Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Sure. What is just the interview process like? I don't know how involved you are with the product management hiring process, but just I'm curious what that is like, high level and engineering hiring process, however you can share. Yeah, there are a couple things that are very common across hiring for all roles at Stripe and in particular engineers and PMs. One of the things is we do have structured hiring loops. So we put everyone through a very consistent process, so very personal as we help folks figure out why they might want to be here. But then we have a consistent way of evaluating talent. And I think that's important because it means that you can, as an interviewer, as a hiring manager, you can actually really start to understand what is the broad spectrum of responses you might get here and what do I actually learn about individual candidates when I'm asking similar questions. The other thing that these loops have in common is nothing is a trick question. We try to put people into an environment which is as close to doing the actual work together as we possibly can. So I mean for engineers for instance, we've got several different coding exercises that they do. They share their screen with the interviewer. It's actually kind of pair programming welcome to use Google to search for Stack Overflow to search for answers. We don't care. We just want to see the outcome. We're happy for you to ask your interviewer questions as you go along. And we've created these exercises that is close to real problems as we need to solve at Stripe as possible. The same is true on the PM side. One of the things, for instance we do with PMs is we have a written exercise, we've got obviously a variety of different problems and we find that very valuable for actually just seeing how does someone attack a real problem that they would be solving at work and will they want to do that in a way that is curious, digging into the details, collaborative with their interviewer and so forth. So that's the point. Structured loops that are consistent. And then questions that are as close to the real job as we possibly can.…

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