I left Stripe a little over 6 months ago to join an exciting startup with a number of my friends. What I miss most about working there is the culture of shipping. There are a number of 'shipped' email lists at Stripe where people can tout their accomplishments large and small. These lists are widely read and commented on, and folks put in a fair amount of effort making their "shipped" emails informative and entertaining.
That feeling you get when you finish a challenging project, write a great shipped email, and get a bunch of feedback from folks throughout the company is pretty amazing. Once I was invited to convert one of my shipped emails into a presentation for a company all-hands meeting. I had a less than a week to get it done, which was pretty hectic, but in the end it turned out great and it was perhaps my favorite memory of my time at Stripe.
I enjoy my current job, and those little dopamine hits I get from checking things off my list as well as the bigger ones from finishing projects, but now only my boss and some teammates notice when I finish something. One thing I learned about myself, is that I really do care about what other people think about my work.
If Stripe's HR department is reading this thread, I think they can pinpoint one crucial interview question that will determine culture fit in their organisation for future hiring - and that is "do you like talking about your accomplishments with the rest of your team?".
Seems to be a very polarising thing to be asked to do, judging by the replies on this particular comment.
EDIT: Curious about the downvotes? This is a real thing. I am sure they don't want to hire people that would hate to write shipped emails and publish them to the list if they actively hated writing them. It is simply not good culture fit, and I am sure they would want to identify that early on in the recruitment process.
That's certainly a reasonable concern given the information above. For what it's worth, though, I work at Stripe and I've never felt pressured to write a shipped email; I don't think others are either.
In fact, I think the only shipped emails I've written have been on behalf of colleagues since I was so excited about something they'd built/fixed (with their permission). Many (most?) Stripes aren't the type to brag about their work. But it is nice to share, and to let others know that X product is better now.
Possibly that such a recruitment filter would exclude a lot of people with depression or anxiety-related mental illness.
To clarify, I hate talking about my accomplishments, it makes me feel deeply anxious and uncomfortable, and will say as much if asked. But I’ll also do it if that’s what’s required of me.
And there are many companies that value humbleness.
I love sharing my accomplishments. I know what's socially expected from me, but not sharing feels really bad to me. It feels as all the work I've done and that cool accomplishment don't matter at all. Therefore I mostly share with friends, though most of them lack the necessary tech-knowledge to really understand it.
I also love hearing about others accomplishments in an easy to digest way. These shipped emails seem like great way to spread knowledge and a positive attitude of getting stuff done.
What I, and the comment you replied to want to say, everyone is different. Let me work at a company that encourages sharing accomplishments and go work for one that values humbleness. But at least please don't take it away from me, just because you don't like it, especially if it's optional.
I've been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I don't have a tech job yet (I have a hard time applying to jobs, for... obvious reasons), but I keep a public log of accomplishments for my weekend projects, announce them when other people might be interested in new features, and so on.
Different people are different. It'll exclude a lot of people, but not all of them, and it certainly wouldn't be clear-cut discrimination.
I mean, discussing your work with your coworkers is a pretty reasonable workplace responsibility. What's illegal about asking if someone was comfortable doing it?
I was wondering this, I thought the discrimination was about disability, particularly, and "depression and social anxiety" are casually considered illnesses rather than disabilities.
https://www.gov.uk/reasonable-adjustments-for-disabled-worke... says "Employers must make reasonable adjustments to make sure workers with disabilities, or physical or mental health conditions, aren’t substantially disadvantaged when doing their jobs."
and the examples given on the gov.uk site include a specific mention of an anxiety disorder "doing things another way, such as allowing someone with social anxiety disorder to have their own desk instead of hot-desking"
But I don't know where "reasonable adjustments" comes in with this. "I have social anxiety and don't want to present in front of a group, may I send an email instead" sounds reasonable to me. "I don't want to send an email, someone else will have to do this part of the job" doesn't sound reasonable. You don't reasonably hire one person to do a job, then hire another person to the parts the first person cannot do, right? But I'm no lawyer.
The key is to make your culture filter not cause people who actually would be a good fit to self-filter. Mental illness is insidious because it can make people who actually would enjoy something if given the right push instead think/assume that they don't want to do it. It affects a large enough percentage of the population that it's something companies need to be thinking about.
One of my friends worked for a company where one of the official values was "100%", and to me this was problematic because different people would understand it to mean different things. Some would assume that it just means that everyone works hard, that it's not a cushy job. Whilst others would interpret it to mean that everyone works crazy hours and is expected to give their life to the business at the expense of other commitments. My friend couldn't recognise that different people would interpret the value differently, so believed it was a perfectly reasonable way to get the wrong kinds of candidates to self-filter.
I think that's not as easy at it sounds (or I am misreading you).
Let's assume you're wary of talking about accomplishments - what reasons could be there?
Bad memories of trying to convey what awesome things your team did and were generally received really badly? Preferring to sit down and ship and not boast about it at all? Sure, never accomplishing anything might also be the case, but in my experience a lot of really good people weren't keen at all to talk about cool stuff they did in any official or formal form - only over beers between a few developers or not at all. I don't think this is necessarily tied to being an introvert.
I didn't downvote you but I think it's a bad idea. Also because the opposite is true. No matter how much they personally contributed, the loudest people will tell you everything their team did.
Why wouldn't you want to share your accomplishments with your team? If you are proud of what you did, you would want to share it! Then the team will be proud too! And you get feedback! And you give motivation to the rest to do like you did! I see no bad side. :)
Absolutely nothing like it. I'm not sure that you actually read the top post on this thread. We are talking about a company's particular way of ensuring that changes are documented and shared with the rest of the team. Their method is to encourage team members to share their ship details in an internal mailing list.
It's an internal procedure that helps build company knowledge and information sharing. It has a side requirement for acknowledgement for peers, but it is nothing like an optional purchase being high fived...
At work (Pivotal) there's a "Drumbeats" mailing list which I subscribe to. Various teams post there to describe what they're doing.
The company has grown so much larger since I joined that I have found the Drumbeats to be a godsend. It helps me feel connected to the breadth of what's going on, which would be physically impossible otherwise.
I guess a time will come when there are too many Drumbeat emails to keep up with (it sometimes feels that way -- I've gotten better at skimming). I don't know what I'll do then.
We also have a What We Learned This Week list. It's gone a bit quiet lately, which is a shame, because there were some amazing war stories posted.
I agree that release notes and credits are really important. My prior company's product manager made these herself for every release, and while other parts of the company weren't great, I (and others) really liked getting the recognition from the rest of the company.
It helps make a fuller product, since people have less pressure to always work on the flashier things, and can devote time/energy to things like developer tools that are also extremely important.
if you're at startup, you should feel the control to establish the culture you'd like to have. I'd say, introduce the emails, let the feedback be known. I think you have more control on your experience than you might think
It was optional, but it was definitely encouraged. A manager a level above my manager would rub his hands together and say things like "really looking forward to reading that shipped email!" whenever I told him about what I was working on.
They also made it fun. One manager conspiratorially told me were two schools of thought around what made a great shipped email; copious footnotes or funny gifs, and jokingly told me to make sure I had one or the other or even better both.
Stripes love their "footnotes" though, which are essentially links to things. Even though everyone had full HTML email, they were almost always formatted in the style of Hacker News[0] comment links. The people at the top can definitely set the communications tone for the rest of the company.
> A manager a level above my manager would rub his hands together and say things like "really looking forward to reading that shipped email!" whenever I told him about what I was working on.
That doesn't sound optional at all.
From my point of view, making things fun isn't fun. Watching a comedy routine is fun. Writing one isn't.
I agree with you - that said, it all depends on the situation. Good manager will present the same thing as almost mandatory to someone who is more extroverted, and as completely optional and not a big deal to someone who is not. Both of them will feel appreciated and will feel comfortable in the company, which is actually the whole idea. Some people need this kind of exposure, some don't. We just need to appreciate the fact that we are not all the same, and that we all need to have our own way to deal with the socializing rituals.
There are things you have to do for work, such as showcases. You can make them fun, or you can not. Yes, it dos not compare to a comedy routine or watching Airplane. That isn't really the point.
Agreed. This reminds me of office space when the waitress's has the appropriately listed amount of flair but is disparaged for not going above and beyond.
This is so absolutist. You must have a boring life. Sometimes it's about making things fun, sometimes it's about making fun things, and sometimes it's about both.
Driving a car is fun. Building a custom hotrod isn't.
Going to the museum is fun. Learning to paint isn't.
Playing a video game is fun. Writing a video game isn't.
> It was optional, but it was definitely encouraged.
I strongly doubt it was optional, if you wanted a positive career trajectory.
This is also the case in most other companies - it's just that different firms have different expectations for how their employees should market their accomplishments.
Same, but it sounds like it's required to the extent that visibility is required for promotion (no idea at Stripe, but at other companies visibility to upper management is more important than anything when it comes to promotions). To me it sounds like an improvement over the widespread practice of agile demo days / sprint reviews, where individuals on teams demo what has been "shipped" (or made dev-done at least) that sprint.
I can't speak to Stripe, but I expect that this is something that Engineers CAN do, but Product Managers MUST do. Letting the rest of the org know what's going on is a big part of the challenge in scaling a company.
There were much drier "snippets" style communication for just talking about what's going on. I'd say that folks who abhor shameless self promotion typically didn't write much and instead worked with with the annoying extraverts on their team and mostly focused on making sure that the technical details were accurate. These things were often team efforts.
Presumably it's just a forum for validation. If sharing your success with your peers doesn't get you off you can forgo the email, but you might lose some exposure.
Yeah, that's what I mean. It feels like it's just forcing everyone to increase the amount of time they spend on self-promotion (even if it's theoretically "optional").
Not ever seeing these emails, it depends on where you stand. I can see how it would benefit the organization to have people know what is being shipped in other areas of the org, and also provide valuable feedback loops from differing perspectives.
However if all the threads are just “great job on X!” I can see how that could be low-value self promotion.
Yeah, same here. Would have no Interest in writing those emails and setup a filter to send them to bin on receipt too.
I worked for a company that did cards, like thank you cards, or well done cards that you could give a colleague and these would get handed out each month to the recipients. It made me cringe. Can't believe people are so needy.
I really enjoyed that aspect too. I was an intern a few years ago, and at the end of my internship I sent out a 'shipped' email, with lots of positive feedback. It's easy to feel ignored as an intern, but Stripe at the time felt very cohesive.
In reply to foldr's comment, yes, they were totally optional (I can't imagine it's changed).
Don;t think of it as tooting your own horn, think of it as a useful description of something that has been developed, that co-workers could helpfully know about.
That feeling you get when you finish a challenging project, write a great shipped email, and get a bunch of feedback from folks throughout the company is pretty amazing. Once I was invited to convert one of my shipped emails into a presentation for a company all-hands meeting. I had a less than a week to get it done, which was pretty hectic, but in the end it turned out great and it was perhaps my favorite memory of my time at Stripe.
I enjoy my current job, and those little dopamine hits I get from checking things off my list as well as the bigger ones from finishing projects, but now only my boss and some teammates notice when I finish something. One thing I learned about myself, is that I really do care about what other people think about my work.