Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote

South America, Mexico, and other North American countries exist in the same timezones as the US and Canada. Is it something to do with hiring regulations being too much of a pain to deal with in countries where Stripe doesn't feel like the best talent is?

Additionally, why not just offer remote positions that require you to work US hours? I manage just fine as someone self-employed and remote working with people in the UK. This wouldn't need to be a permanent solution, but I don't see why exclusion is necessary here.

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.

I disagree — those issues are totally for the company to solve. Or at least, the company should be prepared to meet employees halfway. If a North American company is going to insist that I work North American hours whilst living in Europe, I'm just not going to work there. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.

I live in Europe and work for a very remote-friendly, NY-based company, and I work pretty normal European hours. I have 2-3 hours of overlap with the various members of my team, and that's all I need. (In fact, I'm more productive in the morning here because it's easier for me to focus when our group chat is mostly quiet.)

Of course, it's not as simple as saying that you can work from anywhere for anybody at any time, but I don't think it's fair to say that timezone issues are not for the company to solve.

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 agenda, in part because by default some decisions get made in a hallway and some information travels at the speed of coffee, and we've learned we should go out of our way to be inclusive of employees who don't passively benefit from those factors.

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.

I expect we'll continue publishing what we learn on this in Increment, our engineering blog, and other places. It seems unlikely to me that five years from now instituting this policy will be very contentious at well-run tech companies; that implies we, as an industry, have to get much better at this very quickly. We're always happy to share what we've learned.

My experience is that some people genuinely are less productive without the social pressure net of their co-workers around them, or literally the boss on-hand as a sort of "productivity enforcer." It's varied wildly from job to job, office culture to culture, and at an individual level, but I take all those experiences with me and it tints my perceptions of productivity as well.

I remember when I was a recruiter it was a life of KPIs handed on down from on high. Management would pat you on the shoulder as they walked by if you were on a call, expressing approval of your activity. We'd crack jokes only somewhat ironically like "any time is a good time for a client call!" If you were still in the office at 7, you could expect a heartfelt appreciative email from management. If you hadn't been on the phone for an hour, a boss may shout across the room "bit quiet over there, someone check if komali_2's napping!"

Then on the days that all of management was at an off-site, things got a lot "looser." Less calls, less grandstanding, more hanging out in the kitchen, longer lunch etc. I don't know if productivity was actually lower ( it probably wasn't ) but it felt that way, because of the culture of our work place.

To that business, the idea of working from home would be laughable. Never mind that there were independent recruiters working out of their house and pulling in literally millions in revenue. How could you be as productive as an office of hardcore recruiters with their managers setting excellent KPIs and tracking goals and establishing milestones and shouting "a bit quiet over there!" occasionally?

Of course now that I'm an engineer I'm easily more productive on my own at home or at a cafe than I am in my office for a multitude of reasons. My purpose is to explore and explain why some people, particular management, believe remote to be less efficient.