Inbox: "How does Stripe maintain a high level of polish?" Some thoughts, in my personal capacity as someone who writes code occasionally and knows a bit of the story but isn't involved in it daily:
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Note that this comes back to the company culture thing, because senior ICs in marketing talking about what they did that week who say "Oh and I spent some time on localization engineering" need to know that their leadership and the company will say "Of course you did, cool cool."
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I mentioned recently that another thing we do is having an internal alias to report product quality oriented bugs. A team triages either fixing them or getting them to the right part of the organization to fix, and routinely keeps the company updated on the rate of flow in+out.
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Before we make major changes to e.g. API integrations we do internal and external testing on it. There's often a call for "Who has a real, honest-to-goodness Stripe account lying around? Can you upgrade to the beta?" Folks break out time to do that and exhaustively document it.
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I saw a spreadsheet recently for this; imagine 20+ engineers implementing API consumers "for real" and being very, very nitpicky. We can't have the depth of coverage customers can, but beats the heck out of guessing.
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(This is one of the relatively few times where "Hmm I don't think I've touched the payments code in that project since 2014, barely understand how it works, and have no tests" is a real asset to an engineering team.)
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None of this is rocket science, and (in spirit of rigor) none of it is sufficient. We are actively dissatisfied with where quality is at the moment, not in the usual "Oh our standards are high" passive raising-the-bar dissatisfaction but in "Working on this actively" sense.
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If working with very smart and dedicated people who profoundly care about this, up to and including senior leadership, sounds interesting to you, Stripe is hiring.https://stripe.com/jobs
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A big shoutout to customers, too. We often go to ones we're close with and effectively co-create new releases with them: tight feedback loops, thorough mutual understanding of how X should operate in their business, and the mutual understanding that named people are working today
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There's some substantial gnarly technical detail on "How do you expose three people in the world to new behavior of a core service while making sure not to change behavior for the other businesses processing transactions in real time?" and that might be a story for another day.
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End of conversation
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