To be fair, I clicked into the list and maybe I’m being naive but the first person I clicked on mentioned that they’d be happy to talk to someone about anything from mentoring to Star Trek episodes, so I think it’s kind.
There could very well be someone out there that’s otherwise isolated (maybe in a new city) and just hanging out with other company at the right moment makes a big difference in their life.
Also it’s odd to me to suggest that a university student has nothing useful to share. If you’re a first-year student that’s struggling, another student who’s familiar with what that’s like in 2024 could be exactly who you need to speak to.
I kinda agree, but also not. I've found that the best mentors in my life have been people that are just a few steps ahead of me. The industry changes so fast these days that what someone did 30, or even 5 years ago, might not be applicable to what you need to do now.
How do you do that when Stripe holds your subscription / recurring revenue? Keep that recurring revenue base independent of the CC processor? I used to use Recurly and stuff like that but it seemed like I was paying double just for the benefit of maintaining my own recurring charge list, not to mention not integrated with many of the payment features.
Doing even 10 on-site interviews is incredibly draining, especially if you're actually contributing at your full time job.
I interviewed around 2 years ago at about 10 places as well. 10 days of interviewing for 6-7 hours was so mentally exhausting that I just took a week of vacation after all the interviews were done.
I had my 10 interviews in a span of 3 consecutive weeks.
It's definitely not worth an engineer's time to resolve random customer issues, especially as Stripe has grown from ~500 people to ~7000 people.
Gone are the days where all the engineers were intimately familiar with every product and could offer you their tribal knowledge to resolve your silly issue.
Stripe is now a big corp. and there is no incentive for engineers to waste time on HN resolving customer feedback. There are proper channels that are better equipped to do so, namely the "clueless customer support agents" you speak of.
If your issue is truly some bug in the backend and not user error (which it usually is) it may eventually get surfaced to engineering.
> It's definitely not worth an engineer's time to resolve random customer issues
Paying a good engineer for a day to deal with customer service issues? ~$1,000.
Having the engineer directly learn about the pain points that exist in the organization and giving them real incentive to finally fix the problems that cause the entire company endless grief? Priceless.
I don't know much about Stripe's organization specifically, but in general maybe it's part of the problem that engineers don't have an occasional rotation between projects assisting with some customer support tasks and learning about the real pain points and the damage that they can cause to your business's reputation among customers. It's very easy in technical organizations (I'm looking at you Google) for the engineers to just magically ignore the numerous flaws and holes in their processes.
> Having the engineer directly learn about the pain points that exist in the organization and giving them real incentive to finally fix the problems that cause the entire company endless grief? Priceless.
You need somebody actually in charge of prioritization; often this is not the engineer, but the PM.
But like all humans, different project managers have different strengths and weaknesses. Some PMs are really good at certain things like schmoozing the stakesholders and keeping them happy, but aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer when it comes to actually building products, understanding technical details, and solving business problems.
Good ideas can come from all corners, but I'd say it would be a good thing for the engineers in particular to experience some customer service tasks for some of these reasons.
1) They have better insight into how hard something would be to fix and can probably prioritize a little more effectively in some cases.
2) They might not be aware of the problems that a particular issue causes. In many companies, even those with good communication between departments, it can be easy for something important to not be communicated well enough even with a great PM.
3) Getting exposure to some of the pain of doing customer service might give the engineer more empathy about the problems that customers and staff have to deal with and might have them take it more into account when building future features for the product.
>It's definitely not worth an engineer's time to resolve random customer issues, especially as Stripe has grown from ~500 people to ~7000 people
That's true if you assume a constant rate of incidents.
But when engineers are responsible for customer issues, they become aware of problems and can change the product to reduce those incidents.
In services like this one, letting engineers do the customer support is the closest they can get to eating their own dog food.
If incidents are handled by another department then it's more rewarding to implement another bonus-relevant goal than to reduce the number of problems.
This IRC channel I'm talking about was still running just 1-2 years ago if I remember correctly, way after Stripe could be considered a startup.
Sometimes the support experience matters a lot as well.
I think, for what it's worth, that the IRC channel was maintained by Stripe employees on their own accord, not a company sanctioned support channel, and the help there was very "best effort".
The same engineers who staffed the IRC channel staff the Discord. Unfortunately it moved to a proprietary platform when Freenode was taken over in 2021. As _engineers_, though, they're never going to be a point of escalation for a support concern related to disputes, supportability, or issues involving personal information.
"The median 1-bed price in San Francisco last month was $2830, a 20.3% decrease from a year ago. Not only is this drop among the largest yearly decreases Zumper has ever recorded in our history of tracking rental prices, but it was also the first time the median 1-bed price in San Francisco was priced below $3000. These combined trends show just how drastically the market has changed in the nation’s most expensive city to rent."
> I feel like 23&me is literally only useful/interesting to white people because they can see which one of the 50 European countries they have ties to.
I'm not familiar with the kinds of ancestry information they can provide, but why would that only apply to white people? Why not also, say, people with African heritage and which of the African countries they have ties to?
As a 3rd generation white person in the US, what specific European ancestry I have is meaningless to me.
I find the health tests to be more interesting than the ancestry, though it was a bit scary though having to click through all the warnings to get to the results.
e.g. a university student (2025 grad) who is working part time is in this list.