That said, the interview process itself, once it was set up, was one of the best interview processes that I've participated in. The PDF they send about the questions and scope of each interview helped me know how to prepare. Each interview had a specific goal and angle on determining if I was a good engineer, and at the end of the day, I felt like we all had a good idea of each other. I ultimately didn't get the offer, but because the process was robust, I didn't have a regret of "I could have done better" or "These questions were unfair and I should have gotten the job". I was confident that Stripe had a good measure of my skills and mindset, and that they'd simply decided I wasn't a good fit.
It's hard to really ask for more than than from the process itself. I can't say if it's effective for them, but at least to me, it seemed like Stripe had thought more about the interview process than most companies I've ever been with or interviewed with. There's obviously going to be implementation issues and problems around the specific people who have to implement it, but the plan itself seems well conceived.
When I interviewed with them. I got the same amount of long periods of no contact and people showing up late (if showing up at all) to interview calls. The things the recruiter told me about the role and interview process completely contradicted the things that the team members told me. I was told that the third interview would be a coding interview, and then when the interviewer showed up (late to the interview, of course), it turned out I had prepared for nothing and the interview was actually just a behavioral.
They weren't even able to tell me if the role was pre-sales (and commission based) or if the role was post-sales (and not commission based). The leadership team had apparently not decided yet, but still wanted to hire people for this role. This is a pretty fundamental characteristic about a job, and I honestly don't know how you can recruit for a position without even knowing the basic compensation structure.
In the end, the recruiter told me that they wanted to move forward with scheduling the final round, then rescheduled my interview several times, then cancelled it outright (but assured me they still wanted to interview once they found a good time), and then eventually the recruiter totally ghosted me without scheduling the interview and never responded to further emails.
I still feel like they wasted my time. I told them my compensation expectations up front, went through the entire interview process, and then got an "non-negotiable" offer about 30% under what I told them.
They tried to justify it based on a very optimistic valuation of their equity. I'm already working at a unicorn that skimps on salary with the promise of the equity being worth something, and it would have been a significant cut in take-home pay to accept their offer.
It's very tough to take seriously the bemoaning about engineering hiring difficulty from the likes of pg and others when this is the case.
To the extent companies are investing in the process, it seems to be look for more ways at how to reject people. Now companies want some technical project phone screen AND an algorithms on site AND a "design" review AND some sort of weird personality thing where they grill you on working with past managers and whether you mentored people. Find 99 reasons to ding you. By the way, the design review is usually run by someone 2 years out of school who works on their Jenkins configs and thinks the most important thing is that you magically read their mind and know the right "questions" to ask them.
It's just barely tangentially related to actually working in the industry, which has the result it's actually biased against senior engineers, because ironically the standard for being hired as a senior engineer is actually being better at these interview games that juniors have more recently spent time preparing for.
A lot of companies quite frankly look at what Google did, think "we're just as good as Google", and more or less copy what they do except add even more junk. These companies don't spend much of any time getting to know candidates, they will run some "events" that appeal to people with excessive free time, again mostly juniors. They haven't invested a hundredth of the massive PR push that Google has (Google literally got a box-office movie with Owen Wilson made to recruit), and they CERTAINLY don't want to offer Google-style RSU compensation packages.
After all this "we have the best people" crap, "we have this rube golderberg style interview to filter out all the riff-raff" crap, they want to offer market salaries and some weak ISO package you will have zero chance of valuing accurately and leave 18 windows open for VCs to screw you.
So, given all this, should you waste your time interviewing at companies like Stripe?
My own experience was that Stripe was able to take me from a prospect to a hire in less than 30 days. My interviews and calls were all on Friday, and I would hear back on Monday with results and schedule the next round for that very same week.
Most people do not show up to interviews late and the process is a 1hr phone screen + 1 day onsite + 30m decision meeting. From start to end, if the candidate was available, took about 1 week. That part is not a scaling issue, but a cultural issue where it's OK to be late or flake on interviews.
That may or may not be true and a single annecdotal evidence brought fourth based on a very specific actions that have led a single individual to feel uncomfortable is hardly enough to downplay the points that have been raised.
As an external applicant, I would say it was better than most, but still an internal recruiter shit-show. Week-long windows between email responses, dropped balls, and even no-shows for scheduled calls. Seeing this contrast makes me wonder if Stripe employees are just high on their own supply?
Recruiting is hard. I can only imagine it gets harder at scale. I'd bet that Stripe's best recruiting is done through employee referrals... and that is probably building a mono-culture.