
Stripe's remote engineering hub, one year in - dochtman
https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub-one-year
======
robert_g
The points under "Cultural improvements" can't be stressed enough:

* When only one member of that team is remote, they often suffer a combination of isolation ... and organizational burden ...

And their approach to foster inclusiveness is a great checklist:

* We nominated a site lead ... to be responsible for the overall happiness and productivity of the hub. * We ensure that our leadership regularly visits the hub via Zoom meetings to lead discussions, answer questions, and provide a sense of connection. * We encourage virtual coffee chats to promote a sense of belonging. * We survey the team regularly and review feedback and people data, so that we can understand both the shared needs of our employees and the particular needs of a hub.

Remote doesn't have to mean work from home, and I can attest that having too
few remote employees and not enough cultural investment is a recipe for
failure.

An ole employer had a satellite office with just a few employees. The main
office was in a city in a different state. There were many occasions where we
were in the dark about talks that'd happened at HQ, activities, and even some
times when the owners would let folks leave early on Friday! Without dedicated
leadership and effort to make sure employee are included, even a small
satellite office can feel isolated and neglected.

In the end there were just 3 engineers total, all in different teams. I left a
year after the company restructured, closing the satellite and everyone was
WFH.

~~~
mdorazio
To add another story... a previous company I worked at had an HQ of about 700
people in Chicago with satellite offices of 20ish people in a number of
locations, one of which I worked at. After a couple years it was extremely
obvious that the satellite offices were not only left out of important
discussions and considerations from HQ, but were also treated very poorly in
comparison when it came to bonuses and promotions. This despite many of the
satellites being more percentage-profitable with higher growth than HQ. It led
to a toxic environment and a personal lesson to be wary of working away from
an HQ.

------
netcyrax
Am I the only one thinking that "remote" would mean "anywhere in the world",
but most of the times mean "anywhere in the country" (in Stripe's case, the
US)? Is it even possible, due to legal/logistics, to have really
"internationally remote" workforce?

~~~
patio11
Broadly, there are tradeoffs, including organizational risk tolerance, and
which margins one is permitted or not permitted to take which risks on.

For example, some software companies are regulated in some jurisdictions. A
not-too-hypothetical regulation is "regulatee understands and enthusiastically
consents to unannounced site inspections by regulator at any time of our
choosing." Thankfully, this doesn't apply to most software companies, but ones
who it does apply to have hopefully long-since had a chat with their competent
legal professionals about _precisely_ what the definition of a "site" is.

There are many, many issues like this, and they're fractally complicated. Even
the basics of "How do I hire a full-time white collar employee with the
standard package plus equity?" vary substantially between jurisdictions.
Setting up the infrastructure for it in a jurisdiction can take the better
part of a year. (It would be an excellent thing, for everyone, if
jurisdictions decided to compete on ease to employ their residents.)

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
A lot of smaller companies elect to onboard international employees as the
employee’s country’s equivalent of a 1099 rather than setting up the local
infrastructure. I am not sure at what point this no longer becomes viable
because it’s obviously not a practice followed by larger corporations for the
most part.

------
khalilravanna
Two things I’d be most interested in are:

1) Career Opportunities: what’s the rate of promotion, moving into management
for remotes vs non remotes

2) Compensation: is an engineer an engineer an engineer? Or are there SF
engineers and Tulsa engineers and Austin engineers, each with different salary
bands?

~~~
patio11
1)

We're extremely solicitous of there being advancement opportunities for
everyone in every office. This is something that we're looking at over time.
Companies that can't manage this will lose to ones who can, as their seasoned
talent moves to places where it is valued appropriately.

Promotion isn't co-extensive with moving into management; we have senior IC
tracks, too, including in engineering, and many remote engineers happen to be
senior ICs. (IC = "individual contributor", meaning "has no people reporting
to them." I am an IC at Stripe.)

2)

Like most employers, we craft compensation to be competitive with what we
perceive as the market. We expect that geography will continue to influence
who the “marginal buyer” is for most engineering talent, which will in turn
influence prevailing compensation. That said, we expect that the importance of
geography in determining compensation will continue to shrink, and data
suggest that candidates outside of major tech epicenters have found our offers
to be very competitive.

While a lot is said and written about how geographic compensation “should” be
done, tech company hiring is at root a highly competitive and vibrant market.
If our (or any other company’s) strategy is wrong, the market will quickly
tell us.

~~~
GordonS
> Promotion isn't co-extensive with moving into management; we have senior IC
> tracks, too, including in engineering, and many remote engineers happen to
> be senior ICs. (IC = "individual contributor", meaning "has no people
> reporting to them." I am an IC at Stripe.)

This sounds great, and I wish more organisations did this - for most, it seems
there is an absolute limit at which your career path stops dead.

~~~
UncleMeat
Unfortunately, this is largely a fundamental issue. It is _outrageously_ hard
for an IC to have impact that is orders of magnitude more than their peers.
Volume maybe. But in terms of impact? Really hard.

Managers get to cheat, to some degree. They instead are tasked with organizing
a whole bunch of people - who _can_ achieve things that a single person never
could. So a manager has a much easier "I made the company 10% more money"
story than an IC.

Some organizations try to fight this bias, but it is hard and takes a clear
framework for promotion guidelines and constant vigilance.

~~~
exged
High-level IC roles (in the companies that have them) are still leadership
roles. They are just technical leadership roles instead of people management
roles. They may not have direct reports, but they are still responsible for
getting big projects done, usually by organizing a large number of engineers.

------
147
A while back I was looking for a remote position at Stripe. I live near the
Chicago area and was told I couldn't work remotely because they were starting
a Chicago office and wanted me to be there instead.

~~~
patio11
Feel free to check back in the next time you're looking; our appetite for
"remotes in the same city / metro area we have an office in" has been
increasing over time, particularly as individual offices mature.

~~~
satvikpendem
Are there opportunities for partial remote, or WFH when you want but go into
the office sometimes as well? In my case I'd like to live in the city and go
in but also work from a coffee shop or at home on certain days, to get some
variety.

~~~
patio11
This was reasonably common for our office-based employees in better times. I
expect it will be even more common when we re-open our offices.

~~~
satvikpendem
Sounds good, Patrick. You'll be seeing my application later this year :)

------
justinclift
Heh Heh Heh. After the article talks up all of benefits of remote working, and
how they can hire in any of 50 countries, there's a link to "these are our
remote positions".

 _Every one_ of which has leading text stating:

    
    
      Remote in North America only
    

Something seems off. Pass.

~~~
patio11
I work at Stripe, including on this post. As we mentioned, our remote hiring
is in scaled production mode in the U.S. and Canada, and in early stages
elsewhere. We anticipate this will change, and are working towards changing
it, as quickly as various constraints allow.

~~~
flunhat
There are 212 job openings listed on Stripe's careers page as either located
in the United States or remote. Of those, 17 are remote (~8%) & the rest are
not. So even excluding non-US listings, it's a small percentage -- Seattle has
~30%, SF has ~50%, NYC has ~11%.

Even though a single job listing can/does represent multiple job openings,
that's true for all the listings as well. So all other things being equal, I
would expect Stripe to have _way_ more remote listings if it's been as
successful as this post implies. Which leads me to believe the reality is much
more nuanced and that the blog post is a bit heavy with PR fluff (no shame!).

Also, big fan.

~~~
patio11
I'm pretty confident that we made only true claims, particularly the ones with
numbers. If your model doesn't agree with our SQL, I think the maximally
polite observation I can make is that one of us is probably wrong.

~~~
Shorn
Or both.

------
echan00
super tough to take this post seriously, it sounds very much like a company
marketing/recruiting post

------
LunaSea
I wonder what the engineering comps are.

~~~
andy000
I wonder about this as well because usually the inclusion of remote engineers
is usually to pay less comp than main locations especially when outside the
country.

------
buboard
"Remote Work Is Eating The World" , next week on HN

~~~
twic
I'm already looking forward to the front page in 2025: "What's the secret of
our success? We did the unthinkable and co-located our whole team in one
office."

