Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote

#261

Post by def_true_false » Sat, May 04, 2019, 12:10 AM UTC

perlgeek wrote: post #219

ebg13 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops a person from lying (within a reasonable time difference) about where they live?

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 t…

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.

Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote

#262

Post by drited » Sat, May 04, 2019, 7:59 PM UTC

luminati wrote: post #166

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 wo…

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.

Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote

#263

Post by redisman » Sun, May 05, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

kossae wrote: post #205

robocat wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand this. 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…

> then why wouldn't you pay USD200k in all areas? 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).

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.

Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote

#264

Post by redisman » Sun, May 05, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

rak00n wrote: post #245

kossae wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then why wouldn't you pay USD200k in all areas? 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).

In that case what if I use the zip code for getting a better salary and then just move a cheaper location?

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.

Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote

#265

Post by redisman » Sun, May 05, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

aantix wrote: post #240

sciurus wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stand up to them by doing what? Moving to SF? Turning down the job and working for a local company that pays even less?

Put multiple offers against each other? If you're already in a remote engineering position, show that you bring more value than Tom in SF, even though he's paid more.

That's pretty difficult right now since not that many companies offer remote (yet).

Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote

#266

Post by redisman » Sun, May 05, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

Androider wrote: post #143

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 engineerin…

Previous company no, current company yes. I much prefer it even if I don't go in every week.

Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote

#267

Post by redisman » Sun, May 05, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

caprese wrote: post #40

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…

I work at a 80% remote company (we have two smallish offices). We definitely get accolades for a well made project once it ships.

Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote

#268

Post by redisman » Sun, May 05, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

stevens32 wrote: post #252

akyu wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had no idea there might be some connotation about remote workers as some kind of people, any idea what they may have meant?

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.

Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote

#269

Post by redisman » Sun, May 05, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

kierenj wrote: post #113

Uhm, "Remote in North America only" though?

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.

Re: Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote

#270

Post by redisman » Sun, May 05, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

ahstilde wrote: post #146

xadhominemx wrote: post #130

Why does Stripe need 5 engineering hubs? I don't understand what Stripe engineers work on all day.

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.

Also how terrible and archaic financial insitutions APIs are if you're used to nice polished REST APIs from the web..