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Coinbase will be a remote-first company

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#101

Post by codingdave »

Cookingboy wrote: post #7

I'm really curious, how many people actually prefer WFH permanently vs. just having the flexibility to WFH when wanted. If I wanted to stay home forever I'd have just taken a remote consulting job a long time ago, but I enjoy going to office and there is a lot of benefits that you don't get from being remote 100%. I've also made very good friends at work and I see my coworkers as much more than just another GitHub ac…

I've been working from home for almost a decade now. I absolutely prefer it. And most people I talk to prefer it. Clearly, not everybody... and I respect our differences, but the ones who prefer offices feel like a vocal minority to me.

The communication concerns you are talking about do exist when there is a mix of office-based and remote staff. But those problems evaporate when everyone is remote. You learn new communication styles, and everything is different, but it works. That being said, I do agree that if you have a split company, the remote staff ends up being a little out of the loop. For some people, that is acceptable, for others it is not. I'm in that boat at the moment, and I accept it because the benefits of being at home outweigh my desire to be involved in all decisions.

As far as lowering costs go, yes it is a cost saving measure and it does mean that cheaper talent gets hired in. And sometimes the talent is lower quality because of that as well. Again, whether or not that is acceptable depends quite a bit on your own career goals and motivations. I am a 47 year old coder, transitioning out of coding, who has already accomplished all I wanted to in this industry. Someone 20 years younger than me who is ambitious will certainly desire a different working environment than I.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#102

Post by peruvian »

xiphias2 wrote: post #32
Cookingboy wrote: post #7

I'm really curious, how many people actually prefer WFH permanently vs. just having the flexibility to WFH when wanted. If I wanted to stay home forever I'd have just taken a remote consulting job a long time ago, but I enjoy going to office and there is a lot of benefits that you don't get from being remote 100%. I've also made very good friends at work and I see my coworkers as much more than just another GitHub ac…

For me the biggest problem with working in an office was that tech hubs concentrate men, so it completely destroyed my dating life for years. My low social status of being just an average looking male outside work also made me depressed so much, I never ever want to feel that again. Also working in an office was the best with a small team in a separate room with a nice view, the noise from open office plans is so bad…

> tech hubs concentrate men

When people have this issue I always recommend NYC. I know it's not the easiest city to live in, even with a tech salary, but at least the gender imbalance is not a problem at all.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#104

Post by riffraff »

GordonS wrote: post #47
LB232323 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been working remote by choice for years. You don't have to stay at home, you just need internet access. This means you have the freedom to work from anywhere on the globe as long as you can access the web. This is a pretty straightforward advantage of the internet. Some jobs have always been "remote". For example, writers still type their manuscripts from anywhere and mail them to editors. However, only some j…

> You don't have to stay at home, you just need internet access. This means you have the freedom to work from anywhere on the globe as long as you can access the web I've been working from home for several years, but to be truely productive I need a separate working space with a good desk, good chair and multiple large monitors. On occasion I've worked from an airport or a cafe, but the noise, seating position, table…

I've also worked remotely for several years and while I work from my laptop I would still agree that working from a random location is not ideal.

Some cafes are ok, many airports are not, and anybody who ever tried to work in the sun knows how bad that can be :)

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#105

Post by yalogin »

This is inevitable. There are too many advantages for companies to encourage WFH. Reduce the entry level salaries for employees, save on building leases, no need to offer free food and more. The productivity will probably even increase too. I am sure they are all going over numbers to see how productivity changes.

For the employee though it’s going to be tough in the long run. Building relationships at work is one great way to get things done not just in the team but also across teams. So code might get written but the overarching dynamics about how things happen in a workplace are changing big time. We don’t see the effects of them until sometime.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#106

Post by tjbiddle »

GordonS wrote: post #50
tjbiddle wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More choice is always better, in my opinion. So I'd prefer flexibility to be WFH. My first "real" job had WFH options for T/H which I regularly took advantage of, and from April 2014 on I've been 100% remote. I rode out a few consulting gigs and then went full-time for a NYC company, my requirement was that I was able to WFH - and then I stayed living in Cincinnati at the time. I very thoroughly enjoyed my all-expens…

A bit OT, but you mentioned you are now living in Indonesia, and I gather you're a US citizen - can I ask what permit/visa you are on, or are you doing "visa runs" and staying on a holiday visa?

I've tried a few, haha

- Tourist Visa (30 days) - Visa On Arrival (30 days + 30 days extension) - Social Visa (180 days) - Business Visa (Valid for 1 year, but max 60 days at a time) - Bonus Visa: Emergency Visa for COVID-19 (Unknown - We're allowed to stay until they lift the restriction. Not much info right now, just know I'm legally allowed to be here even though I've overstayed my current 60 days on the Business Visa)

Correct - after you hit those limits you do a visa run. Just involves leaving the country and coming back. No one cares if you were gone for 6 hours or 6 years. I usually either do a morning flight to Singapore and evening flight back if I don't want to disrupt my life, or I'll take the opportunity to do a 1-2 week trip somewhere.

Pretty much the only "usual" route I haven't tried is the KITAS/KITAP which is a working visa. You would get this if you're either working for an Indonesian company, or running an Indonesian business and issue yourself the visa. These are good for 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years I believe.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#107

Post by xiphias2 »

peruvian wrote: post #102
xiphias2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the biggest problem with working in an office was that tech hubs concentrate men, so it completely destroyed my dating life for years. My low social status of being just an average looking male outside work also made me depressed so much, I never ever want to feel that again. Also working in an office was the best with a small team in a separate room with a nice view, the noise from open office plans is so bad…

> tech hubs concentrate men When people have this issue I always recommend NYC. I know it's not the easiest city to live in, even with a tech salary, but at least the gender imbalance is not a problem at all.

Sure, I should have done that before, actually it's a bit sad that I haven't done that when I was younger. At this point I have an asthma because of air pollution from living in cities, so I can't go there anymore, but I'm independent now.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#108

Post by jakecraige »

goblin89 wrote: post #98

Additional remote positions do not make a company remote-first any more than additional @media queries make a desktop website mobile-first. To understand what real “remote first” might mean, let’s define the status quo: “in-person first”. To me, in-person-first companies are those in which being a remote employee means hampered career potential, and mingling with the right people at the headquarters is sooner or late…

Brian calls this out and describes how Coinbase plans to do this in the “This will require a huge shift in how we do things. How will we get there?“ section.

> To address all of these, we will form a cross-functional team to oversee this transition. This group will identify the changes we must make to become a remote-first company (e.g., around people management, recruiting/talent, culture and connection, and documentation and async work…), host open design sessions with all of you to surface ideas, considerations, dependencies, and concerns, and partner with internal experts to redesign how all of this works for a remote-first Coinbase.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#109

Post by jakecraige »

aprao wrote: post #2

Official statement here: https://blog.coinbase.com/post-covid-19-coinbase-will-be-a-r... (Although it's annoying that I need to signup for an account to read the statement of a company's CEO) Wonder how they are going to handle the complexities around crypto custody (esp. cold storage), given it's hard to sign transactions with multiple signatures when your workforce is distributed.

We (Coinbase) already sign cold storage transactions in a distributed manner so this isn’t an issue :)

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#110

Post by jakecraige »

joelbluminator wrote: post #55

Any Coinbase employees here? Was wondering what the tech stack is, saw a job description mentioning breaking a Rails monolith into micro services - does that mean Coinbase switches to a different stack?

The main app powering coinbase.com, the “monorail”, is a Rails app backed by MongoDB. It’s typically what’s being referred to when breaking out microservices.

Historically most other services were Rails/Sinatra with Postgres. These days there’s a lot more Golang being used for new services.

There’s also some services that are serverless, using Lambda and DynamoDB but these are a minority.

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