I think you need to hear "Sorry." from someone, and I'm someone, so I'm sorry this happened. I don't specifically recall it happening, because my access to candidate-related communications doesn't last an indefinite amount of time after the fact (y'all can probably predict reasons why the opposite would be unwise), but I'm disturbed that I can't immediately rule out something similar to it having happened.

I have little within my immediate locus of control, particularly with many of my coworkers being away on break at the moment (as I am), but can promise we'll look into what happened. This would be well below our bar. I respect that it might be too late to help you out, but we will postmortem the process.

For the benefit of other HNers: we try to be extremely accessible. There are some operational challenges in working with (a very large number) of candidates per year, but those are our operational challenges rather than yours, and to the extent we ever drop the ball we would far prefer knowing than not. If you ever feel like you need a bat signal, my email address is my HN username at stripe.com, and Patrick Collison's is patrick at the same domain.

Nothing we do on any given Tuesday is more important than making sure Stripe is still capable of hiring great engineers/etc.

On a vaguely similar note, I got recruitment inquiries from folks that recruited for Google for many years. I finally decided to look into it as I was considering going back to fulltime work from working on my own projects. Great hour long chat with the recruiter, great hour long phone interview with a Googler who went to my school. Was told that I'd hear from a manager in NYC when they got back from leave in a month. Nothing. Heard from the original recruiter a few months after that asking if I was still interested. Said yes and relayed my experience. And then nothing again. It really saddened me as I was quite excited about the prospect - I had friends working there and loved the idea of possibly being able to create and then build a big thing as a 20% project in addition to working with a smart team of folks. I never wound up looking into Google again.

That's the type of stuff that is really egregious. If you filled out a form application and no one got back to you, who cares that's not really ghosting, but this...wow.

Well, you were doing absolutely RIGHT thing, but doing the right thing sometimes does not bring you any benefit. In this particular case, if you think about it again, I guess you will do it in a completely different way. They have already ghosted you once, so it would be naive to trust them not to ghost you again. And it turned out exactly the case. My personal approach is to save their name and number, particularly the mobile number in my address book, clearly marking as them as not trustworthy and sometimes even block their number so that I don't talk to them anymore.

Sounds like an episode from The Office.

You tried to pull rank on the guy so he responded by reiterating the message. With any luck, a higher ranked Stripe employee might pass by and your stratagem could work this time.

I too was ghosted by Stripe, and this was only about a month ago

That story is hilarious

Stripe has a serious ego problem.

How do you go from this story to "ego problem"? It sounds like they have other problems - but doesn't sound like ego is one of them, at least from the story.

This is HN. I'd wager a good portion of us have had an experience with Stripes hiring.

They simply have a lot more demand of engineers than they have supply of jobs so it's logical for them to not care about individuals.

It is logical now, not logical for the long term. This applies to interpersonal relationships also -- things that are logical when you're at the top might be logical in the long term.

I've had very senior people come back years later asking me for references or an "in" at another company. You cant do that later if you abused your privilege back when you could.

Not really. Seeming like a sitty place makes recruiting harder.

oh wow! this sucks

I’d dump pretty much every VC into the bucket of ghosters as well. And then, you know, from there you get all the trickle-down economics.

I'm so sorry about your experience.

Please let us rectify the situation. We can discuss your opportunity with our COO this time!

You can book the time slot here: calendly.com/stripe-coo.

I forgot /s