about the negative Stripe posts is that I haven't seen many Stripe employees (other than executives) show up and say that these anecdotes are surprising. I have, however, seen several anecdotes in this thread and others noting that Stripe's hiring process is notoriously chaotic and flawed.

I don't really know the truth. I'd lean toward assuming these are abnormal experiences, but I wouldn't discard them entirely just because they're not what you expected to hear. What you expect to hear about a big company is largely a function of deliberate PR pushes these days.

>> I haven't seen many Stripe employees (other than executives) show up and say that these anecdotes are surprising.

... Do people normally do that? With verifiable, named accounts? Personally, as an employee, I would feel profoundly uncomfortable to publicly comment on such matters of my company; and may well be explicitly and clearly forbidden from doing so. Plus, most people would only really have their own experience to relate, and I at least would be reluctant to share anecdata as useful evidence.

(and then there's a matter of time and prioritization; heck, I work for IBM -- if I tried to counter every negative comment on IBM on Hacker News, that'd be my six new full time jobs, even though I've personally had brilliantly positive experience over two decades and deeply respect all of my colleagues :D )

It seems pretty scummy to prohibit or penalize employees for talking about their initial hiring interactions with the company. Especially if they keep their remarks to the period prior to their officially being hired.

At that point... you weren't an employee. And it's pretty odd for a company to assume they have a right to your silence, covering a period before you had entered into a contractual relationship with them and they were paying you.

Yes, I've read Snowcrash, yes we live in dystopian future; at the same time, if I try to be a devil's advocate and simplify it to very basics - if I'm running a two person shop, and one of them is saying bad things about my/our company... I wouldn't really be excited about working with them either, would I? I ran a photography side business for a while, and if my assistant had feedback to share with me, awesome; on the other hand, if they went on Tweeter and criticized our working, what's my motivation to call them up and work closely with them again? :-/

Things get far murkier at larger companies of course, and there's labour law etc, but I imagine there'd always be some tension in speaking negatively about your employer.

(Edit: As for "talking about hiring process" specifically, that may get even trickier; unless you're an HR manager actually familiar and proficient and authorized to formally represent hiring process to prospective candidates, you may cause untold amount of ruckus even with best intentions in describing your limited perspective on the hiring process to people - setting up incorrect expectations or even accidentally prejudicing against the company in any potential latter lawsuit. Just because Person A has had specific experience in hiring, in no way guarantees that Person B will, but it can and has easily been interpreted that way when Person A says "Company A hiring practices are as such").

i've always written ibm off as large, old and stodgy. curious to hear a counterpoint if you're willing to share.

IBM (and Microsoft, and Google, and others) are huge and it makes sense that there are pockets of awesome and awful distributed throughout them.

We tend to ascribe... personalities to large companies; explain them in single sentences. IBM is old and stodgy, Oracle has awful licensing practices, Amazon has (great cloud | shoddy warehouse employment practices | too much counterfeit goods) depending on perspective, etc. Sometimes we mix up Musk and Tesla. Overall, we tend to put a simple descriptive sentence over companies, just like we do over politics and history etc. We must, it's how we make sense of the world :).

But in a company of tens and hundreds of thousands of employees, cultures and perspectives and motivations can differ significantly. It'll be a complex landscape. Not all of IBM is stodgy anymore than all of Google is cool. And I've been amused there's a guy in Amazon who maintains PeopleSoft HR just like there's guy in Government of Canada who maintains PeopleSoft HR :-). The IBM guys designing hardware who test their work by putting radioactive material under the computer and seeing how CPUs behave? not so old and stodgy, in my mind :D . There's also some genuine good hard work on occasionally boring stuff like RDBMS engines & optimizers, compilers and OSs for obscure boxes, and I am pretty grateful to folks who write p-series firmware because watching a live production sync and migration is exciting stuff, as well as OS/390 / z/OS/VM guys who are probably chuckling at the "Virtualization" and "Cloudiness" things we all think are shiny and new and cool:). Don't know enough to speak about the quantum thing, I suspect there's a core of innovation wrapped in unfortunate marketing bollocks, as there was for "Watson" (which I find easier to think of "branding for semi-related suite of created and acquired products, some good some average some ugly" rather than "AI that won Jeopardy").

For myself, FWIW, people around me have much more immediate impact on my working satisfaction, than overall corporate average/stereotype. And I've worked with excited enthusiastic peers, been surrounded by experienced leaders who provided extensive mentorship, and done some personally exciting stuff (inasmuch as "pushing 1's and 0's around and making computers go bleep bloop" is exciting:). I've had times when I worked on personally technologically exciting things; and I've been in places and worked for clients where it's all molasses and quagmire and politics and procedures; I've tried to force myself to learn something about all, and I feel I've gained a certain perspective... but we each have our own perspective and priorities and where I've found satisfactions others would only find frustrations. But what it comes down to - I've been surrounded by sufficient percentage of people competent and motivated (even if in ways and fields that HN stereotypically would not always necessarily respect), to enjoy myself on average :).

Ever since they shut down most of their software research division (e.g. Hawthorne) , I don't even know anyone who still works at IBM.

(In spite of this I confess that I devoured the Stripe thread alongside a heaping bowl of popcorn. Some combination of Gell-Mann amnesia and a vulgar taste for tabloid gossip, I guess.)

Disgruntled ex-employees will leave bad feedback, people who have invested a lot of themselves in the company will leave good feedback (and perhaps not even see some of the problems others see).

Not sure if they ended up posting but when I was reading the thread there weren't any.

I interviewed with Stripe around 8 months ago and I think the recruiters are one of the better ones. I do see a deliberate effort to make it a good experience. While prepping, I reached out to friends of friends at Stripe and they were helpful going out of their way to ensure I was prepared. Didn't get the job but they seem like a nice bunch.

They were surprised that even though I said I could program in TypeScript that I didn't know any of the old style JavaScript meta magic (While I used TypeScript as a programming language, I wasn't particularly versed in web). Also, I failed the mandatory HTTP test (everyone had to do a problem related to HTTP, even they were interviewing for a compiler job). That was all very odd, and I think Google was a better fit for me anyways after going through that.

I keep careful track of companies that do this and I will never stop interviewing if I get an offer from a company that does. That is bad because it means I'm more likely to renege on their offers last minute.

There's an interesting psychological process here that I don't think I've seen described before.

You would expect that the higher the reputation something has, the more resilient that regard is. As if good reputation means the thing has a large number of "reputation points" and can thus afford to lose some while still retaining a large quantity of remaining rep points.

But the perceived effect is the opposite. The higher the reputation the more fragile it is to bad news. When a middling reputation thing gets some bad news, we consider it not particularly newsworthy and its reputation is unchanged. But when a highly regarded thing gets tainted, the pristine edifice comes tumbling down.

I can understand why our brains would work that way: we are incentivized through our evolutionary history to be highly attuned to detect deceipt—actors that are not what they appear to be. So bad news about a good person is read as vital information that causes us to re-evaluate everything we knew about them in that light.

But it's not clear to me that that model logically scales to an entire organization. Organizations are not monolithic entities and when an otherwise great org makes a misstep, that doesn't necessarily mean it's rotten to the core.

The way the thinking goes is that humans are wired to tell stories and there are certain stories we are predisposed to. We like to root for “the little guy” and love to cheer on startups, especially those with sympathetic stories, founders, high competence, etc.

We also tend to dislike entities at the very top and in extreme positions of power (eg billionaires, governments, large evil corporations) for a variety of reasons.

At some point in your company’s growth your narrative arc flips and you become the bad guy. The best thing you can do as the company is to try your best to postpone the flip as long as possible, but it is inevitable. When it happens, you are on the downslope and “in the dog house” as far as the media and public perception is concerned and there’s just not much you can do about it. Sometimes the harder you try to explain yourself and fight against it, the worse it gets.

You’ll also notice founders of these companies are often totally caught by surprise when this flip happens. They’ve gotten so used to a sympathetic public and a certain mode of behavior to maintain good public perception - transparent, relatable, “aww shucks” style - and when it flips it can be confusing because this doesn’t work anymore. The perception of them has shifted from “that smart/competent startup person I am rooting for” to “the powerful billionaire CEO that crushes the little people with the raise of a finger” and so the behaviors that come naturally to them take on a different tone entirely from a perception perspective.

When this happens it’s probably time to batten down the hatches and shift PR strategies. The old way isn’t likely to work anymore; the straw has finally broken the camel’s back.

I’m no expert at what it takes to reverse this. My best guess is that you need to spend your time in the penalty box while drawing minimum attention to let the steam blow off faster and not accelerate the roller coaster ride down. Then when you come back after 6-12 months or so, do so with a changed communications strategy that implicitly takes into account the changed public perceptions around power dynamics. You’re not a beloved startup anymore but you can still be “one of the good ones” as far as big companies and billionaire CEOs.

That psychological process is actually ever-present, except it just that we often do not notice it until it is explicitly pointed out, like when the older fish asks the younger fish: "how's the water?" in This is Water by DFW [1].

I remember encountering it a long time ago when I came across this pithy quote for the first time: "education can take a man to any height but character keeps him there".

It turns out that there's quite a few of these that have been codified into common English expressions:

"He fell to a new low"

"She was terminated at the peak of her career"

The reason why these sentences do not seem nonsensical to our brains is because we often equate reputation with ascending a (physical) height. When someone of high repute engages in questionable behavior, of course our brain naturally associates the consequence of such behavior as a fall--similar to any accidental descent from an elevated place.

There are a lot more eye-opening examples in Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff et al [2].

1: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By

A negative thing about a high reputation company gets published in "serious" outlets or upvoted on social media.

A negative thing about a middling reputation company is buried on page 7.

I'd say it's the "Wow, this was on the front page of the BBC" effect that triggers the brain response, moreso than the fact that it exists at all. (Coupled with the fact that you probably won't see much of what's on the proverbial page 7, ever)

Then why is it so brittle in big companies? Because the mishap mentioned here of Stripe rescinding the candidate and others we tend to hear about are pretty major and enough to erode trust significantly and in turn reputation.

When smaller negative things like Amazon not donating a large amount of money to curl but it was short lived and faded easily and probably nobody remembers it but bigger bad things we frequently hear about big companies such as poor work environment in Amazon is pretty hard to forget and no amount of good reputation unless something big enough shows that it is not true it will be on the back of mind for a long time.

In smaller businesses people expect negative things to happen more frequently and nobody remembers since it is normal for people and reputation is unaffected unless something extremely bad happens.

Hence even if you have a good reputation negative things will break it more often than in smaller companies because you have far higher standards to hold to maintain while small companies dont't and their reputation does not go down as much as bigger companies

You seem to think that very positive opinions can only be strongly held opinions, but GP had a generic positive opinion, weakly held due to lack of direct experience.

If the strength of your prior is held fixed, then a negative piece of news should change a highly positive opinion more.

We have this world where things in the public space are highly polished and curated. If you have a look at some historical interviews from say 50 years ago, you'd sometimes get some person who kinda seemed like a kid in school giving his first speech. It would be clumsy, but like in school you could adjust for the presentation, maybe give them the benefit of the doubt.

In the modern world, everything is presented in the most positive light possible. Someone has sat before every public statement or interview and written down all the positives and negatives, and they've already worked out what is good to focus on, and what needs to be spun. They take an active interest in monitoring the public space for what is said about them, and they already have the rebuttals in place. It's actually quite predictable: apologize and say it was a one-off, claim that the bad thing has been dealt with, point out that the information may be wrong, and point out the ulterior motives of the person making the claim.

In light of this, it's simply hard for me to give the benefit of the doubt, and it's very similar with any other spin-heavy communications. It's a bummer, because in my ideal world people would just put stuff out like they see it and listeners wouldn't have to try to un-spin what they'd been told. I'm sure a lot of dishonest communicators hide among the honest, which is their whole game.

> What were your priors? Stripe pays well, has a great product, leadership is great, hires top-tier developers, is a great place to work, etc. (making stuff up here idk what your priors were) but all of that is erased because you saw a random article about two people having offers rescinded and you don't even know if it's true?

Unfortunately, it's like when some person gets outed for being a creep, in the genre of MeToo. One or two independent allegations, I tend to think "hmm gotta see both sides". Somewhere like 4 or 5, I certify the creep status and laminate a card for them. Granted a business is not a single person, so those numbers may need adjustment, but you really don't need much to ruin a reputation.

That way nothing is true until it happens to you.

This is a big reason why most of us are terrible at "investing" in the stock market. You have a good thesis on why a company is good and it checks all boxes. With a small bad news about the CEO or something without evidence gets out and you suddenly forget your checklist and panic.

I do have a friend that worked there until relatively recently (quit about a year and a half ago) and said things were good pre pandemic. He also told me that I should never consider working there with their new comp structure.

Why? Do they have nothing better to do with their time?

Maybe you can ask this person directly why they are lying:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29405734