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Comment by kpennell | Hacker News Reader

FWIW - Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264

I know Stripe is a darling YC company but if you look for it, you can find some usually anonymous detractors.

"+1. Also a founder of an $XB fintech. Exact same story. Patrick + John dangled an acquisition to get a look inside, and ended up re-trading on the terms. Then proceeded to target 2 of our team members to recruit. Fast forward a few years, and now they have deployed a team to directly copy one of our products. Amongst their L2 team, Patrick and Will are described as the "killers". I guess maybe a bit of duplicity is required to build a company of that size..."

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And for everyone of these stories is a story of a startup that screwed its employees during a buyout by another big firm while founders walked in the gravy.

I've found a lot of the "secrets" really aren't that. The ideas are usually pretty public, and the questions come down to ability to execute and integrate etc. Stripe has a good position from which to expand linked lines.

As a data point, I interviewed recently for a leadership role and had a somewhat similar experience to the link you provided. A change of the interviewer at the last minute, and the interviewer seemed to have a particular answer in their mind and was not open to engaging.

I can understand when it comes to interviewing for a leadership position, some of the interview may be based on 'fit' rather than just the display of problem solving skills w.r.t the interview question, but to me it didn't seem like they were particularly interested in testing either. I have 10+ years of experience operating in a large $XB FinTech and my expertise was an almost exact match for the work the position they were looking to hire.

I'd like to think that it was that specific group within Stripe that had that issue, but the posts on Hacker news have me thinking otherwise.

> but if you look for it, you can find some usually anonymous detractors.

Seems like a vacuous statement. Isn’t that true of anything/anyone in life?

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this needed to be shared

You're welcome to write your own critique of Stripe or anything else but recycling other people's HN drama is not really in the spirit of the site. Repasting an old provocative comment while withholding context (i.e. not linking it and its rebuttals) is extra lame.

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