51–60 of 277 posts
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
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I am full time remote for past 6mo. Never been less productive in my career. I'm looking to switch back to onsite as soon as I can. Edit: I'm not saying remote is bad - just that in my experience I'm definitely less productive.
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’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.
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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 a…
"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."
Overall it seems a bit strange to explain "we officially have a remote hub" and "remote workers need to be supported by physical hubs".
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 a…
> 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.
Definitely a fresh take, and I hope it actually does yield better applicants and results!
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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.
I am full time remote for past 6mo. Never been less productive in my career. I'm looking to switch back to onsite as soon as I can. Edit: I'm not saying remote is bad - just that in my experience I'm definitely less productive.
> 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.
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?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am full time remote for past 6mo. Never been less productive in my career. I'm looking to switch back to onsite as soon as I can. Edit: I'm not saying remote is bad - just that in my experience I'm definitely less productive.
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 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) wh…
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.