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Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
101–110 of 277 posts
Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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.
Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
#103..Remote (North America Only)..
Is this bad? I think it’s totally understandable.
Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
#104Where I currently work they wont let programmers work from home because:
Jealous coworkers who need to be at work. It's not fair clause.
Company insurance doesn't cover people working from home
Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
#105I 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.
Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
#107Does anyone have experience working remotely in a engineering manager (not IC) role? Did it work for you? What had to change?
Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 timezo…
if you are interested and want to solve this for your company, look into Gitlab. They are solving it and have very good public documentation on this.
GitLab employee here, yes we do! I honestly couldn't go back to a company without asynchronous communication.
Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 movi…
Are they not in Austin? I don't see it on the jobs page. Austin is the perfect combination of low COL and available talent in my opinion.
> 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.
Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
#110This is such a smart move.
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.