Michael from Stripe here (the interviewee).

While it’s true we are always hiring, this wasn’t meant to be a recruiting piece—it’s a personal interview Ken (the author) asked me to do based on demand from his readers.

It’s fair to say this is how we want product building to work, and we certainly don’t always live up to it. But I do think it’s broadly reflective of the operating model our product managers, engineers, etc. aspire to and what we hold ourselves accountable to. Do we fall short of our own aspirations regularly? Absolutely.

The interview is certainly useful in that it reflects Stripe's aspirations as a product team. I would have found this interview much more interesting if you had been able to go into detail about the reality of working on a product team where you're holding yourselves to a set of mutually incompatible constraints -- what tradeoffs you tend to make, how you think about making them, what are the common failure and success modes. Maybe a good follow-up post; consider this a single reader's suggestion, not a demand :)

Am I alone here in feeling like that all sounds incredibly exhausting and like a pretty draining place to work, and not-so-subtly seeks to attract workaholics?

It's like there's lip-service to things that we as software engineers enjoy about our profession (eg craftsmanship, deep thinking, high-quality work), but it comes across as just throat clearing before hammering in "moving very, very fast". I read that constant repetition of "moving fast" as "you will always have an endless backlog of work that you will nonetheless have to endlessly crank through with all your energy, and our hiring/retention policy only selects for that"

'Moving very, very fast' for me personally doesn't imply breakneck speed, burning bridges, breaking things, etc. You can still take time to think AND move quickly. Far too many (software) engineers can dwell endlessly on 'The Best Solution' and never get anything done.

That said, I'm pretty sure if you are a tech company, time and timing is of the essence to get your products to market and find out what needs to be changed asap.

Also, there will always be a never-ending backlog. That's why you make decisions and prioritise.

> Am I alone here in feeling like that all sounds incredibly exhausting and like a pretty draining place to work, and not-so-subtly seeks to attract workaholics?

Yes, but if someone loves what they do why wouldn't they want to immerse themselves in it and get paid well for it?

How to burnout 101. Setting an unrealistic performance expectation by doing what you love is fine, but that expectation won’t cease once you are asked to do something uninteresting or frustrating.

I think little of zeal outside of close-knit groups. It takes too much effort, it's easily misdirected, and it can be faked. At scale, it incurs a deficit between input and output, willpower and reality, and eventually achieves its close cousin and exact opposite, cynicism. In the world after zeal, trying becomes pretending, enthusiasm becomes opportunism; anything done the cause becomes suspect in the eyes of those who had to suffer the cause.

The inability to control zeal seems common to communist republics[1], "rocket-ship" startups, and other half-baked endeavors that don't know how to get work done without demanding religious fervor/perfection from their unfortunate subordinates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus

This is a very nice analysis, highlighting the problem which creates the in-crowd who are zealous and the out-crowd who have become cynics.

I can see how many of those items fit - at times I thought they were literally describing me.

Founder that got into products at first using CompSci skills - but finally realized it is the problem solving through business that kept me engaged and pulling me back.

The 30 year vision helps stretch the mind from what is around us (pulling from what is know) to creating an ideal solution and working backwards.