<story><title>Lessons from Stripe</title><url>https://markmcgranaghan.com/lessons-from-stripe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vfc1</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know, this super optimism as a value might lead to situations where something is going clearly in the wrong direction, but people get afraid of pointing it out due to fear of going against the company values, and getting natural overly optimistic personalities out of their delusional high and back into reality.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway_str</author><text>From the engineering friends I know at Stripe, you&amp;#x27;d be correct: there&amp;#x27;s a strong cultural push to not question the status quo &amp;#x2F; prevailing wisdom.&lt;p&gt;On the tech side, they continue to build on top of a broken foundation (MongoDB), resulting in millions of man hours wasted dealing with the complete lack of transactions. Mongo now has transactions, but last I heard Stripe was still running a very outdated version and spending absurd amounts of time dealing with issues that transactions would have entirely avoided. If you suggested that maybe it&amp;#x27;d be worth changing course to something like Postgres because of the insane amount of work being wasted, you&amp;#x27;d be shut down for not being optimistic enough.</text></comment>
<story><title>Lessons from Stripe</title><url>https://markmcgranaghan.com/lessons-from-stripe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vfc1</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know, this super optimism as a value might lead to situations where something is going clearly in the wrong direction, but people get afraid of pointing it out due to fear of going against the company values, and getting natural overly optimistic personalities out of their delusional high and back into reality.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>minxomat</author><text>I agree in the sense that small problems which have technical solutions should be pointed out and overcome. However, in later-stage startups and in larger companies, trying to change the direction might not be the wise thing to do. This highly depends on your position, but as an individual contributor and even as someone in the lower management lane (manager, director), your job most of the time is implementing the CEO&amp;#x27;s vision, whatever that is. If you find yourself disagreeing with that vision, it might be best to change jobs.[1]&lt;p&gt;In smaller startups, where you might be able to steer more aggressively, you should still ask yourself whether the company is &lt;i&gt;clearly in the wrong direction&lt;/i&gt; only from your perspective or if there are factors which you don&amp;#x27;t have any insight into (no matter how close you are to founder(s)) which would re-contextualize the issue.&lt;p&gt;Not disagreeing, but these are some caveats which I found useful to keep in mind.&lt;p&gt;[1] - There was a story about someone from Apple(?) here a while ago who was let go after a lunch with &amp;lt;someone important&amp;gt; where he expressed his dissatisfaction with the company&amp;#x27;s direction. He then took up japanese caligraphy. Maybe someone remembers and can link it here.</text></comment>