I was one of the first two simul-hire remotes at Mapbox (when the company was ~12 people) and, until I left in 2017, the longest-term remote there at seven years. I've been fully remote for thirteen years. At Mapbox, I unofficially took on the role of internal advocate for remote culture. It wasn't always easy to be remote, but as the company grew, Eric, the CEO, was fond of saying that "everyone is remote" since more and more physical hubs for work sprang up across many timezones. It was a tough balance, particularly as increasingly more work and customer opportunities centered around the Bay Area, and the spiritual heart of the company switched coasts from the official HQ in DC to the larger and faster growing office in SF.
Personally, I can't overstate how much being a remote employee and even freelancer has impacted my quality of life and my opportunities. For the most part, I was able to focus on my work and hook in to the rest of my teammates as needed. The best times of this were when the company engineering culture was very asynchronous and allowed for it. Slack and always-on expectations, as well as much more complex software in later years, made this more difficult, but still manageable.
It wasn't without struggle, though. Often it was lonely, isolating, I felt out of the loop on some decisions, I didn't get some in-jokes and nicknames, I missed the non-holiday parties and happy hours, etc. Even with that stuff aside, it takes a real commitment from the leadership to fully integrate remote team members. Kudos to Stripe for putting themselves out there and holding themselves accountable to the goal with a public statement and metrics.
The key snippet from the Stripe announcement is this:
> improve our ability to tap the 99.74% of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs
The future of much of the technical work that needs to happen is remote, and I'm glad to see Stripe embrace that.
"Often it was lonely, isolating, I felt out of the loop on some decisions, I didn't get some in-jokes and nicknames, I missed the non-holiday parties and happy hours, etc."
I am in this boat now. . . and find it really tough. Many others I know feel the same way but it is rarely talked about. How do you get over the social isolation of being remote?
There are two parts to this: work and your local community.
For work, you're not going to do it alone. Someone on the HR side (or just general management, if the company is still quite small) is going to have to be a willing sounding board for remote employee concerns.
On the social side, this might be supporting a policy (as Mapbox did, maybe still does) of flying remotes to the holiday and other big parties, as well as, if able, just having them in every month or two to work alongside the non-remotes and make those connections. When I first started, I'd fly from Portland to DC for a week every 6-8 weeks. It helped that I lived in DC prior for five years (before Mapbox), so it felt like a natural connection.
On the technical and process side, we had a policy of things not existing (or not existing properly) unless they were in written form. This included decisions, context, back-and-forth reasoning, announcements, etc. We used GitHub for non-code "tickets" this way, almost like an internal blog and topic-focused discussion forum. This broke down in later years, but even to the scale of dozens of people was a great way to make sure that being 3,000 miles away and three hours "behind" wasn't as isolating.
For the local community part, go to meetups. Organize a weekly/biweekly social gathering with likeminded friends or peers. Work in coffee shops or other places out of the house. I found that I went stir crazy when I first started remote, because I wouldn't leave the house and needed some human contact. Placing all of that expectation on your employer and not on yourself is unreasonable. It takes effort.
> On the technical and process side, we had a policy of things not existing (or not existing properly) unless they were in written form. This included decisions, context, back-and-forth reasoning, announcements, etc. We used GitHub for non-code "tickets" this way, almost like an internal blog and topic-focused discussion forum.
We are working on making this process more scalable at Aether’s Pro version, it is especially useful for remote companies as you mentioned. It helps that we are a remote company as well, eating your own dog food is the fastest way to improve. If you’d like to get on the pilot, hit me up and I’ll add you in.
For me personally, be proactive and step up the communication. You wouldn't hesitate to walk over to a co-workers desk and shoot the shit or ask a question about something, so you can't hesitate to call them either.
It feels weird and intruding to me still after years of doing it, but it works. I don't feel left out, I don't feel isolated, and while I often feel like an annoyance, everyone tells me that isn't the case.
Also, make sure the communication systems work well. It's invaluable to me to be able to make a video call and just have it work, to turn that one on one call into a group call, to share my screen and notes, to know that everyone on the team has a headset and knows how to use it.
Without that, it just makes the communication that much harder, which amplifies those feelings of isolation and being an "outsider".
When building remote teams, we've tried to hire within common geographic areas, so the regional team can meet once per week at a Starbucks or co-working space of their choosing.
The commute may be up to a 1 hour for some members, but it addresses the isolation challenge.
We also try to bring the entire company together in-person once per year an at annual tech conference.
Work from home, but primarily accountable to teams in other timezones. The regional teams coordinate their own in-person activities.
Culturally, the concept of remote work is not well understood in countries like the Philippines and India. The occasional social "meeting" is more to convince their family members they have a "real job" with physical place of business.
I think it really depends on the person. I had the same feelings of being isolated and not really getting to know everyone. I ended up getting an office job which is great. I love seeing people and having a separation of work and home.
I know others who now do remote and absolutely love it. From what I understand though they are in my same situation but it just doesn’t bother them. It all depends on your personality and what you are looking for.
Perhaps find a local coop workspace where you can go meet other engineers in your situation but then is that even remote anymore?
I've seen 3 general schools of thought on remote pay:
- its a global talent pool, so in raw dollars everyone should be on a level playing field (ie, compete for SF Bay wages no matter where you are in the world since that is generally the top wage market)
- market rate for your current location (ie, whenever you choose to reside, you get paid an amount that provides a comfortable standard of living there, somewhat influenced by what local wages for your role would be - we won't round down if you're in a place where dev salaries are unusually low relative to other industries, but we will round up a bit to be competitive if you're in a market where they're high)
- "remote is a perk" so take less pay in exchange for the freedom
Personally, I currently work at a shop who is doing the second version and everyone seems happy enough with it. I'd never work somewhere who was trying to pitch remoteness as part of the comp package, and I think there are only a handful of companies out there who peg their wages to the most expensive markets in the world (I generally see this kind of position pushed by self-branded "expats" who want to metaphorically live like kings in cheap areas).
Unfortunately there are a lot of companies who have decided they're going to go remote as a cost-savings measure, and that cost-savings mentality permeates everything about the business - including trying to sell being remote as a perk with value and lower wages to go with it.
Remote as a cost-cutting measure is the same as offshore, with the same poor results. There is no emphasis on quality; you've traded that dimension for some balance of cost & functionality.
As soon as you move beyond trivial software projects the true effort is in the domain which depends on visibility and communication. You can do this with remote but I think it actually costs more outside of all but the highest tier labour markets.
We really need to work to define remote as a supply sourcing solution and kill the notion of a cost control solution, otherwise we'll never be able to build fully integrated delivery teams out of globally-distributed people.
As a dev who has worked in lucrative markets (defence contractor, tech-citys) for 10+ years, ive just taken a paycut (30%) to go remote only.
Everyone trades things off differently. I couldnt be more happier. When i was making more money; i had more debt and less time. That equation only gets higher as you get more senior. So yeh, i couldnt care less a google grad is making more then me - i dont work for an evil company, i can work flexibly, i can do overtime without having to travel, i can literly get in my car, travel 1000miles, setup my 4g next to a beach, and goto work. When i have a children i dont have to be an absent parent.
For sure - if you make all of the same mistakes with remote teams that companies are so prone to making with offshoring companies (little to no integration into the rest of the business, little vetting of individual contributors, using metrics to incentivize all of the wrong kinds of behavior, chasing low costs instead of skill and business value) you'll get all of the same typically-horrible results.
My company offshores, has remote only roles, has an in-house office, and wework offices across captial cities. They also pay their workers based on where the company headquaters is, not their locale.
Work of the future will need to be flexible. I envisage the rat race of the future being for unskilled labour.
I’ve worked remotely for most of the last 10 years. Don’t buy into the idea that work is your community or social life. That isolation can drive you to go places where people hang out after work (I met most of my friends at the climbing gym), get involved in clubs, etc. work sociality is a weak proxy for real community anyway.
Also, I always work from coffee shops, because I like having humans around.
The truth is that almost half of our non-sleeping lives are spent in the workplace. We are inherently social animals (if not the most social animal on the planet). You've pointed out that there are lots of avenues for socializing outside of work, but I think it may be important for humans to socialize in the workplace too since we spend so much time there. It seems like we are wired to want to gather around the water-cooler and chat. As you mention, there's something quite natural about "wanting humans around".
One way to achieve this need to socialize is to work out of a co-working space or coffee shop.
one practical approach I actually learned from Stripe is to prioritize remote. This can be pretty superficial, like remote always goes first in our daily stand-up, to more material - they don't always get it, but I always consider them first for project assignment, team representation at inter-departmental meetings, etc. Maybe this "affirmative action" could be viewed as unfair, but it's way too easy to ignore and marginalize remote teammates if you don't continually fight the bias.
There are really two different things in that quote.
Being out of the loop on decisions is a combination of a company with a mix of remotes and company locations who would benefit from better documentation/communications practices. In practice, it's also something remote workers often just need to be more proactive about.
The latter is really about separating work as social activity from work as work. You arguably lose something in the process but, if you're remote in a different location, you're not going to be at work happy hours, other gatherings, or software league. What you can do is join other local groups of your choosing.
I can't speak for the parent commenter, but for the loneliness aspect I found a coworking space that is focused on community. It's a bunch of remotes and freelancers, so you see the same folks every day. It's kind of a "third place," although I guess that it's a second place since we all work here.
At LightStep where I work we have company wide coffee chats which are fortnightly 30 minute randomly assigned groups of two or three with no agenda, a weekly “virtual water cooler” which is 30 minutes, and my team has a randomly assigned weekly one on one chat as well.
They’re super pleasant and a great way to break up the day and they really help me get to know the people I work with on a personal level.
I would really recommend setting something like that up with your teammates and coworkers or at least being an advocate for such a thing!
There are advantages and disadvantaged to being remote.
One way of getting over isolation is to work in a share office. But even getting out to the library, or a cafe can be good. I used to work in different places, Museums with wifi, art centers, Uni's, almost anywhere.
I have been working remotely for the last 3 years. I'm a pretty social creature and after doing it for about 2 weeks I was already feeling pretty lonely!... For me, joining a co working space was excellent, can't recommend highly enough
The lack of parties and happy hours is music to my ears, personally. I can't stand these events, and they often work in the service of this strange social construct that we all know and love - "culture." At some point socializing with your teammates outside of working hours became part of the job. Its strange really, to almost force these things on people, as it doesn't even serve to strengthen the team bond that much. Soldiers don't bond at the bar, they bond on the field; they socialize at the bar.
Loneliness and isolation is often cited as a downside of remote work, but as someone who doesn't like to mix work/personal and has a healthy personal social life, I just can't see it being an issue for everyone.
Also a former Mapbox employee, and the effort that you put in to making it a remote-friendly culture showed in huge ways. I've carried those lessons to other companies, and I'm really grateful for your work <3
- remote-first meetings; is someone is remote / in another office, everyone takes the call from their laptops. That way no one ends up being forgotten on a screen in a room full of people.
- habitually reverting to written communication, so that information doesn't get lost in 1:1 conversations. That means writing thought processes into tickets, so folks can search for things later. We worked across 3 timezones (including PT to IST, ~12 hours off) so async communication was key.
- not having a central office. "Everyone is remote" wasn't perfect, but there wasn't a true home office in the same way as my current company. For example, it was considered rude to "@here" in the general chat channel for things like donuts, because hey, many folks are in other states/countries, and don't need to hear about y'alls treats. Little things like that make a big difference in employee experience.
Hey Justin, we miss you very much! Happy to see you chime in here.
> it takes a real commitment from the leadership to fully integrate remote team members
This is so true. I thought this would only be manageable for relatively small companies, and that it was natural for Silicon Valley companies to loose this culture as they grow rapidly, so it's very inspiring to see this kind of commitment from a company as large as Stripe.
Most of them are in tech hubs like the bay area. I know it's popular to dismiss that view as unjustified arrogance or whatever, but I've actually made a living in the Midwest and other "not a tech hub" locations. The difference in interest and ability cannot be overstated: my colleagues in SF are heads and shoulders above the typical developer I worked with in those other places.
I hope other companies follow Stripe's lead here. Anecdotally, I've never been as happy and productive as I've been the past few years as a remote worker. It seems to me too few companies are taking advantage of the opportunity here. The few challenges I've encountered seem solvable:
(1) effective team culture building: can be solved with travel budget & prioritization of good team cultural norms by team leads
(2) whole team collaborative brainstorming (particularly when facing a "fire drill"-type time-constrained challenge): more challenging to solve from what I've seen, but might be solved by some combination of better tech and better work practices
I'm interested to hear how Stripe addresses these and which challenges they find.
One question at a higher level: what are the immigration law impacts here? Does Stripe need to get H1Bs for internationally located workers? I hope not: effective remote work is fantastic step toward bringing labor mobility more in line with capital mobility, with potentially positive effects on income, taxation, and social policies for people around the world.
We have talented lawyers and comply fully with employment-related requirements everywhere we do business. These get rather nuanced, particularly when factual situations get complicated, but if we weren't ready to implement complex state machines and handle edge cases then we picked a really poor line of work.
Generally speaking, most Stripes work for a subsidiary which hires them in the standard fashion for professional employees in their jurisdiction. For example, I work for Stripe Japan, K.K., and demonstrated/maintain authorization to work in Japan. We can and do support people moving internally, including regarding immigration status where appropriate.
While it's not sufficient, travel budget is an important element IMO. I'm more or less remote but the ability to get together multiple times a year with both formal team members and other people who I collaborate with is pretty important to me. Also just getting out of the house to have regular contact with other people in the industry. I suppose, I could more proactively do more local events but, generally, I find interacting with people at events an important part of working remotely.
H1Bs are used for non-immigrant workers to be allowed to work on US territory. So no, no need for H1B if workers live and work from a different country.
Well, they're probably ongoing challenges that any company needs to consider--and I'd argue that culture and communications can be challenges even within a company location as it scales. I'd shy away from ever saying they're "solved."
But the fact that there are successful companies with a significant percentage of remote and/or distributed workers suggests that they can be solved well enough.
There are plenty of very successful 100% remote companies, including GitLab, Zapier, Automattic (Wordpress) etc. I think it's fair to say they've solved it well enough.
Traditional office space also comes with its own fair share of challenges and problems.
Million dollar question - how are the remote stripes going to be compensated? Are they going to be compensated pegged on their geo-locale (which then just makes it like international offices without the office)?
I'm pretty sure the dublin and singapore stripes are paid much lower than their sf counterparts. How are they going to resolve this for the remotes?
Not poking at stripe, but generally as I think of remote work, I think we're probably to going to think of true value based salary scales (you are creating X$ of value, therefore you are to be paid a fraction of that) as opposed to geo based scales (you may be an icpc world finalist living in Kathmandu but you will be paid 1/10th of a boot camper from SF because 3rd world).
They are compensated according to locale. Our Google sheet of offer anecdata contains a few entries for Stripe, some remote and some SF. I’ve seen a salary difference of 30%. I don’t know the people who entered them personally so I can’t speak to how well they performed during the interview, so take that with a grain of salt.
If a company knows how to get choose a USD200k engineer in SF and get a good return for the company off that engineer, then why wouldn't you pay USD200k in all areas?
USD200k is a good carrot where I live, so you would be able to attract the best engineers living here (with far less competition and far less churn).
I get it that SF has network effects, but good remote engineers also tap into the same network.
Because they don't have to. Peoples' expectations of salary are likely in line with their local job markets, so even great developers living in a rural area will likely either accept the average base salary for their locale, or move to SF for the larger payday (and all of the expenses that come with it).
This should be reversing because the internet grants us easy access to this data, so market signals should be forming, but it isn't reversing, which is suspicious. Getting the data is harder, but we do already have data sets to compare to (and can apply inflation, CoL, other adjustments as time goes on).
The only real reason for zip-code adjustments would be some labor-related, CONUS, or state laws that I'd be unfamiliar with.
If I deliver the same business value as a Silicon Valley engineer, and you're paying me less, I'm getting arbitrage'd.
I agree, if we're getting paid differently based on zip code but producing the same business value we're getting arbitrage'd. The question is; how do we as developers make money off this market inefficiency?
We have a few options.
1. Negotiate better salaries. This is only possible when the purchasing price of the next best developer also increases. This already happens in the Bay area market. It is happening slower outside the Bay.
2. Start own our business. We hire the best developers at a higher rate which raises the market rate for a developer. This is happening in the Bay but much more slowly outside.
3. Move to a better geographic market. A lot of people who can chose this.
Developers probably can't exploit/correct this market because we have no way of directly/quickly making profit from the price difference.
I would love for developers to capture a larger share of the value they create. Does anyone have any ideas on how to restructure the incentives of the market to make this happen? (Cooperatives?)
Depends on the company. At my previous one you were locked in to where you started so I left after moving to a more expensive city and they refused to adjust it.
Also if the hire is living on a ranch in Montana then at least as of today they don't have that many companies to choose from if they turn you down for a lower salary than Bay Area engineers get. In SF they can just walk down the street to the next place but there aren't that many really remote companies out there.
I mean companies that you don't transition to remote but start off as remote and are treated as a first-class employee the whole time and that the workflows are remote-friendly.
There are a lot of bad managers who style themselves as feudal lords and one of the known ways to get them to give up on that model is offering to save them a bunch of money. Pay someone a bunch of money and I don’t get to yell at them? No thanks.
> If a company knows how to get choose a USD200k engineer in SF and get a good return for the company off that engineer, then why wouldn't you pay USD200k in all areas?
If you're willing to buy a $2 million property in Palo Alto, would you pay $2 million for the exact same property in West Mississippi?
To a company an employee is a commodity investment only - no matter what the culture manifesto says. There are a lot of factors that determine who gets paid what.
In addition to what kossae said, overpaying for the market is not good for Stripe. The flip side of massively reducing churn is that it also means people wont leave even when they want to, because of the golden handcuffs. Stripe doesn't want demotivated employees who are only staying because they'll have to take a 50k pay cut to work anywhere else.
> If a company knows how to get choose a USD200k engineer in SF and get a good return for the company off that engineer, then why wouldn't you pay USD200k in all areas?
If they can get those other people to join paying 100k, why wouldn't they want to save 100k per engineer?
Companies pay you what they need to in order to get you to join and unfortunately, market rates are still largely decided by location.
I know, why wouldn't a company pay more. When I go buy something, I always insist on paying double for it. It just makes sense to pay more when you don't have to.
People don't get paid more in San Francisco because they deliver more value than a worker in New York City or London. San Francisco rates are high because of geographic scarcity of talent in that location. Over the long term remote is going to reduce SFBA rates, not propagate them.
Walmart Labs hires for my skillset pretty often. When they first started they hired remote at Silicon Valley salaries. They've now moved to a scale based on zip code. I'll always regret not jumping on that job before they made that switch.
What's wrong with targeting equal disposable incomes (after covering essentials like housing/schools/childcare etc)?
I see this in my field where I work remote and most people in my field work in NYC or London. My gross income is way lower than my former classmates who settled in NYC. However I have a bigger house, equally good school and childcare for 1/10th the annual cost etc. Don't see why I should get a salary that reflects the massively inflated cost of living in a city that I don't live in. Instead I think it should be about targeting a quality of life commensurate with the contribution made & scarceness of the skillset. The cost of providing that quality of life will vary dramatically between someone living in a rural area vs San Francisco and so should the pay imo.
Yes, of course. I wanted to emphasize that the underlying forces are the same even if the results end up different.
That's why Bay Area companies don't usually offer Bay Area salaries for remote workers around the world. And also why Croatian companies don't hire remote workers in San Francisco :)
Why is this even a question? If remote workers don't like the comp/pay being offered, they could go looking at other companies in their market (or other remote work opportunities). This is a non-issue.
What do you mean “why is this even a question?”? It’s a question that frequently comes up in remote worn discussions. Stripe being a big company, and now making a big commitment to remote work, is likely to be an example other companies draw from.
Can you name a single company that pays Remote Employees SF/Bay Area salaries?
Edit: Fair enough. There are companies that pay everyone SF level salaries but you can also find companies like Gitlab - 100% Remote but they explicitly downscale from SF salaries based on location.
- Not just "Remote but in the US"
- 1,000+ employees
- 40+ countries
- Local holidays
- Co-working Space stipend, if you want it
- Almost nobody goes to the offices we do have
- Everything is written down and x/referenced: GH, email, Slack
- Zoom for face to face
- Engineering All Hands: Usually twice a year, once EU, once US
- You work on your own Timezone, expecting otherwise is ridiculous
My point wasn't to say that Stripe should do one thing or the other regarding location-adjusted alaries. I was asking the previous commenter why he indignant that the question be asked of Stripe at all, as if it were irrelevant.
Expensify! I work as a remote engineer, but we have remote employees all over the world (Europe, Asia, North America, Australia) that don't have their salaries adjusted for COL.
I don't really want or need an SF salary, but I do expect a company to compensate fairly and not based on where I live at any given time. I can understand a reasonable adjustment based on the different compliance costs and payroll expenses for a given political jurisdiction.
Ethics? Fear of voiding the employment contract if based on false information?
I also don't think it's practical.
Here in Germany at least, the address of residency is used in so many contexts (health insurance, pension schemes, tax things etc.) that I doubt this would go unnoticed very long.
For example the city you live in determines which regional tax office handles your income tax, and I'm pretty sure it's easy to notice for a company if some of the income tax goes to an address that doesn't match the employee's city.
It's not like people always keep their residence up to date though. If you are still able to receive official correspondence at your previous address (e.g. parents' home), why would you bother changing it? Even more so across a border -- it's trivial to have multiple residences at the same time and they are not guaranteed to be unique, nor are they necessarily considered tax residences. That is, you can be tax resident in a country where you don't have permanent residence even if you have permanent residence in another country.
I've always wanted to switch to fully remote. I worked from home for a couple weeks after my son was born and my current company didn't like it. My productivity was down and they noticed so they informed me I wasn't allowed to work remotely anymore because of it.
Obviously it had nothing to do with the fact that they gave me 3 days of parental leave after the birth, so I was trying to help a recovering wife take care of a needy child.
I don't think that has anything to do with "remote work" vs "working and caring for a newborn at the same time," which, obviously, would heavily distract you from work in any setting.
There are pros and cons. I've been partial remote for 6 years and full remote for nearly 5. I can do whatever I need to do to get into the flow of work; music, no music, lights, no lights, etc. I don't have to conform to what happens at an office. I can start early or work late (my "office" is several time zones away). I can take a personal call w/out feeling guilty.
What I cannot do is walk over to a colleague's desk and chat. I miss hallway conversations about the project. Phone meetings are always a pain as someone is usually too far from the mic and I can't hear. I don't work in a city that has a "tech" community. I can't take my setup with me and go sit at a coffee shop (part of my project is writing hw controls).
There are certain jobs that I think could really benefit from pairing, akin to pair programming. I used to do compliance work for a bank, and I think as a whole our reporting defect rate would have plummeted had we worked in pairs. Obviously for some jobs this is cost prohibitive and otherwise impractical, but an ideal working environment for me would be remote and part-time pairing. You get consistent human interaction, information flow across the team, and the benefits of remote work.
We've done a few "mobbing" sessions with three remote people and it worked out very well. We got a lot done and we all felt a high level of energy for days afterward.
I think this is something that will improve in the future. Cities everywhere are optimized for the very specific 9-5 living lifestyle and commute, and people heavily rely on work for social functions. But as more and more people are working remotely / without an office, i think we 'll see a shift. This will probably involve a lot of online communiction/coordination.
3 days of parental leave is a travesty. Fuck them, seriously.
Find a company that values you more, and that allows remote (or remote-first). Plenty of companies in the latest Who's Hiring that have fully-remote work-from-anywhere $100K+ positions. Just Do It.
The problem was not "company didn't like remote work," the problem was "spending work time caring for a newborn instead of working." Moving to a company that's entirely remote doesn't fix that issue, you still need to be actually working during work time.
Of course, the problem was caused by lack of paid parental leave with a desire to care for the newborn/wife and not lose salary. So, really, a family oriented company would be best in that situation. Unfortunately, from what I've seen, paid paternity leave is an uncommon benefit in the US.
Have you looked for a new role yet? If not, why not?
Start interviewing! Find a company that provides better benefits, better pay, and supports flexible work arrangements. Can't fix your current org having garbage parental leave unfortunately (I mean, you could, but it's a more effective use of your time to just bounce).
dude my productivity went down for like 2 years after having a kid. Griping about productivity during what "should" be parental leave is just wrong. Seriously, consider changing jobs, they'r not all like that.
Great to see that a well-known company such as Stripe is embracing remote work because they've seen that remote workers are effective, not just as a mechanism to leverage locales with lower wages. Hopefully other companies follow suit.
I’m not sure this says anything about the wages being equal. The remote wages are anecdotally lower. Judging by the offers I’ve seen coming out of SF compared to some of their other hubs, it’s significantly lower. Not just in salary, but in equity as well.
Remote wages are surely lower than SF today, but so are non-remote wages everywhere as well.
From a non-Bay Area company point of view, it simply doesn't make any sense to hire remote employees that are in the Bay Area, when you can pay above market rates for top-talent employees in Chicago, Vancouver, Berlin, London, etc. and still pay less than half the going SF rate. I think this is also why Bay Area employees are still dismissive of remote, it's taking off everywhere else but the factors that are making SF the highest paid area are also what makes it the least attractive for remote hiring.
But I think what we'll see is, as SF companies themselves slowly start hiring remotely it will push up both remote and local wages globally. Non-SF and non-remote companies will have a harder time competing as their local employees now also have high-paying remote job opportunities from SF companies to consider.
It's certainly possible that Stripe is offering productivity as the reason for their embrace of remote work when it's really about cheaper labor, but I'm hopeful. I know there are other companies where those decisions are transparently about lowering costs, but if what you say about remote workers typically getting less equity is true, too, that's pretty disappointing.
Buffer (which has been remote-heavy for a long time) handled this by explicitly breaking their salary assessment into multiple elements. In addition to base salary-for-role and various experience adjustments, they have a public "price sheet" describing the cost of living adjustments they apply for different locations.
It's not a perfect system, I'm sure. CoL is reduced to three fairly broad bands, and other pay elements like experience and performance are potentially skewed by remote status. But I think it's an appealing approach in general. Candidates know in advance what to expect and can move somewhere more expensive without needing to find a new job. Meanwhile, the company saves some money, but still gets access to remote candidates in expensive cities where they don't have offices.
I suppose it would drive away any remote worker who's consciously living somewhere cheap to increase effective salary, but presumably that's offset by getting access to people in DC, NYC, Boston, etc. who aren't open to other cost-saving remote jobs.
Why would the cost of living factor into salary at all?
I write the code. I offer architectural decisions. I'm working on the most demanded features by the customers, bringing more value to the product.
What if I pair program on a feature from a person in SF? My efforts are still paid less.
Who cares if I wrote the code from SF or Vietnam.
I wish more remote workers would stand up to these businesses looking for a way to lower their costs.
As for the engineers, the whole "midwest nice", "flyover feebleness", "sure is great to just have an opportunity to work remotely" mindset has to change. Don't let them discount your value.
Honestly I don’t know how fair businesses can be with respect to this while being economically rational. Differences in markets are very real, and if you can get good developers who can’t work in the US for less, why not? It’s not surprising the Zoom founder tried so hard to make it to America.
Sometimes a driver is that you may pay lower wages than an in-office employee in, say SFBA, while still higher than average in the area the employee works in, so win-win. Similar to the logic that drives some remote/satellite offices to places they can grab some of the best local talent by paying above local-market, and still save quite a bit on salaries.
Bravo Stripe! I work for a company that allows me to work remotely pretty much whenever and it has done wonders for my productivity(no interruptions to flow) and overall happiness level. The 2 hours/ day of time I used to spend commuting are now spent cooking/going to the gym/home improvement/gardening. I save tons of money and have never been healthier or happier. As long as I stay a software engineer I don't think I'll ever take another role that doesn't let me work remotely. Of course I am strict with myself about working during work hours and have good rapport/trust w/ management. Just my 2c
> While we did not initially plan to make hiring remotes a huge part of our engineering efforts, our remote employees have outperformed all expectations.
I wonder what metrics were used. Would be interesting to know whether the main motivator was simply raw performance, or performance/cost.
Probably both, I'd imagine. Regarding cost, Stripe was pretty outspokenly against Prop C in SF last year (which passed, to their dismay). The result is an added tax on revenue which hits Stripe hard since they have a high volume, low margin business. Not to mention CA is already a very expensive place to run a company.
With rising costs in SF, they likely had to explore viable long-term solutions. They can start moving more jobs to their other offices, open new secondary offices, or expand their remote presence. With remote, they're able to keep SF as the HQ while lowering costs. It's also popular among devs, so it'll keep their brand image good amongst their target demo and among their current employee base.
> Austin is the perfect combination of low COL and available talent in my opinion.
Some evidence for that: half the game studios I know of have programmers in Texas, or occasionally elsewhere in the southeast (e.g. North Carolina). If you want a dense talent pool around your office, but don't have the margin/capital to pay coastal cost of living, there aren't many other options to rival those.
Im wondering what learnings has Stripe figured out that makes their remote workers as productive as their in-office employees.
Do they use things like OKR, slack,etc ? What works and what doesn't - is there a cognitive disconnect between remote teams and people who work in office .
Is there an expectation of minimum screen time expected from remote employees?
We use Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, Github, and a handful of other widely-adopted technologies. They're really good and we couldn't do this without them, but they're probably not the lynchpin to making this work at scale.
We're working constantly on improving the integration of peers throughout the company. Something Stripe Atlas does, for example, is schedule time for the team to low-key socialize without an explicit agenda, in part because by default some decisions get made in a hallway and some information travels at the speed of coffee, and we've learned we should go out of our way to be inclusive of employees who don't passively benefit from those factors.
I cannot conceive of a reason we'd track screen time for employees, remote or otherwise. I can model why a company which had an adversarial relationship with employees might want to do that (to discourage shirking). We do not have an adversarial relationship with our employees, and (hopefully) have more interesting utility functions than that.
I expect we'll continue publishing what we learn on this in Increment, our engineering blog, and other places. It seems unlikely to me that five years from now instituting this policy will be very contentious at well-run tech companies; that implies we, as an industry, have to get much better at this very quickly. We're always happy to share what we've learned.
> I cannot conceive of a reason we'd track screen time for employees, remote or otherwise. I can model why a company which had an adversarial relationship with employees might want to do that (to discourage shirking). We do not have an adversarial relationship with our employees, and (hopefully) have more interesting utility functions than that.
its not about the company. See you guys are in a unique position - you have an in-office team and you have a remote team. So it is a A versus B for those people - people who are having to commute for hours to work, mandatorily sit at their computer screens . Versus others who wake up late (because no commute) and can walk about the house in their pyjamas.
How do you deal with the perceived imbalance in quality of life between these two teams ? I asked about mandatory screen time from that perspective. Because there is a set of people who are working synchronously - is there no cognitive drop off between them and the remote team who may have chosen to take their dog walking at the same time when a team decides to ping on a code bug question ? this wouldnt be an issue if everyone was in office together.
An all remote team is a simpler setup. I'm not at all arguing for one or the other - i do understand some people are very social and need people around them (like me) and others work best at their homes. However, after having run large orgs, I do know if you have both kinds simultaneously together - there is a massive grass-is-greener issue. The remote workers think that the in-house employees have more management "ear time" and the in-house employees grumble at the remote workers taking it easy. I have massive respect for you guys, if you have built a cultural practice that neutralises this issue.
>Something Stripe Atlas does, for example, is schedule time for the team to low-key socialize without an explicit agenda
How do you do this ? any learnings here? this is something i have wondered a LOT about.
> So it is a A versus B for those people - people who are having to commute for hours to work, mandatorily sit at their computer screens . Versus others who wake up late (because no commute) and can walk about the house in their pyjamas.
It's a false dichotomy. It's not commute + "mandatory" screen time vs. sleeping in and wearing PJs.
When I worked in offices, I enjoyed commuting, it gave me time to listen to podcasts and transition between home and work. Working in an office with other people brought many opportunities to socialize, get pulled into impromptu conversations, take long lunches, and leave really early (to beat the commuters) if I needed to get home for some kid's after-school activity.
I work remotely now, and I still have to wake up on time, get dressed (hello video chat!), and be accountable. If I step away for a measurable amount of time, then I let people know in chat. It's far easier for a remote person to engage in overwork because there's not a clear boundary for when you're "at work" vs. "at home" (unless you create one). For better or worse, I "work more" as a remote employee than I ever did in an office.
The office folks who commute sometimes get to work late (traffic, train/bus issues, etc.), are pulled into random conversations and are unexpectedly unavailable just as much as any remote person. Are they contributing more by being in the office, or is the value just in their "presence", that you could literally tap them on the shoulder?
IMO, It all comes down to communication and empathy. If you're experiencing a major issue because you have to wait 10 minutes for someone to finish walking their dog, then imagine that person were in the office but in the bathroom. Would you still sneer at them because they were holding you up? Very few conversations are _SO_ urgent that you absolutely need an answer immediately. Having remote coworkers allows us to engage more thoughtfully with each other, and often pushes us to write more (and more useful) documentation so that we _aren't_ expecting immediate answers from any specific human.
>Having remote coworkers allows us to engage more thoughtfully with each other, and often pushes us to write more (and more useful) documentation so that we _aren't_ expecting immediate answers from any specific human.
this is very interesting - is this emergent behavior or have you guys figured out some todos that makes this an effective tool ?
for example, do you consciously allocate more time for documentation by developers, than you did before remote workers ? is there a particular way you do this that makes it better, etc ?
This is my experience at the company I'm currently at which has offices in SF and other US locations, as well as a significant number (as a % of the Eng team) of remote people across the country. I don't know the origin story, as the practice was in place when I joined this team, but it's proven its value time and time again. We do consciously make time to document and discuss how to make that information more useful/discoverable/accurate.
* Use the tools - ticket tracking, chat rooms, wikis or other documentation repositories
* Own it - engage in the conversation, do the work, help the whole team get better, accept responsibility, acknowledge your own mistakes, and acknowledge others' wins and contributions
* Do it in public - @mention people in tickets, etc., use PUBLIC chat spaces, use org-wide sharing of documents
A company I worked for in the past, which had a SF office and a smaller number of remote engineers, did not embrace the value of thoughtful written communication, and ultimately didn't see the value of remote engineers. It fostered a culture of "need-to-know" conversations where they felt if you couldn't be "in the room" then you simply weren't going to have the information you needed. They didn't value recording (video, text, etc.) the agenda, discussion, or outcomes of these discussions, so it only lived on in the individuals involved. This artificially stunted the remote engineers, and in turn it backfired on the entire team's productivity.
In my experience, this has been both an emergent behavior that has worked out well, and subsequently a culture/process that has been encouraged by management for new members (both remote and in-office) of the team.
There hasn't necessarily been a need to allocate more time for documentation, except for everyone getting in the habit of default communication modes being easily accessible documentation (common wiki/docs that all decisions, specs, and proposals go into) ... so it's not a "more time" thing, as much as it's a "don't send an email, but instead update the docs"
I work at Stripe and I'm not sure the answer to the question, largely because it hasn't come up that I know of; most folks enjoy working in our SF office (even many who usually decry open seating plans).
I often work from home (or will WFH until ~11am, and commute in after traffic). I also know some SFBA Stripes who work from home more often than in the office. To an ancestor's point, I am not remote and often do code in my PJ's.
I think there may be at least one Tahoe/Truckee-based remote, but I may be misremembering...
Why would you expect remote to be less efficient? Working in an open office is incredibly distracting—of course there’s productivity gains from going remote.
My experience is that some people genuinely are less productive without the social pressure net of their co-workers around them, or literally the boss on-hand as a sort of "productivity enforcer." It's varied wildly from job to job, office culture to culture, and at an individual level, but I take all those experiences with me and it tints my perceptions of productivity as well.
I remember when I was a recruiter it was a life of KPIs handed on down from on high. Management would pat you on the shoulder as they walked by if you were on a call, expressing approval of your activity. We'd crack jokes only somewhat ironically like "any time is a good time for a client call!" If you were still in the office at 7, you could expect a heartfelt appreciative email from management. If you hadn't been on the phone for an hour, a boss may shout across the room "bit quiet over there, someone check if komali_2's napping!"
Then on the days that all of management was at an off-site, things got a lot "looser." Less calls, less grandstanding, more hanging out in the kitchen, longer lunch etc. I don't know if productivity was actually lower ( it probably wasn't ) but it felt that way, because of the culture of our work place.
To that business, the idea of working from home would be laughable. Never mind that there were independent recruiters working out of their house and pulling in literally millions in revenue. How could you be as productive as an office of hardcore recruiters with their managers setting excellent KPIs and tracking goals and establishing milestones and shouting "a bit quiet over there!" occasionally?
Of course now that I'm an engineer I'm easily more productive on my own at home or at a cafe than I am in my office for a multitude of reasons. My purpose is to explore and explain why some people, particular management, believe remote to be less efficient.
"If you were still in the office at 7, you could expect a heartfelt appreciative email"
This sort of thing is horrible. Stop normalizing this. It's OK not to work all day.
My kid goes to bed at 7:30 and I hate that my colleagues are so willing to work late, normalizing the idea that 6-7PM calls are OK. I mean, I get it - it's not their fault I had a kid, but hell, when IS it OK to stop working?
How could you be as productive as an office of hardcore recruiters with their managers setting excellent KPIs and tracking goals and establishing milestones and shouting "a bit quiet over there!" occasionally?
By separating the performance of "productivity" (i.e. nearly everything you mentioned) from actual productivity.
Not everyone does well with remote work. For those that do, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were nearly universally more productive...so long as the company is being serious about supporting it.
I agree, but it seems silly to assume that offices are peak productivity for everyone—this is a common excuse for not allowing remote work. Some of this is understandable but it really comes down to resentment between remote vs in person.
Are you by chance just noticing all of the empty space that was previously filled with non-productive time in an office?
I've worked remotely for about 5 years now. Without the water cooler talk, chit chat, and misc distractions, I can easily fit a 8+ hour day into less than 6 hours when I work from home.
I think it just depends on the person. I work full time remote for a 100% remote consulting company. Some people come in and do very well. Others don’t seem to be able to make the transition into remote.
I’ve worked with new hires that literally take entire days off and give excuses why they were unreachable. Sadly they are just shuffled around the company instead of disciplined but that’s another topic. But I figure in that case, they were probably not so great workers in-office either.
I work almost entirely remote today and definitely prefer it. (The people I work with are scattered all over the place anyway.)
But I can't really imagine how I would have done well working remotely towards the beginning of my career. It was a different time with far fewer communication tools but, even taking that out, it would have been very difficult both socially and in terms of work discipline.
What empty space? When I arrived at work, I work intensely, and hard. None of us want to be longer than we need to accomplish our work. Occasional chit chat while making coffee is definitely not slowing us down in any meaningful way. Except for a few places (contracting at government) I've never felt on site had too many distractions
I did remote for about two years. Found it really draining and too easy to go full workaholic and work into the late hours/be constantly stressed out. I'd like to try working remote again but I can totally get how it wouldn't work for some people. I'm way more likely to take a short breather in the office than at home
It’s not for everyone. I’ve been remote for the past 6 years and love it, but it definitely had a learning curve. Friends of mine have tried it and went back to the office.
One thing that has really helped me I’d having a non-work group of online friends who also all work remote. We can commiserate and trade tips.
I think this is the key to working remote. Having a network of people who also work remote online. I need to try that.
I work half of the time remote and sometimes feel very unmotivated due to lack of human contact. Having someone to just chat with would be awesome. Neat idea I wonder if there is a discord chat for that.
Yeah i currently WFH one day/week and i actually look forward to going into work the next day. I guess it might be different if you had family and kids, but i'm single and live on my own and I am a bit of a social person so i actually look forward to going into office.
I was a lead/senior developer of a team of ~10 (in a startup of 30). I was involved heavily in the direction of the company, as well as the day to day running of my team. I now work remotely with a 15 hr time difference. Nowadays I feel extremely left out of the direction of the company, the direction technically, and what my team is up to day to day. I try to close these gaps during calls with my team every day, but it's just not enough. This leads to intense feelings of anxiety and impostor syndrome.
As an example, I'm currently working on a proof of concept using Rust to replace some existing C++ that coordinates some Gstreamer pipelines. This sounds like the perfect task for remote: self contained task, redoing existing code, fairly small scope. But remote (or more specifically the time difference) makes it pretty difficult. I don't know Gstreamer that well, and I don't know the existing code that well. I'll often run into a problem that I KNOW someone on my team could answer in 2minutes, and unblock me. Instead I need to push through wasting valuable time trying to figure it out myself, or wait till they are online. Perhaps this is the time difference not the remote aspect at fault. If they were on the same timezone, it'd be a quick Slack message away
Now, I am reduced to writing code that slots in around my team. As for actual empirical metrics, I don't have many. We tend to track achievements as a team (OKR's etc), and my team has been hitting there goals mostly. I do feel we could achieve more though if I was onsite. A probably non valuable one might be Github commit count, which dropped from ~ 3500 for the 2018 year to ~ 300 for the last 6 mo. So at least on code alone, I am churning substantially less of it out.
I'm not poo-pooing remote btw. I think my story would be totally different in a 100% remote company, or a company with substantial remote presence. I think for me though, in this situation, I prefer on site.
Oh boy, my guess is that the 15hr time difference part is the biggest issue: it's rough to not have _any_ overlap in natural work hours.
Not to say that your issue might not be remote in general, but for me I definitely think that having much more than the 3 hour difference I currently have with my team would be tricky: just too much time where someone is waiting for someone else.
I can easily imagine other side of the world being tough. +/- 5 hours or so, you can reasonably time shift a bit so there's significant overlap in the course of the day. But you get into 12 hours and you're into one or the other ends of the call being well outside normal work hours. So it doesn't happen a lot on a regular and casual basis.
The work package that you are assigned to yourself is not necessary a problem with remote per se. It sounds like that the work package is not matching the skills/knowledge for assigned team. But you are correct, the ramping up of knowledge is much easier when the teams are close together where sharing of know-how is much lower.
This. Whenever someone asks "but how do they manage to be as productive as an office" I just roll my eyes
People who "can't adapt to it" usually is resistant to using technology to communicate efficiently. They're usually the ones who think it's just fine to do a quick loud meeting with a colleague (next to someone else's desk who has nothing to do with the conversation and is deeply annoyed by it)
Of course, talking in person is important, but it is absolutely not necessary to discuss 90% of mundane stuff.
"How do you remote work?" The answer is "Always work as remote, even if your colleague is next to you"
I'm not sure that's completely fair. A lot of people--perhaps especially those earlier in their careers--genuinely enjoy the social aspects of an office as well as the ability to grab a room and whiteboarding something with colleagues, etc.
Sure, the latter can be replaced with other forms of communications, but it's not a 1:1 replacement and I totally get why a lot of people wouldn't want to work remotely, at least not full-time.
its not about less productivity... its about perceived unfairness about quality of life by the in-office team. this is a very tenuous issue when you have one company with an inhouse and remote team at the same time. I made another comment to patio11's response up the thread.
As someone who works at a company with a lot of remote workers but also people who regularly work out of offices, I haven't personally experienced this. I'm sure there are people who feel forced to come into an office even though it's not their preference and resent those who don't have to. But I find that there are a lot of people who like coming into an office, people who mostly like working remote, and people who like doing a bit of each. So I don't see any sort of widespread resentment of people who choose/are allowed to work at home.
I don't see much of this within hybrid companies and don't see why it would occur. The whole point in a hybrid setup is you get to choose what suits you. If you want to work in an office with people, choose that. If you prefer to be remote, work remote.
> Im wondering what learnings has Stripe figured out that makes their remote workers as productive as their in-office employees.
Hmmm... you get done what you promised to get done during the sprint.
If a team member isn't doing what they promise to do, it doesn't matter if they're remote or not, you figure out a way to get them productive or help them pursue other interests. A remote employee isn't inherently less productive.
HN remote workers, does your company pay for your use of a coworking space? Or even fully manage it?
I've noticed that companies I admire greatly like Basecamp, and also in yesterday's Who's Hiring thread, that they list a $200-$300 monthly stipend towards coworking space fees as an employee perk. That doesn't seem quite enough to fully cover a coworking space in NY or SF. I'm tasked with building a remote engineering workforce myself in our business, and was initially thinking that we as the company will be the ones setting up the contracts with WeWorks etc. But perhaps you as an employee would actually prefer to be in control of that?
Are there companies that are fully remote but don't contribute anything towards coworking? If you're in that situation, what do you think of it?
Yes, my company (GitLab) fully reimburses me for the coworking space I rent. They don't manage it for me - I just submit the rent as an expense each month.
No. I work for a fully remote company, and we decided that individuals within the company could pay for working a coworking space if they wanted, but giving them a stipend for doing so created a benefit for those employees that didn't exist for employees that optimized their home office for remote work. Personally I am in favor of more pay for every employee across the board at an organization rather than trying to come up with lots of extra benefits to take advantage of to collect more money.
I think that some kind stipend for office/equipment/etc does make sense for companies that have remote and in-office employees, but feel that it should be a set amount and not tied to actual usage, as I feel that in those cases, the company is getting a clear benefit from the worker being remote, in not having to provide them with space in the office.
Tacking the would-be stipend onto base pay can remove the feeling of the benefit being provided at all.
e.g.
A: You get a salary and we also cover your gym membership
B: Your salary of $100k already includes a baked-in $50 a month for a gym
That said, definitely agree the stipend shouldn't only be for employees who choose a coworking space. Provide $X for either office space, or home internet & office expenses
Same. You can standardise equipment allowances but you can't standardise co-working costs, especially if you have international workers. Wework cost us roughly USD 700 per head in Sydney, USD 500 in London and USD 300 in Madrid.
I'm having a hard time reconciling
"They see how people purchase food differently in bodegas, konbini, and darshinis. They know why it is important to engineer robustness in the face of slow, unreliable internet connections. They have worked in and run businesses that don’t have access to global payments infrastructure." with this precision.
What's the point of mentioning typical south american or asian shops names and then offer north america only remote jobs ?
"And though we intend to hire remote engineers in Europe and Asia eventually, our hubs in Dublin and Singapore are not sufficiently established to support remotes just yet."
"There is substantial organizational, legal, and financial infrastructure required to support each new jurisdiction we hire in, so we have to be measured in how quickly we expand."
Each country you want to pay salary in comes with legal aspects. Therefore they have to be a bit tactical with where they try to hire people.
As remote guy I see potential for disruption in this area. So far umbrella subsidiaries or agencies and invoice-based contracting does the job, but stuff like IP rights and liability is quite complex.
We would need some Stripe-like service for employment matters.
In the US there are PEOs (professional employer organizations) that function as virtual co-employers that allow companies to hire in all 50 states without establishing a physical presence, handles payroll, state taxes, health insurance and benefits in all the states etc.
Something like that, but on a global scale, would be amazing for remote hiring. What unfortunately now seems to happen is that remote foreign employees get classified as contractors (which probably wouldn't stand up to any real scrutiny), which isn't great for either party.
This is spot on. People who've never had to deal with the administrative overhead of having to accommodate a new locale per employee don't realize how difficult it can be. There is substantial tooling on the front office side with respect to remote work, but the back office is sorely lacking and one of the key inhibiters of more companies doing this at sufficient scale.
I wonder if there are additional restrictions based on being in financial services. It may require different licenses, registrations, insurance and employer regulations (e.g. different collective bargaining agreement) compared to traditional industries.
I work remotely for a U.S. based company from South Africa. I don't think they do anything special for each different territory. The IRS stuff just has two categories - U.S. and outside U.S.
I'd love to apply for an engineering job at Stripe.
Not sure if this is true in Stripe's case, but in some cases contracts with clients (especially governments, financial firms, healthcare companies, and the like) have stipulations as to where work can be performed.
They clearly state in the article that this is because they aren't currently set up as well to accommodate remote people across disparate time zones, but are looking to resolve that.
South America, Mexico, and other North American countries exist in the same timezones as the US and Canada. Is it something to do with hiring regulations being too much of a pain to deal with in countries where Stripe doesn't feel like the best talent is?
Additionally, why not just offer remote positions that require you to work US hours? I manage just fine as someone self-employed and remote working with people in the UK. This wouldn't need to be a permanent solution, but I don't see why exclusion is necessary here.
Moving to remote work is hard and filled with problems to begin with. Adding different national holidays, connectivity challenges, cultures, languages, etc on top of that adds to the complexity. If remote work failed, is it because remote work doesn't work, or is it because of employees in different countries, or is it because of cultural differences, or is it because of...?
Starting with a limited trial seems a more risk-averse move. If remote work proves itself out, it can be expanded more easily than it can be retracted.
If you want to test out workers outside of USA but not have to solve the timezone related issues I recommend Colombia. There is at least one interested person there.
As someone who's worked remote with "timezone issues" before they're not for the company to solve.
If you live in Europe but work for a US company that requires you to work US times, it's simple, you work US times. This is how I've worked before and it's worked out perfectly. In fact, I'm a bit of a night owl so I much preferred it.
I disagree — those issues are totally for the company to solve. Or at least, the company should be prepared to meet employees halfway. If a North American company is going to insist that I work North American hours whilst living in Europe, I'm just not going to work there. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.
I live in Europe and work for a very remote-friendly, NY-based company, and I work pretty normal European hours. I have 2-3 hours of overlap with the various members of my team, and that's all I need. (In fact, I'm more productive in the morning here because it's easier for me to focus when our group chat is mostly quiet.)
Of course, it's not as simple as saying that you can work from anywhere for anybody at any time, but I don't think it's fair to say that timezone issues are not for the company to solve.
> And I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.
Your not, what AP thinks is reasonable would be considered rediculous if you frame it under normal satellite office scenarios. Can you imagine Sydney Googlers all catching the late train into the city to work the night shift. Like come on.
Re stripe limiting to NA only I get their concerns but its a failing approach. They're going to build out remote teams and a bunch of practices that rely on this timezone sync.
Swapping out real-time communication to async communication is going to be much, much harder once those practices are ingrained.
They also need to add more than just engineering into this remote hub. Having all your non engineers in offices is going to create a very odd adversarial culture.
No, this is not how the timezone should be solved, and great if it works for you, but this is just not sane for most people.
To solve the timezone issue, you put in place as much tools and processes as possible around working asynchronously instead of having meetings all days. This is why most remote setups work better in fully remote companies - they are more incentivised to put those things in place.
I work at a company where everyone is expected to be in the office. But we have early birds and night owls employed by the same company to work together. We don't have a formalized solution as night owls do as you described and get on up if they have work due in the morning. Or the early birds will stay up late to help the night owls finish.
But a lot of companies take on "Core hours" and essentially solve the timezone problem even with a physical office. With core hours management is deciding that they don't want to solve the "timezone issues".
I wonder how well the opposite end of the spectrum would work. Our async communication tools are pretty good these days. You could keep someone solving the problem all day long with just 3 or 4 hires but instead people choose to work on the problem in scheduled bursts of 6 hours with their entire team.
Also GitLab employee here. I work for the Geo team (geographical replication and disaster recovery), and funny thing is we are also sparsely geographically distributed. No single person in the same country. We have people spread out with all impossible timezones combinations, from US west-coast, Brazil, Europe (east/west) going all the way to Australia.
I think one of the fundamental things about remote work culture is default working async with occasional blocks of scheduled sync time, instead of default working sync with occasional affordance for async time (when you're at a meeting away from your desk etc.). You're working more the way an open-source project works, with higher-bandwidth higher-latency communication channels like email or code review tools instead of in-person conversations.
If you have timezone issues at all (outside of your on-call rotation), that means you haven't figured out your remote story yet. Which is totally fine! I'd have trouble imagining how you figure it out without already doing it. So it makes sense that they're starting in a half-remote state and then intending to get really remote at some point.
To offer a counterpoint to all the praise of remote working: I'm the living proof of a dysfunctional remote employee. I work effectively 20 minutes a day, sometimes not at all. In the morning meetings it's so easy to just wing something vague and get away with it. I guess the fundamental problem is that I work in a team where everyone more or less owns a separate part of the product and no-one has any insight in other peoples' work.
Very seldom and when they do it's something really trivial to fix/answer (which I can often do on my phone if I'm out doing... leisure stuff). I more or less have a permanent paid vacation.
I just looked at Stripe's job page and noticed they don't advertise any positions as "Senior" nor do they appear to list 'years required' in any of their listings.
Definitely a fresh take, and I hope it actually does yield better applicants and results!
Even people who were former VPs at Google often have the title "Engineering Manager". Sure, they mostly manage other EMs, but it's hard to precisely tell who is super senior and who isn't.
This actually plays out nicely, as it encourages everyone to default to each other as equals. Later on you'll hear things like "did you know that person built the entire first version of Atlas by themselves?" only to realize they are, in fact, very experienced. :]
> We are doing this to situate product development closer to our customers, improve our ability to tap the 99.74% of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs, and further our mission of increasing the GDP of the internet.
I’ve been at Stripe for 4 years, joined as an IC then shortly transitioned to an EM. Previously was an EM, and remote for 12 years total.
Noticeable differences:
- While I’m remote people tend to default to throwing time on my calendar, which means a conversation sometimes doesn’t happen. We use Slack, so I am highly responsive on Slack to ensure I’m still talking with folks I need to and would rather ping someone unnecessarily and ask about something than miss out on information. Ding words and DMs to offset the barrier to adding calendared time to talk.
- Capturing all “collisions” (we have awesome stairs to encourage this) is a lot different. As a remote, when I’m in the office it’s a bit special and people come up to me. When working in an office, I get less “Hey, what have you been up to?” conversations.
- Timezones are definitely harder in the office. In an office people generally have fixed blocks of time, since commuting has a cost. Being remote (from home) there is no commute cost, so I can split my day up if I need to without working overly long days. I worked with engineers in Europe, so having this flexibility to hop on a call at 6am and then take a break to hang out with my kids before school is super cool.
What doesn’t change? I believe the most effective management practices aim for predictability, and having inclusive behaviors. Also it doesn’t change how you show up to the job. When I’m in meetings, I need to look fully engaged and present, whether remote or in the office. I think this can be harder in a home office, being surrounded by your things vs. an empty conference room.
Happy to talk more about my experiences here or remote in general!
One thing I've found when working in a silo or remotely is the difficulty of getting accolades.
Pretty much all discretionary accolades like "team member of the month" is related to building rapport with the decision maker.
This factors into not just the employee of the month, but bonuses and layoffs.
I'm not even sure if abstracting this out into specific performance metrics is the solution, an individual will still want to give another certain individual praise at their discretion.
I always assumed work from home positions were very difficult to get because your pool of competition is so much bigger. Can anyone chime in if that's the case or not?
They can also be hard to find because they won't be advertised as remote. I'm full time remote but this wasn't mentioned in the job description, and I only found out after getting the job offer. I think management had the sense that advertising the position as remote attracted "the wrong kind of people".
I guess technically I have an "unlimited work from home" policy, because I do still have a desk if I want to go in.
One characterization I've heard is the "sits around in PJs and dicks around all day" - like a sickday that goes on forever. Which I have found almost never to be the case, or it was very obvious and they were let go pretty quickly.
I think there might be fewer people who actively seek them out, so competition might be similar to any other job. I know a common sentiment I see spread around to would-be remote workers is that you need to work on-site for a while and then be given the chance, which isn't always the case.
This is just me speculating though. I had no issues finding a fulltime remote gig but I think it might be more common for people like me in the DevOps/cloud area than strict developers maybe.
> There are still some constraints on our ambitions. In our first phase, we will be focused primarily on remote engineers in North America, starting with the US and Canada. While we are confident that great work is possible within close time zones, we don’t yet have structures to give remotes a reliably good experience working across large time zone differences.
I get the time zone thing. So why not South America?
Stripe is such an amazing company, and I am really glad that they keep pushing workplace innovation this way.
I am currently looking for a new job (exec level) and unfortunately I don't see any great fit with Stripe's current openings, otherwise I would simply love to see how the company operates from the inside.
Love it, and more companies should make it as evident and public as they are doing it today with the announcement.
Remote work is here to stay, and certainly the future, and one of the main reasons I am now working full-time in the space with my product, to help improve culture and communication within distributed teams, which is one of the main challenges around remote work. Edit: ps. in case you'd like to check it out it's https://standups.io
This is great to see. In the past, I had wanted to apply to Stripe, but left saddened when they didn't offer remote positions as I've worked remote for the past 3 or 4 years.
There are a lot of factors & regulations that make South America uniquely difficult. For example, regulations state that in Brazil the payment processors (like Stripe) cannot pay out funds until 30 days after they are earned.
This obviously isn't the best user experience. It will just take longer to build something truly great that can span the globe.
If anyone from Stripe is reading: is there any precedent for taking a remote role with a view to transitioning to an office role in the US while being sponsored for a visa?
Setting up payroll, writing employment contracts in different countries, timezone differences etc. are pretty valid but not unmanageable for a company of this size. Hope they expand it later once this turns out to be a great idea.
You also need to organize your engineer and product management layers to cover all the new locales which could mean much longer days for those people.
Probably lower them, which is bad if you're part of that demographic, but better for everyone else outside that very small group (which admittedly is probably a significant proportion of HN readers but a small proportion of the entire population)
I've seen a sign on the street level in Berlin of a Stripe office and heard that 10-20 people are working there with half of them in engineering. I realize that this probably doesn't count as a hub, but how does it fit in with what's explained in the blog post? Has Stripe more non-hub locations?
Stripe has offices in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Seattle, Amsterdam, Bangalore, Berlin, Dublin, London, Paris, Melbourne, Singapore, and Tokyo. Engineering hubs have organizational infrastructure that the rest of our offices may not, like dedicated reporting lines for engineers at the hub, engineering teams which exist at the hub and don't exist elsewhere, and similar.
We have engineers who work out of our non-hub offices as well, but there generally isn't intensive, permanent core engineering work being done out of them like there is in the hub offices.
I've always been curious why Stripe doesn't have LA offices. It seems (superficially, at least) to be ideal: same timezone as HQ, multiple top-tier colleges, a desirable climate, and a large engineering pool to source from.
> I don't understand what Stripe engineers work on all day.
Software products are icebergs. For all the things you see as a user, there's way, way more going on under the hood that you never see or think about. Some of that is platform/infrastructural work, some of it is features that target things you don't know or care about.
You can explore Stripe's website to get an understanding for their product size and scope: https://stripe.com/ .
Also, I promise you don't understand how much work goes on behind the scenes at payments companies around fraud detection and prevention. Fraud costs account for ~3% of revenues at large financial firms.
It's sad how they don't just have plans to hire in South America, Stripe as a service doesn't even work in South America. It looks like a market that's overdue for disruption.
> There are still some constraints on our ambitions. In our first phase, we will be focused primarily on remote engineers in North America, starting with the US and Canada.
Are there any other well known Silicon Valley companies that also are committed to remote work? Particularly with a focus on hardware/firmware type engineering? ;)
Specifically: We have remote data scientists (I work closely with one in Tokyo) and will have more in the future. Generally: every engineering workstream at Stripe will have remotes in it.
I was one of the first two simul-hire remotes at Mapbox (when the company was ~12 people) and, until I left in 2017, the longest-term remote there at seven years. I've been fully remote for thirteen years. At Mapbox, I unofficially took on the role of internal advocate for remote culture. It wasn't always easy to be remote, but as the company grew, Eric, the CEO, was fond of saying that "everyone is remote" since more and more physical hubs for work sprang up across many timezones. It was a tough balance, particularly as increasingly more work and customer opportunities centered around the Bay Area, and the spiritual heart of the company switched coasts from the official HQ in DC to the larger and faster growing office in SF.
Personally, I can't overstate how much being a remote employee and even freelancer has impacted my quality of life and my opportunities. For the most part, I was able to focus on my work and hook in to the rest of my teammates as needed. The best times of this were when the company engineering culture was very asynchronous and allowed for it. Slack and always-on expectations, as well as much more complex software in later years, made this more difficult, but still manageable.
It wasn't without struggle, though. Often it was lonely, isolating, I felt out of the loop on some decisions, I didn't get some in-jokes and nicknames, I missed the non-holiday parties and happy hours, etc. Even with that stuff aside, it takes a real commitment from the leadership to fully integrate remote team members. Kudos to Stripe for putting themselves out there and holding themselves accountable to the goal with a public statement and metrics.
The key snippet from the Stripe announcement is this:
> improve our ability to tap the 99.74% of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs
The future of much of the technical work that needs to happen is remote, and I'm glad to see Stripe embrace that.