When I compare my 15 years in the office to my 7 years full-time telecommute, I can say without a doubt that I get a lot more work done working form home. Anyone who hasn't experienced the huge amount of time wasted in big-corp office environments hasn't worked in big-corp offices.
A thief running a scam like this will try 5-10 cards before moving on. Your average customer only owns 2-3 cards. We usually flag a user when when they get 3 declines from 3 different cards - and if it looks suspicious enough at that point, we hellban them.
You never wait for the chargebacks. If you get chargebacks, they cost you a lot.
You try to detect/block immediately - if a thief wants to check 10 cards in 5 minutes, you want to block him in the middle of it. And you immediately revert/cancel any transactions that succeeded so that you don't get chargebacks.
Let me try another way. Some Rails apps that are too unwieldy are barely even Rails apps. They just happen to have Rails at some layer of the tech stack, but also have many other non-Rails components such that saying "Rails" has become too complex is disingenuous.
You're doing it wrong! Do not slap frameworks and complexity on top of Rails. Rails' strength has been unchanged from day 1 - "favoring convention over configuration".
Rails is for building web apps. 99% of the world's web apps will work fine with Rails, an RDMBS, a web server. That's about all you need. Anything else is probably just developers wanting to play with the latest toys.
So yes, if you try to avoid Rails' conventions, you will have trouble. But it's not Rails' fault.
Despite the consensus that college has little value to hackers, Stripe team members come largely from Stanford, Harvard, MIT and other major universities. Is this and the fact that Stripe's products are highly regarded just a coincidence? Would it be the same team and products without the team members' Ivy league credentials?
I think the answer is no and no. The benefits of college education are widely underestimated.
If their most successful recruiting channel (by far) is referrals, as they say, then dominant clusters of particular schools isn't surprising or all that telling.
To be fair, many of those Harvard and MIT people are dropouts. I think there's some signal in having graduated with a degree, especially from a well regarded university, but it isn't really something we specifically look for and it definitely isn't a requirement.
Correlation does not imply causation. If they're hiring the brightest, it shouldn't be a surprise that there is significant overlap with universities that only admit the brightest.
Or the benefits of self-discipline, academic excellence and selection bias before such individuals get into "Stanford, Harvard, MIT".
For your argument to work, you'd need to find someone who's below average, lacks passion and under achieves on a regular basis. Then they enter "Stanford, Harvard, MIT" and become a highly regarded passionate professional.
The truth is that most of people who enter top-notch institutions are so far ahead of averages on a bunch of levels, that you could pull a bunch of them out during freshmen year, and they would still do well.
A large number of people at Stripe (I want to say more than half, but that might be wrong) dropped out of college or didn't go at all. Given that a bigger portion of our peers outside Stripe do have college degrees, I think that suggests a different correlation entirely.
On my part, I dropped out of school almost immediately (I was an Econ student at Suffolk in Boston). I joined Stripe right after graduating from Hacker School batch[2].
College is not the only source of pre-determined differentiation.
The fact that you went to Hacker School is also indicative of superior financial position and accreditation. Hacker School is a very well known and respected program that is (anecdotally) incredibly hard to get into. Moreover, since it is in NYC and is effectively equivalent to a full-time job, doing it necessitates a large amount of savings or a really generous network.
Hacker School is about as close as a training program can get to emulating the inhibiting factors of "top colleges."
Why does success == exit? I guess to each his own, but I would hate to be working for years on something with the goal being some finish line, especially when often "exit" for the founders means being sucked into another organization where you have even less control over choosing your work. So many other ways to measure success that this story falls flat for me.
Exits are complex. You have to consider not just your work, but the livelihoods and goals of your team and investors and ultimately where the market is going. The decision to exit is a bit of an out-of-body experience. Often, you don't think about yourself until you are in the process. At that point, hopefully you get to use your personal preferences to make a decision as to who to be acquired by.
You have to take the article in context. The author of the post is a partner at a venture capital firm. In VC the only real measure of success is return on investment.
It's almost like the diet and weight-loss industry. We spend way more time and effort on trying to solve the problems than on preventing them in the first place.
Want to balance work/life? Here's the secret formula which I'm giving away for free today only:
Work 40 hours / week
Sleep 56 hours / week
Play 72 hours / week
This formula covers everything discussed in the blog post. What's surprising about it is that it is nothing new!
We're way overthinking this. The American workforce has been getting up, going to work, coming home and enjoying time with friends and family and hobbies for decades without having an industry of workflow systems and work-life balance editorials. But to make it this simple sells no books, attracts no seminar attendees, and brings in no blog readers.
