StubHub insights
Hello fellow blinders! I wanted to share an insight into how things are looking from inside the company as many folks are looking for jobs and StubHub is still giving out offers. Here are a few things I’ve observed after spending a few months at the company: 1. StubHub is NOT a tech company and never will be. Their business is simple - for each ticket sold on the website they take 25% cut. Some people (including POTUS) call it “junk fees” and I tend to agree. Read more here: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/15/biden-pushes-ticketmaster-seatgeek-to-show-junk-fees-upfront.html 2. Lack of scale and interesting projects. Their entire traffic is served by < 10 application servers running on prem and a single SQL database. Typical project is adding new field/table to a SQL database and a stored procedure to read/update it. This is a classic architecture from 10+ years ago, with some minor efforts to modernise it here and there. 3. No career advancement - applies to more senior folks, but is a direct result of #1 and #2. There are simply no projects for Senior+ roles - it is a mature company whose bread and butter is taking a commission from a sale, leaving little to no opportunity for technological advancement. Also by modern measures they’re pretty low scale - with a few thousand tickets being bought in the website each day. 4. Toxic workplace culture (or lack of culture) - StubHub was acquired by viagogo and all people from original StubHub were thrown out when they’ve merged two platforms. They also threw out original features StubHub had in 2019 and now are hiring engineers to reimplement those. People from viagogo have been around for many many years and feel very protective of their legacy crap. Apart from that they feel jealous due to insanely high TC numbers being offered to newcomers. Combined those two factors lead to some toxic interactions. 5. Crazy title inflation. Senior Director with only two engineers reporting to them? VP of engineering managing a team of three reports and one contractor? This is the reality here. 6. Hazy IPO prospects. During my time there I couldn’t see what my equity was worth or how many shares I’ve had - there is no internal portal with such information. Similarly, no information about valuation was ever communicated from leadership. The only pointer was a number of articles available on the internet. According to those articles StubHub was valued at 13B, while their competitors VividSeats and SeatGeek are valued at around 1B. engineering #software #swe
The hire/fire culture they have is also quite concerning for new hires. If you don’t click with your manager or piss off the wrong person, you might be gone in under a year and lose those (dubious) stock units
How often are new hires fired?
It is not that frequent. Though the people posting on blind are more likely to be the ones affected so may make more noise. That being said, it is true that if you don't click with your manager you might be gone fairly quickly. I don't think this is unique to stubhub though. You will get given multiple opportunities to fix the issues the manager sees. There are also skip level managers you can raise concerns with.
Not sure what you're talking about OP. I joined not too long ago. Worked on multiple new projects with people who have been at the company for over 5+ years. Pretty amazing people to work with. If you're expecting FAANG culture or projects, I think you're at a wrong place. Company valuation is truly a mystery, but I don't care too much.
Are you able to see your RSUs at least? How do you keep track of them?
Also curious for any feedback anyone can offer. Sitting on an offer from SH now. Concerns about the rumors on here about hire to fire or the need to deliver results so quickly after coming on board. Anything about culture and how flexible the in office policy is? Any insight or input would be greatly appreciated!
CTO, VP, and my managers told me to take time to learn business context rather than delivering results fast. Culture is pretty ok to me. The president told us during all hands that he doesn't believe in remote work, so the expectation is at least 2 days/week in the office, but I'm remote 🤷♂️
Can I dm you guys? I am in the interview process rn
OP, a lot of your points done make much sense from my experience, transaction count is way off, server count is way off too, there is more than one DB. Not sure where you got your info.
how would you say the wlb is? is it better on teams which have more viagogo ppl rather than ex faang are better? Is there truth to hire/fire quickly?
What would you say about the culture also?
Agreed on 1 and 6, disagree on the rest, I’m starting to see some really interesting projects in our roadmap that actually engages me Well maybe 4 I slightly agree with, there’s no push to have good WLB here and your managers will never look out for your well being, kinda just gotta watch your own pace and avoid burnout
How often do u see new hires fired?
I saw 2 in the past 6 months? But they were definitely underperforming
I have a question for StubHub folks about "good filtering during the interview process" Upon each stage, you're given an email detailing exactly what's going to be asked, and you can have as much time to prepare for the exact questions beforehand. While the areas tested are indeed versatile, that can be overcome by prep. As far as I know most StubHub employees are expected to conduct interviews. Do you experience a lot of bad candidates during the interview (and hence my assumptions are a selection bias), or do most people get to the next round?
This is a good q. Maybe the last round is harder cause they can grill you a lot even though its preparable?
It's not on prem and we're not moving to snowflake. Snowflake is our data warehouse. We're not moving our transactional data to snowflake
Hey Stubhub folks, What's the current valuation on Stubhub? Is it still 13B? I heard recently it's at 2B.
No idea. I hope it's not 2b because then my rsus are worth 1/6th
Yeah hopefully not. Are you not able to see your RSUs at all? Is there no portal?
Many recent hires have been laid off recently and nothing happens to mediocre people who have already been here for a couple of years
Why are recent hires laid off? Is it safe to accept an offer now
It is random. There's often talk of eliminating mediocrity, but this only really seems to apply in specific areas and to newer people.
Disagree with pretty much all your points outside of the valuation. The valuation does feel lofty to me compared to competitors.
So the part about projects and scale is not true then?
I dont want to divulge details, but his transaction count is very off. We dont just use a single db for our prod. While its true certain services dont have that much scale by design, other services have a ton of scale.