<story><title>Stripe hiring issues make some lose job offers</title><url>https://www.protocol.com/workplace/stripe-hiring-issues-rescinded-jobs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ericmay</author><text>&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;ve got no horse in this, it&amp;#x27;s not my industry and I&amp;#x27;m just a spectator. But two days ago I thought of Stripe as a top notch company, with top notch leadership.&lt;p&gt;No dog in the fight either here, but that&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;exactly&lt;/i&gt; what those who posted these stories recently are trying to do. You saw some bit of news and then totally changed your perception. That&amp;#x27;s how this thing works. Those tiny bits of negative news just stick in your mind.&lt;p&gt;What were your priors? Stripe pays well, has a great product, leadership is great, hires top-tier developers, is a great place to work, etc. (making stuff up here idk what your priors were) but all of that is erased because you saw a random article about two people having offers rescinded and you don&amp;#x27;t even know if it&amp;#x27;s true?&lt;p&gt;What if all of the above priors were true and it was also true that two people had offers rescinded? Do they not have top-notch leadership because two people had offers rescinded? Is that enough to sway your opinion?&lt;p&gt;Best course of action here IMO is to wait and see more evidence. If you had a weak opinion either way why have one. If you had a strong opinion is this strong evidence to change &lt;i&gt;all of your priors&lt;/i&gt;? Plenty of companies rescind offers, they just aren&amp;#x27;t making it to the front page (Google, AirBnB, etc.).</text></item><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>Reputation is a fragile thing. I&amp;#x27;ve got no horse in this, it&amp;#x27;s not my industry and I&amp;#x27;m just a spectator. But two days ago I thought of Stripe as a top notch company, with top notch leadership. Since I&amp;#x27;m well aware that PR is a thing, that reputation also tends to be brittle, but while nobody had said anything bad about Stripe, I thought they were tops. This is not so much about Stripe as about the PR world we&amp;#x27;ve created: we know that everything we&amp;#x27;re told is polished to make it look as nice as possible, so when the facade cracks, we should adjust heavily.&lt;p&gt;So now I&amp;#x27;m going to have to shift my priors, and it may well be unfair to the firm. For one, I don&amp;#x27;t know if the allegations are true. I also don&amp;#x27;t know whether this is a one-off, or whether this happens all the time and this is the tip of the iceberg. I do know that whatever I hear is going to be deeply invested one way or the other.&lt;p&gt;Specifically about the rescinded offers, the only acceptable reason to do that is when the person has gotten the offer in bad faith, eg they lied about their CV or claimed to have done something they provably hadn&amp;#x27;t. Other than that, someone who&amp;#x27;s gotten an offer may well have started moving house, taking their kids out of school, gotten their spouse to quit their job, and all sorts of hard-to-reverse decisions. It&amp;#x27;s an utterly crappy thing to have happen, and any company that does it should be outed for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>&amp;gt; What were your priors?&lt;p&gt;The better question is: Where did your priors come from?&lt;p&gt;Every big tech company invests a lot of time and money into projecting a good reputation on the internet. It&amp;#x27;s basically table stakes for competitive hiring these days. This includes everything from making a founder a celebrity in tech circles or on Twitter, to posting fake Glassdoor reviews (and getting negative reviews removed). The worst company I worked for would periodically send e-mails to everyone reminding us about the NDAs we signed and implying that they&amp;#x27;d sue anyone who talked to the press or wrote negative things about the company online.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re making judgements based on the frequency of good versus bad posts, your opinions are going to be dominated by companies pushing positive PR for themselves.&lt;p&gt;The strangest thing about the negative Stripe posts is that I haven&amp;#x27;t seen many Stripe employees (other than executives) show up and say that these anecdotes are surprising. I have, however, seen several anecdotes in this thread and others noting that Stripe&amp;#x27;s hiring process is notoriously chaotic and flawed.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t really know the truth. I&amp;#x27;d lean toward assuming these are abnormal experiences, but I wouldn&amp;#x27;t discard them entirely just because they&amp;#x27;re not what you expected to hear. What you &lt;i&gt;expect&lt;/i&gt; to hear about a big company is largely a function of deliberate PR pushes these days.</text></comment>
<story><title>Stripe hiring issues make some lose job offers</title><url>https://www.protocol.com/workplace/stripe-hiring-issues-rescinded-jobs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ericmay</author><text>&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;ve got no horse in this, it&amp;#x27;s not my industry and I&amp;#x27;m just a spectator. But two days ago I thought of Stripe as a top notch company, with top notch leadership.&lt;p&gt;No dog in the fight either here, but that&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;exactly&lt;/i&gt; what those who posted these stories recently are trying to do. You saw some bit of news and then totally changed your perception. That&amp;#x27;s how this thing works. Those tiny bits of negative news just stick in your mind.&lt;p&gt;What were your priors? Stripe pays well, has a great product, leadership is great, hires top-tier developers, is a great place to work, etc. (making stuff up here idk what your priors were) but all of that is erased because you saw a random article about two people having offers rescinded and you don&amp;#x27;t even know if it&amp;#x27;s true?&lt;p&gt;What if all of the above priors were true and it was also true that two people had offers rescinded? Do they not have top-notch leadership because two people had offers rescinded? Is that enough to sway your opinion?&lt;p&gt;Best course of action here IMO is to wait and see more evidence. If you had a weak opinion either way why have one. If you had a strong opinion is this strong evidence to change &lt;i&gt;all of your priors&lt;/i&gt;? Plenty of companies rescind offers, they just aren&amp;#x27;t making it to the front page (Google, AirBnB, etc.).</text></item><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>Reputation is a fragile thing. I&amp;#x27;ve got no horse in this, it&amp;#x27;s not my industry and I&amp;#x27;m just a spectator. But two days ago I thought of Stripe as a top notch company, with top notch leadership. Since I&amp;#x27;m well aware that PR is a thing, that reputation also tends to be brittle, but while nobody had said anything bad about Stripe, I thought they were tops. This is not so much about Stripe as about the PR world we&amp;#x27;ve created: we know that everything we&amp;#x27;re told is polished to make it look as nice as possible, so when the facade cracks, we should adjust heavily.&lt;p&gt;So now I&amp;#x27;m going to have to shift my priors, and it may well be unfair to the firm. For one, I don&amp;#x27;t know if the allegations are true. I also don&amp;#x27;t know whether this is a one-off, or whether this happens all the time and this is the tip of the iceberg. I do know that whatever I hear is going to be deeply invested one way or the other.&lt;p&gt;Specifically about the rescinded offers, the only acceptable reason to do that is when the person has gotten the offer in bad faith, eg they lied about their CV or claimed to have done something they provably hadn&amp;#x27;t. Other than that, someone who&amp;#x27;s gotten an offer may well have started moving house, taking their kids out of school, gotten their spouse to quit their job, and all sorts of hard-to-reverse decisions. It&amp;#x27;s an utterly crappy thing to have happen, and any company that does it should be outed for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>munificent</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; Those tiny bits of negative news just stick in your mind.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s an interesting psychological process here that I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;ve seen described before.&lt;p&gt;You would expect that the &lt;i&gt;higher&lt;/i&gt; the reputation something has, the more resilient that regard is. As if good reputation means the thing has a large number of &amp;quot;reputation points&amp;quot; and can thus afford to lose some while still retaining a large quantity of remaining rep points.&lt;p&gt;But the perceived effect is the opposite. The higher the reputation the more &lt;i&gt;fragile&lt;/i&gt; it is to bad news. When a middling reputation thing gets some bad news, we consider it not particularly newsworthy and its reputation is unchanged. But when a highly regarded thing gets tainted, the pristine edifice comes tumbling down.&lt;p&gt;I can understand why our brains would work that way: we are incentivized through our evolutionary history to be highly attuned to detect deceipt—actors that are not what they appear to be. So bad news about a good person is read as vital information that causes us to re-evaluate everything we knew about them in that light.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s not clear to me that that model logically scales to an entire organization. Organizations are not monolithic entities and when an otherwise great org makes a misstep, that doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily mean it&amp;#x27;s rotten to the core.</text></comment>