#What is it you do, anyway?
Stripe’s mission is increasing the GDP of the Internet. Mine is increasing the number of successful software companies on it. That is basically the entirety of the job description. On a day-to-day basis, it’s very Choose Your Own Adventure; I’ve written code, requirements documents, strategy memos, the Stripe Atlas guides and advised Stripe employees, partners, and users.
This is… not a straightforward thing to write on a business card.
On the one hand, it gives me huge amounts of latitude to determine my day-to-day direction, and makes use of having a wide skillset. Relatively few people can solo ship an initiative which requires copywriting, React, an ETL pipeline, and a business negotiation; it turns out that is pretty valuable and decreasing the time-to-market of it (versus having to spin up a team of five people to do the same work) is useful.
At the same time, there are reasons why job descriptions exist; they help communicate one’s position to others at the company, clarify discussions about dependency graphs, give decisionmakers a handle when plans are made, etc etc. Being the singleton instance of Stripe::Atlas::Patio11 is occasionally a mixed blessing. //
Why work at Stripe when you could run your own business?
Leverage.
Leverage means things which increase your capability to provide impact. For example, writing code is an extremely leveraged use of your time; you go off to continue living your life but your code keeps running.
Kevin Kwok asked “Leverage on what?”. Fifteen years into this career thing I definitely know what my success function for the next thirty is: the product of the number of people I’ve helped in the community I serve (software people, broadly writ) times the delta in the average life that my efforts uniquely caused. If one uses e.g. income as a metric because it’s crunchy enough to keep one honest, then the most effective thing I’ve ever done (by far on an ROI-on-time basis) was writing about salary negotiation for engineers. A few hundred folks have emailed me the outcomes they attribute to that essay; this lower-bounds the impact to score of that essay at about 7,000,000 (a year). //
The company-level mission is “Increase the GDP of the Internet”; every time we increase the pace of business formation, the likelihood of business survival, or the rate of business growth, we win.
