The press isn't a special case where we have to make sure they can operate without being held accountable for their actions. Everyone should be held accountable and everyone should be able to defend themselves. If anything, journalists are already granted a greater shield than the rest of us.
Again, we're talking about journalists who have _acted_ with agenda against a company, and we're up in arms over off-hand _comments_ about retaliation. Neither party is altruistic and both are financially motivated. If the press acts with agenda and now reports on the retaliatory comments that were made, they can no longer be regarded as unbiased and fair. I'm not going to take their side, and I'm certainly not going to defend them when they appear to be the real bully. Nor am I going to support Al Franken as he attempts to exploit the situation for his own benefit. We've got bigger problems to deal with than who's more butt-hurt about what someone else said.
"The press is our shield against all the evil that is done against the public by governments and corporations."
This seems incredibly naive to me. It's certainly idealistic, and it's extremely difficult to believe that the media, at least the American media, isn't heavily biased by capitalism. Sensationalism does more harm than good, and it's trivial to
"buy" press coverage. The New York Times may very well have enough integrity to refuse to be bought, but it's a common practice to solicit journalists to write articles about new products and such. If you have an agenda, there are journalists ready to be paid to support it. Not only is the press sometimes not our shield, sometimes they're actually a sword against us.
While Travis' comments were certainly regrettable, there's an important distinction between talking about doing something and actually doing it. Almost anytime someone is called out for something they've said, the comments are taken out of context. It's easy for me to imagine that what was said was a reaction to a journalist behaving badly, writing an article with an agenda. It seems likely that the suggestion to use trip data was a suggestion to stoop to the same level, rather than simply to be evil towards someone who was noble and with unquestionable integrity. Uber gets a lot of press, and while some fair points are made, the press I've seen tends to be overly aggressive, misinformed, and usually displaying a clear agenda. What Uber is doing is revolutionary, disrupting well entrenched business models. When you disrupt an industry, you make enemies of the people who were lazily profiting from it. That doesn't mean Uber is good and their opponents are evil. But make no mistake that there is a battle going on, and ugly things are being said on both sides. We're all a bunch of idiots if we waste time letting ourselves be drawn in by someone else's agenda rather than assessing the merits of each side independently and voting with our wallets.
Sure, but it doesn't need to be. The recipient doesn't need to care if the payment is coming from a bank account or a cryptocurrency (as long as there's a party to convert in between).
While it's interesting from an accounting perspective, it could revolutionize payments. Imagine if you never gave your credit card number to a merchant, only signed a receipt from them in a way that assured the bank that the transaction was legitimate. PCI would be a non-issue since sensitive information is never exchanged. It also opens all new ways to pay for things, since the transaction could be submitted to the bank by either party (customer pays vs merchant charges).
The compliance process varies depending on how the business operates. There are more controls if you accept card numbers over the phone, for example. For most merchants, the process is straightforward. Our PCI Compliance page describes the process using Braintree.js.
Requirements scale with processing volume, and are generally minimal for merchants processing under 20k Visa transactions annually.
Many gateways use tokenization to dramatically reduce PCI scope for their merchants. It's fairly standard, actually. Even with tokenization, merchants have compliance obligations. The required network scans, for example, protect consumers from merchant websites being compromised ahead of the tokenization step.
I stopped using an alarm clock about a year ago, and it's been one of the most positive, life-altering changes I've experienced. I'm not tired when I wake up, and I have consistent energy through the day. It was a surprisingly easy transition after doing two things: leaving the blinds open so I get lots of natural sunlight in the morning, and eating breakfast within half an hour of waking up.
It's somewhat scary at first, going without an alarm, but I discovered after doing the above two things that I was tending to wake up before my alarm, and ready to start my day. After a few weeks, I decided to give it a go, and have been off the alarm for a year. In fact, I think now that having an alarm was much more stressful and got in the way of getting a good night's rest, despite the fact that I now wake up earlier.
Getting to sleep at a decent hour helps, and waking up early leaves me tired at night. I avoid caffeine after noon and tried to avoid sitting in front of a computer screen during the last half hour before sleep. But I credit the early meal and sunlight most.
Portability is very important and often overlooked. Braintree created the Credit Card Data Portability Standard a couple years back, and I think there are may be a few additional companies supporting it now. http://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/data-portability
We expect anyone applying to Braintree to be exceptional. It's subjective, and naturally some folks are more exceptional than others. Frankly, it's up to the candidate to decide if that label applies to them or not. What we're interested in is whether or not someone will be successful here. That's the sole purpose of an interview. Can this person do what we need them to do? And for the candidate, can this employer provide me what I need in order to be successful?
For us, it's more often the qualities that aren't as easily discernible from resumes and source code that have been better predictors of success. There are certainly companies that are best served by lone wolf, mercenary developers, and would be thrilled to have anyone with strong coding skills or impressive accomplishments. Communication and collaboration are more important to us, and as the post points out, you have to interview differently for those aspects.
If this job isn’t right for you, we’ll pay you $5,000 if you refer someone who is hired! Have them contact us or send us their contact information and we will do all of the leg work.*
We are growing our development team. Instead of including a list of requirements we want you to understand how we work. If our environment sounds like a place for you, then go to our ‘How to Apply’ section and follow the instructions.
How we work
We pair...
We pair program to write all of our software. We work on Mac Pros with two keyboards and two monitors. We work in an open team room; no cubicles or private offices. Communication is key to our process, and we don't want to hinder it with walls.
We test...
Testing is at the forefront of our development philosophy. We never need to check our code coverage to know that it's at 100%: with disciplined TDD, no line of code will be written without a test. We don't have a QA team. That might be terrifying when you consider the type of software that we're building, but we're confident that our automated testing is thorough and will catch any regression bugs. We use continuous integration to test every version of every client library against our gateway.
We are agile...
Agile development methodologies mean different things to different people. For us, the most important part of Agile is doing what works best for the team. We have a story card wall and release a few times a week. We keep the team in sync with daily standups and have a retrospective once a month to discuss things that are going well and opportunities for improvements. We’re pragmatic, not dogmatic. Although we have strong opinions, we're never afraid to try to new things to see if they work and reconsider our positions if the situation warrants it.
We are polyglots...
Although most of our software is written in Ruby, we don’t confine ourselves to a single programming language. We believe in using the best tool for the job while maintaining a slight bias toward the tools the team knows the best. We’ve written infrastructure components in Python, and we build client libraries for integrating with Braintree in Ruby, Python, Node.js, PHP, Java, and .NET.
We value our people...
We spend a whole day every two weeks working on whatever we’re interested in, regardless of whether it's relevant to the business. Some examples of the things people have chosen to work on include competing against each other to build a mesh chat client in node.js, contributing to open source projects, and discussing strategies for our Google AI challenge submissions.
Salaries are generous and compensation packages include 401k contributions, and ample vacation time.
Interested?
We're looking for people who are interested in getting in on the ground floor of an incredible opportunity to build amazing software and transform the payments industry.
Think you’ve got something to contribute to our exceptional team? We’d like to hear from you!
NOTE: The referrer will receive this bonus only after the candidate is employed at Braintree for at least 60 days after his or her start date. The referrer must also complete and return a w-9 in order to receive the bonus. The referrer is responsible for paying taxes on the referral bonus. Also, to qualify for the referral bonus, the hired candidate must have accepted our offer of employment within two months of your referral.
Again, we're talking about journalists who have _acted_ with agenda against a company, and we're up in arms over off-hand _comments_ about retaliation. Neither party is altruistic and both are financially motivated. If the press acts with agenda and now reports on the retaliatory comments that were made, they can no longer be regarded as unbiased and fair. I'm not going to take their side, and I'm certainly not going to defend them when they appear to be the real bully. Nor am I going to support Al Franken as he attempts to exploit the situation for his own benefit. We've got bigger problems to deal with than who's more butt-hurt about what someone else said.