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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

#131

Post by pythonaut_16 »

dannyw wrote: post #46
rainyMammoth wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Offices are made to be productive I would invite you to revisit that assumption. Offices are made to FEEL productive. Who decides on getting an office? All the research shows that open spaces are a huge fad and make people on average less productive (for work that require deeper stretch of concentration). > Am I the only one that misses drinks with my colleagues, or dinner at a local restaurant after work? I am mis…

Open offices cost less. Real estate in SF, NYC, etc are incredibly expensive. So is that really a surprise?

Kinda sounds like you're arguing both sides of the issue.

Offices are meant to be productive, but real estate in SF, NYC, etc makes it too expensive to design offices for productivity.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#132

Post by nogabebop23 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #95
cjrp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you take the kids on vacation, and then work all day?

No, you work regular hours in transit or on site. Then enjoy the evenings and weekends with them in a new place. It's quite nice if you can swing it. (Kids not too young and non-working family to help.)

what do your kids do while moomy or daddy needs quiet for several hours do focus on work?

>> Then enjoy the evenings and weekends with them in a new place

So pay all the costs and negatives of being away from home and get something similar to what you already have? No thanks.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#134

Post by nogabebop23 »

Cookingboy wrote: post #24
noneeeed wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think flexibility is the key. All the things that are touted as pros and cons of both WFH and office working are highly dependent on the individual, the company, the type of work, people's housing situation, disability, and many small life choices. Whenever this topic comes up I'm always rather disappointed to see how many people struggle with the idea that their situation is not everyone's situation, and make blan…

The problem is that it likely snowballs one way or another if you allow full flexibility. If more people initially chose to work at the office, then the minority WFH people will inevitably be at a disadvantage and they would feel potentially left out of a lot of developments that take place in the office. Then they may end up forcing themselves to go to the office from time to time or move to a different company wher…

People who have experienced multiple varations of WFH know that this is true. You can have all colocated or remote-first, but adding flexibility for any other varations means someone is a second-class employee and more work for them. It's not imposssible; plenty of companies are blended, but it's not ideal.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#135

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

tjbiddle wrote: post #26

Why does Coinbase have their publicly facing blog on Medium, which has a free article viewing limit?

It's crazy, right? Maybe it gets them more viewers from within that ecosystem but I find it hard to believe that it's a net positive.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#136

Post by partyboat1586 »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #97
partyboat1586 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your work buddys today will be gone tomorrow. Most work relationships are shallow and transitory. If that's your thing because you're extroverted then great but a lot of people in tech are more ambiverted or introverted, they value deeper more meaningful relationships. What I see a lot is introverted or ambiverted people tricked into believing their work buddies will call after they leave the company. Tricked into sp…

> What I see a lot is introverted or ambiverted people tricked into believing their work buddies will call after they leave the company. Tricked into spending time on this shallowness outside of work hours + commute time over spending time with the people in their lives that really matter and will be there for them in darker times. I’m sorry you’ve apparently had bad experiences (and I’m trying really hard to be char…

I'm not taking about myself. I don't have any trouble making friends and I'm not introverted. Also using that as a jab is... well we will get to that.

I'm talking for people I've known who were in this situation because they won't talk about it themselves... Because they are introverted they are only going to talk about it with people they are close to. I've been close with a lot of introverted people because I love getting to know people and I care about them.

You seem to think that introverted people are not as good as everyone else because they struggle to make friends. That is fucked up. That is the kind of shit they deal with all the time and you wonder why so many introverts have social anxiety.

I never said all work relationships are shallow and I'm not devaluing shallow relationships either. I'm saying shallow relationships have less value for introverted people and it takes social energy for them to participate in these relationships that could be better spent elsewhere.

I personally love being in an office where I can spend time with my co workers. I go to the social events, I spend time with them outside of work. Because I have more social energy than introverted people and I don't care that I won't see most of these people in a few years.

I personally think the ideal situation for an introvert is a long term job working at a small company with the same people. Unfortunately that's hard to come by. Most introverted people would be better off with remote work because they can then live in the same city as their close friends and don't have to expend so much social energy just to get a paycheck.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#137

Post by jasonv »

xoxoy wrote: post #116
jasonv wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have zero desire to go into an office. Ever. Very happy WFH, and have.. on and off, for years. Sometimes self-employed. Also like part time digital nomad-ing. Companies that are WFH friendly tend to have less meeting waste and office culture time wasting. The last company I spent time at had a nice building but horrible amenities. The kitchens were swampy and busy, meeting rooms difficult to schedule, inaccessible…

there’s a difference between being remote and knowing most coworkers are in one location and time zone and being remote first and having everyone in multiple time zones. I assume most who choose to be “remote” will stay in the US, but if “remote first” ends up being a dozen time zones there is no advantage to that at all, in fact it just becomes a massive scheduling headache.

And I've worked in the in-between configuration, where remote first was US oriented. Our co-workers in Asia worked our schedule, or at times, overlapped a bit.

That includes organizations where there was no office (well, a condo in the Philippines, for people who wanted to collect occasionally or when local weather impacted connectivity).

It's easier if everyone worked a PST schedule, but in other instances... having hand-off overlaps allowed for teams to work independently but also leverage their counterparts.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#138

Post by joelbluminator »

jakecraige wrote: post #110
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.

Thanks. But is Ruby considered something deprecated? I'm mainly a Ruby guy and want to keep it that way is why I'm asking.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#139

Post by whateveracct »

dannyw wrote: post #38
rainyMammoth wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more. Offices are needed for "controlling" reasons. Bosses and middle manager types want to make sure you are around doing your thing. You also need to realize that offices are not made to be productive but are made so that people can escape their daily life: Kids at home, or wife that you don't want to see anymore. Just check all the people with kids that cannot wait to go back to the office.

That’s so cynical. Offices are made to be productive, including by aggregating everyone into one physical place and fitting it out with functional, ergonomic and productive equipment — beyond your desk, it also includes whiteboards, meeting rooms, and even the water cooler. It’s also a place of team and social bonding. Am I the only one that misses drinks with my colleagues, or dinner at a local restaurant after work…

The office exists to ensure that you commit 40+ hrs/week to the company. Whether that time is productive or not isn't the point. All that matters is the company owns that time.

You can work remotely and commit literally half that amount of time to the company and maintain the same output. That's 20+ hrs/week of loss you've now reclaimed for yourself.

You can spend some of those 20+ hrs on social activities and events. I made plenty of friends at local video game tournaments. We actually have common interests compared to an office where you're stuck with whomever happens to work there.

Re: Coinbase will be a remote-first company

#140

Post by skuthus »

sverhagen wrote: post #44
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…

> I do not want a hip fancy office full of zany perks and a weird cult. Notice taken. Good for you (not sarcastic). This is why you "have been working remote by choice for years". But as the OP said: > If I wanted to stay home forever I'd have just taken a remote consulting job a long time ago ...and he didn't. Neither did I. In the past I have worked remotely for about a year, it wasn't great (admitted that company…

Is it really that surprising that people want socialization after going this long without it? Waiting in line at the DMV would be the social event of the year given our current climate.

You might get more honest results after people are back in the office for a bit.

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