I Asked Stripe How To Get Hired

how does the global payment giant stripe higher engineers and why you should think about becoming a product engineer in today's interview with Kia Coman hi I am IBB and today I'm here

with h com who's the site leader for Stripes office in Bucharest Hi H how are you doing hello hello I'm glad to be here awesome so what is your role today at stripe I kind of do a little bit of

of everything so it's my main responsibility to make sure that the site is running well so that it's successful in Romania and that it's successful within the broader stripe organization I would say I do a lot of

recruiting a lot of reach out a lot of you know media appearances but I also do everything from ordering snacks in the office to making sure that the engineers are happy and they're delivering and sort of their problems are are solved

and I'm generally the person on the ground for stripe in general to make sure that everything here is running smoothly awesome okay so we're in your new office new space very nice getting

getting ready uh um so as far as stripe coming to to Bucharest why open an office here if you could come from the point of stripe I'm I'm sure that uh you

have good arguments from the local standpoint I would say there's a lot of reasons for that there isn't a a singular one it all started late 2022 or at least this iteration of the program

started late 2022 when we kind of looked at what was happening in the world and we realized on the one hand we had this very limited

view of the payments Market cuz more or less all of our engineering was in the United States and the United States is very specific in its payments formats if you will it has credit cards it has

PayPal and a bunch of other smaller players and that's it but if you look globally there's a lot of very specific and Geographic specific payment methods that are big in one place and nowhere

else and we had support for them but we didn't really understand them CU we weren't using them day to day we weren't using them to buy our groceries Etc so we couldn't really build the right product for our customers and for our

customers customers so he figured you know this payments landscape is very Global very fragmented we have also to be Global and be there where our customers are and the other big push for

this one was that realistically 99% of the developers aren't in Silicon Valley or in Seattle so if you want to have access to that pool of talent we have to

go where where the talent is we are cool being you know remote even before the pandemic so we had a bit of this uh stuff in our DNA but we wanted to go big this time and open some really big

engineering hubs outside the US we wanted of course to look at Central and Eastern Europe because we have a really big density of talent in this area lot of great technology people and then

somewhere around April let's say spring of last year we decided to go to Romania to set up sort of the physical Hub and all of this uh infrastructure for it uh

in October we actually opened the site we had like this big opening party and everything and now a year later if you will we're about 50 people we have teams that are already integrated into the

company that are owning you know big objectives for the company that are solving incidents and you know I hope at some point causing big incidents for the company and causing sort of this sort of

uh chaos and and sort of result that we're actually here we're contributing to something big so it's going I would say about as well as we expected it to go so far okay so you're a year in

congratulations that uh what's the goal for the office how many people do you plan to have here ideally um and how has the first year gone so far MH so we want

to grow big I would say so we want to be a big the way I'm putting it we want to be a big engineering presence within the local Tech ecosystem we want to be a big

engineering presence within the broader stripe of company so with that we can let's say our goal for this year is to get to something like 70 people we want to get to a couple you know above a 100

next year and in you know knock onward uh let's say in the fullness of time which means three four years we want to be hundreds of Engineers here we also want to be other

functions so go to market support operations we want to be a really round office in this way and in the same vein we want to be a big you know chunk of

the whole engineering organization at the level of the the company so we want big projects to be placed here we have big Ambitions and we want to let's say Drive the success of the company from

projects that we're doing here in uh Romania um so that's kind of the the big ambition how it's going I say about as well as we expected it to go so we

wanted to get let's say 70 or so people by the end of the year we had some versions of you know if this happens then we can get to 100 if this other thing happens then we're just going to

be 50 so we're about middle of the pack this way I would say the biggest biggest thing has been adapting the way the company Works to the local uh let's say format of of engineering the local

ecosystem and figuring out how we reach out to candidates how we engage with them how we translate from company ways of doing things to local ways of doing things and I would say the first six

months of me being here was just about that kind of educating the company if you will and a bit sort of educating the market in in air quotes you can't really

change the way that 100,000 Engineers are working that work in Romania or the broader ecosystem but you can have you know discussions you can spread the word you can tell them that there's a lot of

great stuff happening here and it's nice to to try to get in if you will so as far as making it work for the local ecosystem was that a matter of just like making the hiring process different and

so on was the matter of also integrating a company can you give examples yeah I would say we tried very specifically not to change anything in the hiring process

so we had this why idea so essentially we didn't want to get in differently than other folks in the company we had we didn't want to say hey and this this

is a common uh issue I would say when people perceive Eastern Europe as this lowcost location with Talent that's kind of so so and that's totally not the case it's the talent is great and then the

cost isn't really low anymore it's comparable to what you see in the rest of Europe more or less so in that way we did want to go through the same interview process with the same people

from the the company and just get in on the same level as everybody else that has gotten into stripe so we didn't have any issue in saying hey you know these people are are different they're kind of

second class Engineers we're the same as everybody else we're operating at the same level and I would say people also bring a bit of extra intensity because

it is a new they know that it's important for stripe to succeed it's also important for the local ecosystem that this thing should work so everybody's very on point in giving it their best both in the projects that

they're doing and then in just engaging and coming to this sort of conference coming to uh student events and just being present in the in the industry so they can be ambassadors if you will of

the of the company so he kind of had this thing that we knew we more or less wanted to keep the same and that that people would wouldn't sort of cast doubt

on the quality of engineering here um the second thing that we managed to change was how we view compensation BS how we engage with candidates um the company had this way of working where

let's say in many other places people apply quite a lot to jobs but in Romania in a lot of places in Eastern Europe you have to go after candidates you have to convince them to join you have to convince them to interview you have to

prepare them for the interviews differently so that was where most of the work with strive was cuz they weren't prepared initially to do all of this work but just by seeing that this is how you succeed here seeing that if

we do all of this stuff we actually get the better results they gradually turned away and now I'm glad to say we're operating in the way that we should for the local market with dedicated

recruiters people that speak the local language that understand the talent that know what good looks like for the local market and are bringing a lot of really nice people so I had this conversation with a s Lead from one of the big tech

companies and um they said that basically like as you mentioned like Engineers weren't used to in local ecosystem weren't used

to putting in the work before the interviews uh why do you think that that is and why are the like hiring processes maybe for stripe or some of these like us-based also Tech compan is different

what does it mean to prepare for an interview yeah I would say there's a couple of points to unpack here since you've given me this platform I'm going to take it to kind of say my my truth I

would say the way it is right now interviewing is like a separate skill that an engineer has the same way as public speaking or writing or you know playing music are separate skills from

actually being a good developer uh the same way interviewing is a separate skill let's say it's it's kind of correlated with actually being good on the job but it's not that and in the US

in Western Europe in other parts of the world they kind of have picked up on this thing that you have to prepare for this skill you have to practice at this skill if you want to be good at it and

then compareed to other skills that you might have interviewing is actually a gatekeeper to accessing various nice companies to being in certain environments that are good overall for your career so they kind of have this

way of working internalized that if you want to have a great career you kind of have to be good at interviewing and in order to be good at interviewing you have to practice that interviewing and you have to make this mental model of I

know it's not the job but I have to get good it in order to to do the right job and work at Google work at Amazon Facebook all of these nice companies so there people are much more aligned when they come to interviews they kind of

know it's a special game a special setup and they prepare for it and then they do well in the circumstances I think in Eastern Europe we really don't have that we don't have it for perhaps cultural

reasons and for historical reasons and um it's no secret that the big chunk of it here is outsourcing companies and I would say they're just the the format of interviewing is different there you have

very few interviews they are much more sort of skill based and and and knowledge based than they are algorithm based or let's say um uh games based if

you will and in that sense the the culture of interviewing is different and I would say a lot more of your let's say prior history matters when you're interviewing so if you worked at a

strong company people are going to believe that you're that they're going to be strong in their company and going to want to hire you after the very minimal of interviews there's even places where after one interview you get

high so references are a big player exactly so if you work at the other strong company you must be strong if you have experience with this technology that we want you're going to be a good fit for the the project whereas for

companies such as stripe um the format is you know it's great that you did all of this stuff you get some extra leg up but we really want to see how you do in our environment and we have a battery of

tests for you to just try to tease out that sort of information for you and folks aren't that used to it's not uh accurate to say they're not completely used to there are a lot of big tech

companies operating in the region and let's say knowledge is spreading and awareness is spreading that it's a different uh type of setup but it's still not not Universal and then I would

say there's still a lack of acknowledgement that the work you get to do in this sort of companies is really cool it's really interesting compensation is also really cool and interesting so there it really is some

sort of like step change in your career as a developer in working in s sort of setup so it's kind of worthwhile to go through all of the tricks and then just prepare for the interviews and and do a

lot of stuff so there you go kind of that's my soapbox moment if you so basically saying it's different from going to Services based or Outsourcing industry to product minded so on does it

tie into the talk that you're going to have actually this afternoon um at at how to web about like product minded Engineers is that like what you're talking about exactly and you can also

see that if you look at trajectories of people they might start in uh services company but if they move to a product companies generally they don't go back

to a Services context cuz the work is is different in a way that is kind of hard to to explain but you're much more aligned with being successful with your product being being Su successful in

your career if you are working at a product company than a Services Company can more into that like how is it more aligned I would say if you give the worst interpretation of what happens in a Services Company it's like their

incentives are not aligned with their clients they want to build more they want to just hire a lot of people and not necessarily deliver fast I'm not saying this this is like the worst interpretation that could happen um most

of the people there do want to do a good job they do want to have success with their customers and be you know good partner to them um but if you go in a product company then 100 % of the time

you need to be aligned with the success of your product like you're selling your software you're selling your product to your customer so all of the work that you're doing needs to be in service of that I would say that's the big thing of

being a product engineer if you will kind of internalizing that thing and making it your mission to make the product successful being viewing yourself as the actual owner of the product not in the term of the product

owner role but you are actually the owner of the product and you are in charge of making it successful and you to actually do the right things as an owner to make that successful building

the right stuff building the right stuff in the right way perhaps speaking with customers and just being totally aligned with how this thing is going to be successful in the market and how it's going to be successful for the company

as a business and once you work like that there's like not going back you feel there's no going back in a place where you can just kind of get instructions where you're assigned projects where you're just doing tasks

but don't have the context of what's Happening why it's happen happening why is it important then primarily how is it going to be successful and if you've actually achieved that measure of

success and I would say if you're even looking at it from a broader perspective most of us got into the game if you will wanted to be programmers because we like

building stuff and and kind of this way of working in a product minded way is the purest expression of doing that in a business environment like you're building stuff and you're completely aligned with the success of that stuff

stuff I would say nobody wanted to do this stuff just for you know getting orders from somebody or doing stuff that they don't understand and somewhere along the way this thread kind of gets

uh gets torn and people do end up in that setup but I would say nobody would call it ideal for them the ideal is you just building something that you believe in that you feel you are the owner of

and that you sort of have this big hand in directing in the right way for to be successful let me just challenge you that from maybe a a perspective that some engineers might especially in the

region so oh I need to sell myself in interviews I need to speak to customers it's not what Engineers do engineers are here to to make the technology do the technology whatever what would you say

to them to that kind of thing which I think historically has been what Engineers have thought of their their work right that's I have kind of two answers to this thing one is uh I really

like this definition of what an engineer is from one of my bodies when we had a sort of career orientation day in high school school and we had some people from the engineering schools come and speak with us and tell us about you know

do you guys want to be engineers and uh the first question they asked was does anybody know what an engineer is and my body answered something like an engineer is a person who solves problems with

with technology and actually this got quite a big laugh from the class because it felt very sort of uh well duh like very very obvious on the one hand and not specific enough for that uh

discussion but I really believe in this definition so as Engineers we solve practical problems for the world if you will using technology right uh and as

software Engineers we use software of course but I think we should absolutely be more focused on the problem than we should be on the technology part of things and I think here we see a lot of

folks that are rather focusing on the technology part not necessarily on the problem part and that's nice because you know technology is cool in itself I would say but it's not I would say the

best way of going about things cuz essentially what people care about in the end is their problems being solved not you using some sort of nice H exactly and that's in a way how you also

get and this is again being philosophic how you get access to the nice projects and the nice career right because the nice project is not going to come in the text tack that you want it's going to come in whatever the nice problems in

the world are going to come in a shape that you know perhaps isn't even clear right now you have to figure out the solution and then you have to have this really big toolbox of tools of technologies that you can deploy to

solve that thing it's not necessarily if you identify as a Java developer your next problem isn't going to come as a Java problem it's going to come as as a problem I would also say that there is a

way like there's more ways to to win here one is being a product engineer if you will but you can also go down the path of explicitly being an expert in a technology being an expert in a

particular industry or some combination of that but you really have to kind of be an expert here like just saying I know Java therefore I'm a Java developer I would say for myself doesn't really

cut it you have to be there contributing to core libraries you have to be there like a member of various committees you really have to be an expert on on Java to sort of say that that's a a good path

like a long-term path for you and then there's places for people like that and every company of a certain size needs deep experts in the technologies that they're using but not a lot of them I

say most companies need generally that can solve problems and that can have like a big toolbox they apply to those problems and that ideally fall in love with the problem they become you

know the owners of this problem for the company and then they can drive it forward in a really nice way why do you think that and that's Point like why do you think that someone in order to be a

job expert or whatever has to again um contribute back be active in community Etc again isn't that like just

again things that again a lot of are not that used to like to open source Etc is is I I would say it is my personal opinion so it's not yeah it's

not necessarily even a majority opinion I would say if you want to work and kind of identify and exclude everything else

you have to somehow make it worthwhile right like you have to go the extra mile if you're just saying well I I'm a Java developer I know Java I know spring and

that's all I know to me that sounds a bit self-limiting like if you if you just have this surface understanding of them if you're just a user of these Technologies then I would say it's

limiting to call yourself just that you have to transition you have to broaden so you either go Broad and you have this big toolbox and you're a generalist that can solve a lot of problems or you go

really deep and those are I would call you know forms of success if you will um if you're not doing that I would say you're leaving a lot on the table you're perhaps not necessarily focused on high

performance that much which is you know for sure like it's not everybody everybody's cup of te but if you are focused on being sort of this high performance engineer that you know essentially wants to take the most out

of their career which for better wor it's going to last 40 plus years so all of us in in this space are not even in the first third of our career so we still have a long way to go I would say

you're M much better off being a generalist or a very deep expert but kind of going the long way rather than stopping short and saying I'm going to be kind of kind of know a bit of things

and um and operate like that I would also add the hint of paranoia which you know a lot of people are becoming accustomed to that it's not all highs in the tech industry like a lot of

people started their career in the last 10ish years just after the last crisis so they were only on the RO myself included like I started my career just when the last crisis was kind of of

stopping so I caught a glimpse of that but that was it um but it's not a given that it's always growing always New Opportunities always higher salaries as we're seeing right now there's a

contraction in the market so you can have to be a bit paranoid about your own career and your role in it because our industry is not very kind to tech companies like I can name a bunch of

like really massive tech companies from the 80s hiring hundreds of thousands of people and people you know nowadays would struggle to remember their names what they did and that's you know 20

years ago and even the titans of today such as Google and apple and what have you they kind of wobbling in the last two or three years like the perception of them as this perfect companies that

can do no wrong definitely has eroded in the mind of many many people and you never know where the you know the future is going to take them but for sure our careers are longer than the time span of

any one company so it's better to be paranoid about this stuff and so to think a bit of the worst case situation and PR prepare yourself and of prepare your career for this long-term um

trajectory that you're going to have outside of any company technology or place that seems super cozy so basically nothing lasts forever

as you mentioned um where does then like developer Talent go like not just in Romania but like central eastern Europe in this case like and product man Engineers uh like expert Engineers Etc

where do you where do you see the the developer Market going because again we we did this re research recently on like what do developers want from their jobs and so on and like job security was

obviously very important for them but again where do you see like the talle going what would you suggest also to developers who might want to uh apply for stri better companies as well I

would say the Meta Meta advices to take charge of this stuff like our careers as I said are really long they take a lot of time from our life essentially from our families and other stuff we we

wanted to do we kind of For Better worse we live in this physical world that's very limited so we cannot afford to not work and not contribute back to society so if we have these constraints we best

make the most out of them essentially and being in charge of your career is definitely uh one such thing so you know sort of local advice I would give to folkus is that there is a phase change

that's happening in the region on the structure of the industry there is a contraction if you will in the services industry you can see it in the metrics you can see it in speaking with people

sort of anic data you can see it if you check Reddit and you see the kind of messages people are posting there they are much more bearish if you on the industry especially if you're a new Joiner or if you're somebody who was

more of a free electron in the industry so somebody who uh did a professional reconversion or who was most like a freelancer not so so well embedded in a company so you can see that sort of

outer layer is already in in a sort of bad shape not finding jobs for months at a time or having to find other sorts of of jobs and it can I would say this is a

symptom the the root cause is like big things are foot in the global IT industry part of them are just uh a sort of global contraction that is mirrored

locally here with a lot of services company depending on projects from um Western Europe and the US getting the green light part of them is more sort of

secular changes we have software eating the world and a lot of traditionally known it companies becoming tech companies and internalizing this this

stuff and also AI to a degree is is playing its part though not yet as big as people would would think but I think the biggest biggest change is that we are more expensive as a group in Eastern

Europe which is great for us individually it might not be so great for the industry because it doesn't look so attractive for external folks and essentially we kind of have two options one is uh you know reduce the costs and

we already are seeing people just offer lower salaries for new joiners than for their oldtimers or we can increase our quality and I would say this increasing our quality is by far the most

attractive one but it has a bunch of C caveats so it's not necessarily about being better technical people because I think overall we are like technical people here are the same as technical

people in any other part of the world what's lacking is this product mindedness and focusing on being owners of the product understanding the business understanding that that area

where there's even saying locally that it's it's not mine but I'm repeating it because it's great there's a lot of Steve waks in this area there's not a lot of Steve Jobs and we need a lot more

Steve Jobs essentially so I would say local advice would be just Orient yourself kind of figure out long-term where you want to get and get into a company where you can actually achieve that it might be a startup like a lot of

startups are hiring people but they're having a hard time hiring them because they cannot match compensation or they are too hectic but they're great learning environments and there you can actually be you know the actual owner of

a product if you get in really early or get into a company that is very product oriented we have small companies we have very big companies that operate like this and where you can learn essentially yeah you can learn the craft you're in

an environment that encourages that sort of stuff and even demands it we have a lot of people here that started very much uh Tech oriented and very much sort of wouldn't it be nice if this thing had

this feature or that feature and now several months in there very very much like you know does anybody need this feature have we spoken to customers do they actually use the feature in the way

that we want it Etc so a very I would say fast mindset shift from being a just builder of things to build being a builder of the right things and then this thing is going to pay dividence

because I do hope that at some point we're going to have this uh explosion of startups of people that have liked working in this space and that see this as their next big challenge of uh of

getting some of that story like some of that action for themselves so for those coming out of University and wanting to apply at stripe which is again a Big Brand big company

ETA um do you work with universities to get students interested what have you done so far yeah yeah absolutely this was one of the selling points for me joining stripe because in other places

where I've worked we had a very clear we are only hiring seniors policy which a bit felt like skimming off the top of the ecosystem so I was really frilled that stripe has a really strong unique University recruitment program and we

wanted to do something even from the first year of operating here like very very early we wanted to make a correct office with both senior people and uh sort of Junior people and mid-level

people and just have the right distribution of seniorities so we can get that nice intergenerational experience of you know training the new generations we learn a lot from them as

well and I was surprised to see just how many really kind of smart and capable people there are in the new generation

are attuned in that in so would say that has been by our sort of easiest Target it's also interesting that it's a tough

time in general for entry-level Engineers nowadays with a lot of companies not hiring so it was also nice being able to be there kind of offer some sort of opportunity at this at this

point so we want to hire a lot more more people this year and in the future and there companies like like in the ecosystem that are hiring 100 people every year like for new grad positions

and we want to get there essentially just be a massive this is another way that you can shape the ecosystem you get this massive amounts of people you train them up in this particular way of

working and then they're going to be like that for forever right and they're going to be quite useful um the good stuff is if you're starting out as an

engineer now in general companies have very low expectations right so they know you're not going to Lo lot of stuff didn't know you're going to know a lot of theoretical stuff but not as much practical stuff so you have the easiest

time getting in any sort of company when you're just uh graduating and we are no different so we have interviews like a shorter interview process where you mostly get grilled on coding so you

really have to be good at this not necessarily lead code style but algorithmic type of coding our interviews are not puzzle like that they don't they're not trying to catch you

off card or anything like that but they do test can person code has this person coded do they know the patterns of their language can they take something like a uh sentence like a description of the

problem and actually turn it into code it might not be the most efficient code it might not be the prettiest but can they do this exactly you know have they played around we also have debugging interviews where people try to debug

some problems in an actual code base and we test you know how much have they played with their tools how much have they worked in a more realistic environment we have an integration

interview which is you know trying to get one system to speak with another and between these two we're trying to catch essentially um how they work in a realistic environment and have they

worked in a realistic environment and let's say you don't have to take all of them so you can fail one interview and people generally fail the debugging interview because they just don't have

as much experience uh debugging things when they're coming out of University so in that that way it's even more relaxed than than you'd think but then you do have to na the coding interviews and be

sort of solid at that and then you're kind of good to go I would say the same extends honestly to Industry recruitment like people who have two plus years of of experience there we also want to see

system design skills like have you thought about how your architecting fixed systems what's the design of systems have you read you know the right books Etc but depending on your level of

experience you know more or less is expected of you if you're you know three years of experience not a lot is going to be expected of you if you're 20 years of experience you better rock it essentially you better have a good story

there of stuff that you've done and it's also a sort of a combination of theoretical knowledge and practical experience like where have you been burned what damage have you done what

sort of late nights have you spent debugging issues that you yourself have caused that are kind of informing your uh your decisions this is actually what a place where people also trip because the most experienced people actually

have a sort of intuition for these things it's like like with chess players and all of those people that have a lot of experience it's not that they're thinking about it they've internalized this stuff so much that they can't

really explain what they're doing it is what it is it's like an intuition and then you have to kind of step back there and say Hey you know I want to understand a bit more of thinking process you're on the right track but

you know lay it out loud what's your intuition here why are you designing it the certain way but certainly you see this that it's not as easy you kind of jump into the thing because it's the correct thing to do because you just

know it because that's what your your intuition is telling you so you kind of have to decompile a bit of that uh that knowledge for the interviewer to kind of figure out your your general thinking or

is it most like is this person lucky do they just like have memorized the single solution and are using it or are they the the real deal but that's like for senior folks and and for that it's like

a different discussion but that's so interesting actually like as someone who has an editor works with Engineers like having them for example write blog post or something like put onto paper there way

thinking could really help them in these situations like to either future interviews like even talking with colleagues or managers on how to like maybe solve a problem yeah it kind of

ties into the general problem of explaining to non- tech people what you're trying to do what something is is complex and then you always have to be on on your age here because most of the

folks you're going to be working with especially as a senior engineer aren't going to be technical they're going to be people from not technical yeah like from Finance or especially it's an expectation of ours that really senior

Engineers drive this really big impactful projects and are in a way even project managers for those things so you're going to have to deal with Finance with operations with sales with all of those folks they're not going to

be Technical and many times they're not going to care as much about you know we need to do this migration first to the other database in order to solve your problem so you have to get there and explain to them why it's important in a

in a language they can understand and with sort of State that they can wrap their heads around and then it's definitely I would say on us to bridge that Gap right a lot of Engineers have

this tendency not to ande well if they don't understand they they're like you know I'm not going to explain to them but it's really on us to explain all of this stuff to them and make ourselves heard as of Partners and owners of of

the product at the table rather than just you know the guys who are executing orders and and fixing stuff and then occasionally complaining that nobody's listening to them and the system is old

and brok and non non-maintained and it's kind of you know on us and and rant here I can go on a bit but I'm going to end end it on this note cool so for those who who find that all of that

interesting where can they apply to a stripe job in Bucharest so we have uh stripe.com jobs you can see there all of the jobs you can hit me up on LinkedIn

as well so I'm hya comman on LinkedIn you can write me an email I'm hya at Stripes really easy to to know so it's I would say it is easy to to find

definitely go there apply and we'll do our best to get to you ASAP and get you on boarded awesome uh we'll link that up uh all uh down below H thank you so much

for this interview and good luck with the office yeah thank you very much Ian nice being here