I'm a positive person, but this interview process was difficult. I usually recommend companies for interview practice, but I suggest skipping Stripe if you're short on time or PTO. Their layout doesn't follow other tech companies, and the practice isn't fully transferable.

PROS

• They reimburse office travel; most companies don't.
• I ate a peach here; it was tasty.

I'm racking my brain trying to find more pros, as I usually see the positive in almost anything. However, I will present some cons to be wary of if you don't see yourself aligning culturally or need to maximize your time, given the hot market out there.

CONS

1. Inconsistent Remote Work Policy: I told the first recruiter I wanted to work remotely, and he said that was fine. Then, I spoke with a second recruiter in my location who stated you can't work remotely if you live in their office's city. Everyone needs to get on the same page.

2. Extended Timeline & Poor Communication: It was almost two months between the recruiter call and the onsite. Was this due to limited headcount? Either way, this is time-consuming if you have other interviews. I had to reach out to the recruiter because they ghosted me for about a month after I passed my phone screen.

3. Scattered Interviewers, Recruiters, and Process:

   • Sometimes, I received feedback that I was taking too long to code when I was just taking the five minutes to understand the prompt, which is common practice and usually mentioned in the Stripe prep guide.
   • When I asked about expected behavior in the code during coding exercises, I often received, "Just Google it," as a response. Sometimes, on the other hand, I received some help. If interviewers are just going to tell you to Google it, then why are they there? In that case, just throw candidates into a room and analyze their results later.
   • Sometimes they listened, and sometimes I had to repeat myself two to three times as they were distracted by their own laptops and weren't listening.
   • The recruiter was hard to reach, wasn't pleasant to talk to, and wouldn't respond to any of my questions after the onsite. Maybe they are understaffed, but recruiters are usually the fun people to talk to at other companies.

4. General Culture & Vibe: It's lunchtime. I look around and feel like I've been transported to San Francisco, and my rent just rose by $2,000. I look down, and I'm wearing a pair of Allbirds – I don't own Allbirds. You could tell I was surrounded by techies, and that if you work here, lunch conversations will revolve around serverless computing and crypto. The average age was approximately 27. There is nothing wrong with this inherently, but if you want to diversify and work with interesting people, this isn't the place. These are the kind of people that don't know how to shake your hand and look you in the eye; that was a summary of my experience.

5. Terrible Recruiting Laptops: The industry is leaning towards providing laptops instead of whiteboarding, which is good because it's a more natural environment. What's not good and unnatural is providing laptops that require you to spend a chunk of every interview setting them up, needing to log in to GitHub but seeing previous candidates' profiles still open, needing to get an access code from your email and still seeing the previous candidate's inbox open, and having interviewers who are as clueless as you are with the laptop, throwing hacks at the wall to try and get it to work, and wasting valuable interview time. Other companies will simply give you a Coderpad link; no weird setup is needed besides knowing the password. That doesn't really work with Stripe's process, but if they want to defer from the rest of the industry, they'll have to debug the issues themselves, which they clearly haven't. After all, I haven't had to own a personal laptop since college and don't plan to, but I guess I'm SOL if I don't want to buy my own or use a VM at work.

6. Lunch: There was free lunch, which is good! Work here, and it'll be yours. What's not good is that I eat healthy, and supposedly they have healthy food. Yet, a few hours after the onsite, it felt as if I had swallowed a bowling ball, and I had serious indigestion. I think it was because the food had a lot of sodium (it was Asian takeout style, so it probably did). It shows that even if they do give free food, I will abstain, and it won't be a perk.

7. Rejection Email: I appreciate that they email instead of calling, as those calls are a waste of time. What I don't appreciate is they do it first thing in the morning on a Friday when I'm getting ready for the weekend. Couldn't you have waited until Monday? Couldn't you have made it a concise email instead of sending me a long email with various platitudes like "We know you are talented," "We wish you luck on your career," and "Unfortunately, we will not be moving forward," blah blah blah. Actually, this email was a good microcosm for the whole experience: fluffed-up nonsense.

Bug finding, adding to existing code, chatting with a hiring manager, coding from scratch, system design.

Spend a few minutes understanding the prompt, but dive into coding to get a working solution ASAP.