Thread by @patio11

There's no magic to doing development at Stripe. Take smart people, write Ruby code, connect to financial infrastructure.

But we have had to do some interesting things to scale this to an engineering organization of hundreds of people. stripe.com/atlas/guides/s…

Thoughts:

Disclaimer at the top: Raylene, who wrote this guide, ran our entire engineering org for years. I've got a commit bit, but engineering is not my primary job anymore, so I'm more of a consumer than producer of that org and its output.

So consider these personal opinions.

Our operations are *sprawling* in breadth and complexity. Our codebase is similarly large. There are tools which help navigate it (and will boot up github.com/livegrep/liveg… on the first day of any future companies I found), but the big win is reproducing eng practices at scale.

This comes partially through writing down the practices, partially through training, partially through peer mentorship, partially through automated enforcement of them, and partially through creating incentive systems which move all of the above into the "pit of success."

Especially as someone who is (physically and virtually) remote to the eng organization, the company default to writing everything down and making it public internally is a godsend. Many is the day that has been saved by searchable email archives for related keywords.

The specific mechanism for this is a culture of CCing basically every conversation worth an email to an "archive list." For the vast majority of those lists, anyone in the company can follow them if they have an interest in it.

I "lurk" on our risk engineering lists, for example

This supports the company culture of doing unsolicited contributions (and accepting unsolicited contributions) outside of one's formal assigned projects or remit, which helps replicate OSS' "more eyes make bugs more shallow at the margin" and facilitates networking.

"Networking?"

Yeah; passive understanding of what other teams are working on, their challenges, and who the players are in situations likely one or two degrees from oneself helps find out how to get X accomplished when you need it done.

Speaking of incentive systems: a major internal cultural milestone is "shipping" what your team has been working on. It has the usual meaning *plus* a one page writeup, distributed to basically the entire company via email.

I love shipped emails. In addition to frequently being great pointers to other written documents (as the folks who've been geeking out on e.g. database snapshot optimization for the last N weeks crank out a research paper, complete with references), they're great for morale.

(They also get piped to a Slack channel, which encourages folks to react to them with emojis. Lowering the bar to praising colleagues' work is underrated.)

We aspire to have career paths in place for engineers (and other folks) to increase in impact without having to do the traditional transition into management.

These are written down, so that folks can have explicit examples of what to do and how to calibrate on success.

(If you want engineers to program and mentor but only score/promote/etc them based on story points per quarter then you will experience a persistent shortage of great mentors. So that expectation is on a written rubric, which are broadly available.)

(This also lets folks at higher levels of seniority specialize a bit in where they get leverage, whether that's bringing projects in, improving technical practices across broad swathes of the org, mentoring, producing broadly useful artifacts, moving industry forward, etc.)

I have very strong opinions about engineering hiring, which is unsurprising given that I ran a company about it. I think the single biggest improvement most companies could make, tomorrow, is writing a rubric for interviews and then grading against it.

IRL example in the guide.

I'd encourage you to read the rest of the guide.

If this broadly sounds like an engineering culture which is interesting, we are hiring *a lot of people*. stripe.com/jobs

Incidentally, we're going to be doing another few remote coffee events where you can meet Stripe engineers & EMs, ask questions, and hear about specific projects on teams that are hiring. Watch this or other spaces for dates and how to sign up.