
Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote - geordilaforge
https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub
======
incanus77
This is such a smart move.

I was one of the first two simul-hire remotes at Mapbox (when the company was
~12 people) and, until I left in 2017, the longest-term remote there at seven
years. I've been fully remote for thirteen years. At Mapbox, I unofficially
took on the role of internal advocate for remote culture. It wasn't always
easy to be remote, but as the company grew, Eric, the CEO, was fond of saying
that "everyone is remote" since more and more physical hubs for work sprang up
across many timezones. It was a tough balance, particularly as increasingly
more work and customer opportunities centered around the Bay Area, and the
spiritual heart of the company switched coasts from the official HQ in DC to
the larger and faster growing office in SF.

Personally, I can't overstate how much being a remote employee and even
freelancer has impacted my quality of life and my opportunities. For the most
part, I was able to focus on my work and hook in to the rest of my teammates
as needed. The best times of this were when the company engineering culture
was very asynchronous and allowed for it. Slack and always-on expectations, as
well as much more complex software in later years, made this more difficult,
but still manageable.

It wasn't without struggle, though. Often it was lonely, isolating, I felt out
of the loop on some decisions, I didn't get some in-jokes and nicknames, I
missed the non-holiday parties and happy hours, etc. Even with that stuff
aside, it takes a real commitment from the leadership to fully integrate
remote team members. Kudos to Stripe for putting themselves out there and
holding themselves accountable to the goal with a public statement and
metrics.

The key snippet from the Stripe announcement is this:

> improve our ability to tap the 99.74% of talented engineers living outside
> the metro areas of our first four hubs

The future of much of the technical work that needs to happen is remote, and
I'm glad to see Stripe embrace that.

~~~
kweinber
"Often it was lonely, isolating, I felt out of the loop on some decisions, I
didn't get some in-jokes and nicknames, I missed the non-holiday parties and
happy hours, etc."

I am in this boat now. . . and find it really tough. Many others I know feel
the same way but it is rarely talked about. How do you get over the social
isolation of being remote?

~~~
incanus77
There are two parts to this: work and your local community.

For work, you're not going to do it alone. Someone on the HR side (or just
general management, if the company is still quite small) is going to have to
be a willing sounding board for remote employee concerns.

On the social side, this might be supporting a policy (as Mapbox did, maybe
still does) of flying remotes to the holiday and other big parties, as well
as, if able, just having them in every month or two to work alongside the non-
remotes and make those connections. When I first started, I'd fly from
Portland to DC for a week every 6-8 weeks. It helped that I lived in DC prior
for five years (before Mapbox), so it felt like a natural connection.

On the technical and process side, we had a policy of things not existing (or
not existing properly) unless they were in written form. This included
decisions, context, back-and-forth reasoning, announcements, etc. We used
GitHub for non-code "tickets" this way, almost like an internal blog and
topic-focused discussion forum. This broke down in later years, but even to
the scale of dozens of people was a great way to make sure that being 3,000
miles away and three hours "behind" wasn't as isolating.

For the local community part, go to meetups. Organize a weekly/biweekly social
gathering with likeminded friends or peers. Work in coffee shops or other
places out of the house. I found that I went stir crazy when I first started
remote, because I wouldn't leave the house and needed some human contact.
Placing all of that expectation on your employer and not on yourself is
unreasonable. It takes effort.

~~~
rolleiflex
> On the technical and process side, we had a policy of things not existing
> (or not existing properly) unless they were in written form. This included
> decisions, context, back-and-forth reasoning, announcements, etc. We used
> GitHub for non-code "tickets" this way, almost like an internal blog and
> topic-focused discussion forum.

We are working on making this process more scalable at Aether’s Pro version,
it is especially useful for remote companies as you mentioned. It helps that
we are a remote company as well, eating your own dog food is the fastest way
to improve. If you’d like to get on the pilot, hit me up and I’ll add you in.

------
a9a
I hope other companies follow Stripe's lead here. Anecdotally, I've never been
as happy and productive as I've been the past few years as a remote worker. It
seems to me too few companies are taking advantage of the opportunity here.
The few challenges I've encountered seem solvable: (1) effective team culture
building: can be solved with travel budget & prioritization of good team
cultural norms by team leads (2) whole team collaborative brainstorming
(particularly when facing a "fire drill"-type time-constrained challenge):
more challenging to solve from what I've seen, but might be solved by some
combination of better tech and better work practices

I'm interested to hear how Stripe addresses these and which challenges they
find.

One question at a higher level: what are the immigration law impacts here?
Does Stripe need to get H1Bs for internationally located workers? I hope not:
effective remote work is fantastic step toward bringing labor mobility more in
line with capital mobility, with potentially positive effects on income,
taxation, and social policies for people around the world.

~~~
BurningFrog
> _The few challenges I 've encountered seem solvable_

I see a lot of people saying this.

I never see anyone saying "We _have_ solved these problems"...

~~~
ghaff
Well, they're probably ongoing challenges that any company needs to consider--
and I'd argue that culture and communications can be challenges even within a
company location as it scales. I'd shy away from ever saying they're "solved."

But the fact that there are successful companies with a significant percentage
of remote and/or distributed workers suggests that they can be solved well
enough.

------
luminati
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 work, I think we're
probably to going to think of true value based salary scales (you are creating
X$ of value, therefore you are to be paid a fraction of that) as opposed to
geo based scales (you may be an icpc world finalist living in Kathmandu but
you will be paid 1/10th of a boot camper from SF because 3rd world).

~~~
throwaway4721
They are compensated according to locale. Our Google sheet of offer anecdata
contains a few entries for Stripe, some remote and some SF. I’ve seen a salary
difference of 30%. I don’t know the people who entered them personally so I
can’t speak to how well they performed during the interview, so take that with
a grain of salt.

~~~
robocat
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 into
the same network.

~~~
kossae
> 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).

~~~
0xDEFC0DE
This should be reversing because the internet grants us easy access to this
data, so market signals should be forming, but it isn't reversing, which is
suspicious. Getting the data is harder, but we do already have data sets to
compare to (and can apply inflation, CoL, other adjustments as time goes on).

The only real reason for zip-code adjustments would be some labor-related,
CONUS, or state laws that I'd be unfamiliar with.

If I deliver the same business value as a Silicon Valley engineer, and you're
paying me less, I'm getting arbitrage'd.

~~~
abj
I agree, if we're getting paid differently based on zip code but producing the
same business value we're getting arbitrage'd. The question is; how do we as
developers make money off this market inefficiency?

We have a few options. 1\. Negotiate better salaries. This is only possible
when the purchasing price of the next best developer also increases. This
already happens in the Bay area market. It is happening slower outside the
Bay. 2\. Start own our business. We hire the best developers at a higher rate
which raises the market rate for a developer. This is happening in the Bay but
much more slowly outside. 3\. Move to a better geographic market. A lot of
people who can chose this.

Developers probably can't exploit/correct this market because we have no way
of directly/quickly making profit from the price difference.

I would love for developers to capture a larger share of the value they
create. Does anyone have any ideas on how to restructure the incentives of the
market to make this happen? (Cooperatives?)

------
ngngngng
I've always wanted to switch to fully remote. I worked from home for a couple
weeks after my son was born and my current company didn't like it. My
productivity was down and they noticed so they informed me I wasn't allowed to
work remotely anymore because of it.

Obviously it had nothing to do with the fact that they gave me 3 days of
parental leave after the birth, so I was trying to help a recovering wife take
care of a needy child.

~~~
throwaway55554
There are pros and cons. I've been partial remote for 6 years and full remote
for nearly 5. I can do whatever I need to do to get into the flow of work;
music, no music, lights, no lights, etc. I don't have to conform to what
happens at an office. I can start early or work late (my "office" is several
time zones away). I can take a personal call w/out feeling guilty.

What I cannot do is walk over to a colleague's desk and chat. I miss hallway
conversations about the project. Phone meetings are always a pain as someone
is usually too far from the mic and I can't hear. I don't work in a city that
has a "tech" community. I can't take my setup with me and go sit at a coffee
shop (part of my project is writing hw controls).

I love remote work. But, I miss people.

~~~
ellius
There are certain jobs that I think could really benefit from pairing, akin to
pair programming. I used to do compliance work for a bank, and I think as a
whole our reporting defect rate would have plummeted had we worked in pairs.
Obviously for some jobs this is cost prohibitive and otherwise impractical,
but an ideal working environment for me would be remote and part-time pairing.
You get consistent human interaction, information flow across the team, and
the benefits of remote work.

~~~
benji-york
We've done a few "mobbing" sessions with three remote people and it worked out
very well. We got a lot done and we all felt a high level of energy for days
afterward.

------
dhd415
Great to see that a well-known company such as Stripe is embracing remote work
because they've seen that remote workers are effective, not just as a
mechanism to leverage locales with lower wages. Hopefully other companies
follow suit.

~~~
throwaway4721
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.

~~~
dhd415
It's certainly possible that Stripe is offering productivity as the reason for
their embrace of remote work when it's really about cheaper labor, but I'm
hopeful. I know there are other companies where those decisions are
transparently about lowering costs, but if what you say about remote workers
typically getting less equity is true, too, that's pretty disappointing.

~~~
Bartweiss
Buffer (which has been remote-heavy for a long time) handled this by
explicitly breaking their salary assessment into multiple elements. In
addition to base salary-for-role and various experience adjustments, they have
a public "price sheet" describing the cost of living adjustments they apply
for different locations.

It's not a perfect system, I'm sure. CoL is reduced to three fairly broad
bands, and other pay elements like experience and performance are potentially
skewed by remote status. But I think it's an appealing approach in general.
Candidates know in advance what to expect and can move somewhere more
expensive without needing to find a new job. Meanwhile, the company saves some
money, but still gets access to remote candidates in expensive cities where
they don't have offices.

I suppose it would drive away any remote worker who's consciously living
somewhere cheap to increase effective salary, but presumably that's offset by
getting access to people in DC, NYC, Boston, etc. who aren't open to other
cost-saving remote jobs.

~~~
aantix
Why would the cost of living factor into salary at all?

I write the code. I offer architectural decisions. I'm working on the most
demanded features by the customers, bringing more value to the product.

What if I pair program on a feature from a person in SF? My efforts are still
paid less.

Who cares if I wrote the code from SF or Vietnam.

I wish more remote workers would stand up to these businesses looking for a
way to lower their costs.

As for the engineers, the whole "midwest nice", "flyover feebleness", "sure is
great to just have an opportunity to work remotely" mindset has to change.
Don't let them discount your value.

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

~~~
aantix
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.

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

------
max_im
Bravo Stripe! I work for a company that allows me to work remotely pretty much
whenever and it has done wonders for my productivity(no interruptions to flow)
and overall happiness level. The 2 hours/ day of time I used to spend
commuting are now spent cooking/going to the gym/home improvement/gardening. I
save tons of money and have never been healthier or happier. As long as I stay
a software engineer I don't think I'll ever take another role that doesn't let
me work remotely. Of course I am strict with myself about working during work
hours and have good rapport/trust w/ management. Just my 2c

------
Benjamin_Dobell
> _While we did not initially plan to make hiring remotes a huge part of our
> engineering efforts, our remote employees have outperformed all
> expectations._

I wonder what metrics were used. Would be interesting to know whether the main
motivator was simply raw performance, or performance/cost.

~~~
jlaurend
Probably both, I'd imagine. Regarding cost, Stripe was pretty outspokenly
against Prop C in SF last year (which passed, to their dismay). The result is
an added tax on revenue which hits Stripe hard since they have a high volume,
low margin business. Not to mention CA is already a very expensive place to
run a company.

With rising costs in SF, they likely had to explore viable long-term
solutions. They can start moving more jobs to their other offices, open new
secondary offices, or expand their remote presence. With remote, they're able
to keep SF as the HQ while lowering costs. It's also popular among devs, so
it'll keep their brand image good amongst their target demo and among their
current employee base.

~~~
pault
Are they not in Austin? I don't see it on the jobs page. Austin is the perfect
combination of low COL and available talent in my opinion.

~~~
Bartweiss
> _Austin is the perfect combination of low COL and available talent in my
> opinion._

Some evidence for that: half the game studios I know of have programmers in
Texas, or occasionally elsewhere in the southeast (e.g. North Carolina). If
you want a dense talent pool around your office, but don't have the
margin/capital to pay coastal cost of living, there aren't many other options
to rival those.

------
sandGorgon
Im wondering what learnings has Stripe figured out that makes their remote
workers as productive as their in-office employees.

Do they use things like OKR, slack,etc ? What works and what doesn't - is
there a cognitive disconnect between remote teams and people who work in
office .

Is there an expectation of _minimum screen time_ expected from remote
employees?

~~~
drb91
Why would you expect remote to be less efficient? Working in an open office is
incredibly distracting—of course there’s productivity gains from going remote.

~~~
komali2
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.

~~~
CalRobert
"If you were still in the office at 7, you could expect a heartfelt
appreciative email"

This sort of thing is horrible. Stop normalizing this. It's OK not to work all
day.

My kid goes to bed at 7:30 and I hate that my colleagues are so willing to
work late, normalizing the idea that 6-7PM calls are OK. I mean, I get it -
it's not their fault I had a kid, but hell, when IS it OK to stop working?

~~~
komali2
I don't intend to normalize it. I think it's bad. That's why I became an
engineer.

------
Androider
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 engineering workforce myself in our business, and was initially
thinking that we as the company will be the ones setting up the contracts with
WeWorks etc. But perhaps you as an employee would actually prefer to be in
control of that?

Are there companies that are fully remote but don't contribute anything
towards coworking? If you're in that situation, what do you think of it?

~~~
camhenlin
No. I work for a fully remote company, and we decided that individuals within
the company could pay for working a coworking space if they wanted, but giving
them a stipend for doing so created a benefit for those employees that didn't
exist for employees that optimized their home office for remote work.
Personally I am in favor of more pay for every employee across the board at an
organization rather than trying to come up with lots of extra benefits to take
advantage of to collect more money.

I think that some kind stipend for office/equipment/etc does make sense for
companies that have remote and in-office employees, but feel that it should be
a set amount and not tied to actual usage, as I feel that in those cases, the
company is getting a clear benefit from the worker being remote, in not having
to provide them with space in the office.

~~~
zild3d
Tacking the would-be stipend onto base pay can remove the feeling of the
benefit being provided at all.

e.g.

A: You get a salary and we also cover your gym membership

B: Your salary of $100k already includes a baked-in $50 a month for a gym

That said, definitely agree the stipend shouldn't only be for employees who
choose a coworking space. Provide $X for either office space, or home internet
& office expenses

------
mahesh_rm
..Remote (North America Only)..

~~~
C4stor
I'm having a hard time reconciling "They see how people purchase food
differently in bodegas, konbini, and darshinis. They know why it is important
to engineer robustness in the face of slow, unreliable internet connections.
They have worked in and run businesses that don’t have access to global
payments infrastructure." with this precision.

What's the point of mentioning typical south american or asian shops names and
then offer north america only remote jobs ?

~~~
starshadowx2
"And though we intend to hire remote engineers in Europe and Asia eventually,
our hubs in Dublin and Singapore are not sufficiently established to support
remotes just yet."

~~~
C4stor
I read that, but the timezone problem doesn't really explain why south america
was slashed.

Overall it seems a bit strange to explain "we officially have a remote hub"
and "remote workers need to be supported by physical hubs".

~~~
kevsim
"There is substantial organizational, legal, and financial infrastructure
required to support each new jurisdiction we hire in, so we have to be
measured in how quickly we expand."

Each country you want to pay salary in comes with legal aspects. Therefore
they have to be a bit tactical with where they try to hire people.

~~~
imhoguy
As remote guy I see potential for disruption in this area. So far umbrella
subsidiaries or agencies and invoice-based contracting does the job, but stuff
like IP rights and liability is quite complex. We would need some Stripe-like
service for employment matters.

~~~
Androider
In the US there are PEOs (professional employer organizations) that function
as virtual co-employers that allow companies to hire in all 50 states without
establishing a physical presence, handles payroll, state taxes, health
insurance and benefits in all the states etc.

Something like that, but on a global scale, would be amazing for remote
hiring. What unfortunately now seems to happen is that remote foreign
employees get classified as contractors (which probably wouldn't stand up to
any real scrutiny), which isn't great for either party.

------
throwawaym13551
To offer a counterpoint to all the praise of remote working: I'm the living
proof of a dysfunctional remote employee. I work effectively 20 minutes a day,
sometimes not at all. In the morning meetings it's so easy to just wing
something vague and get away with it. I guess the fundamental problem is that
I work in a team where everyone more or less owns a separate part of the
product and no-one has any insight in other peoples' work.

~~~
bauerd
What do you do all day then? Does no one ever try to get in contact with you?

~~~
throwawaym13551
Very seldom and when they do it's something really trivial to fix/answer
(which I can often do on my phone if I'm out doing... leisure stuff). I more
or less have a permanent paid vacation.

~~~
stevens32
Do you do other things during the work day? How do you fill the time?

------
pastor_elm
I just looked at Stripe's job page and noticed they don't advertise any
positions as "Senior" nor do they appear to list 'years required' in any of
their listings.

Definitely a fresh take, and I hope it actually does yield better applicants
and results!

~~~
britt_binler
Apparently, everyone has the "same" title - levels are only reflected in your
pay band.

~~~
ztratar
Correct. I work at Stripe.

By the way, this goes almost all-the-way-up.

Even people who were former VPs at Google often have the title "Engineering
Manager". Sure, they mostly manage other EMs, but it's hard to precisely tell
who is super senior and who isn't.

This actually plays out nicely, as it encourages everyone to default to each
other as equals. Later on you'll hear things like "did you know that person
built the entire first version of Atlas by themselves?" only to realize they
are, in fact, very experienced. :]

------
nwhatt
This is a great sentence:

> We are doing this to situate product development closer to our customers,
> improve our ability to tap the 99.74% of talented engineers living outside
> the metro areas of our first four hubs, and further our mission of
> increasing the GDP of the internet.

------
alexhutcheson
Does anyone have experience working remotely in a engineering manager (not IC)
role? Did it work for you? What had to change?

~~~
_jss
I’ve been at Stripe for 4 years, joined as an IC then shortly transitioned to
an EM. Previously was an EM, and remote for 12 years total.

Noticeable differences:

\- While I’m remote people tend to default to throwing time on my calendar,
which means a conversation sometimes doesn’t happen. We use Slack, so I am
highly responsive on Slack to ensure I’m still talking with folks I need to
and would rather ping someone unnecessarily and ask about something than miss
out on information. Ding words and DMs to offset the barrier to adding
calendared time to talk.

\- Capturing all “collisions” (we have awesome stairs to encourage this) is a
lot different. As a remote, when I’m in the office it’s a bit special and
people come up to me. When working in an office, I get less “Hey, what have
you been up to?” conversations.

\- Timezones are definitely harder in the office. In an office people
generally have fixed blocks of time, since commuting has a cost. Being remote
(from home) there is no commute cost, so I can split my day up if I need to
without working overly long days. I worked with engineers in Europe, so having
this flexibility to hop on a call at 6am and then take a break to hang out
with my kids before school is super cool.

What doesn’t change? I believe the most effective management practices aim for
predictability, and having inclusive behaviors. Also it doesn’t change how you
show up to the job. When I’m in meetings, I need to look fully engaged and
present, whether remote or in the office. I think this can be harder in a home
office, being surrounded by your things vs. an empty conference room.

Happy to talk more about my experiences here or remote in general!

------
caprese
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 want to give another certain individual
praise at their discretion.

Just something to be conscious of.

Glad Stripe is having success in this area.

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

------
astura
I always assumed work from home positions were very difficult to get because
your pool of competition is so much bigger. Can anyone chime in if that's the
case or not?

~~~
akyu
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.

~~~
stevens32
I had no idea there might be some connotation about remote workers as some
kind of people, any idea what they may have meant?

~~~
redisman
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.

------
bg4
I've been working from home for over a year. Far more productive than working
in an office.

------
paulddraper
> There are still some constraints on our ambitions. In our first phase, we
> will be focused primarily on remote engineers in North America, starting
> with the US and Canada. While we are confident that great work is possible
> within close time zones, we don’t yet have structures to give remotes a
> reliably good experience working across large time zone differences.

I get the time zone thing. So why not South America?

~~~
dudul
Maybe they don't have any legal presence there? No knowledge of employment
laws, regulations, etc.

~~~
paulddraper
Do they have any legal presence in Canada or Mexico?

------
simonebrunozzi
Stripe is such an amazing company, and I am really glad that they keep pushing
workplace innovation this way.

I am currently looking for a new job (exec level) and unfortunately I don't
see any great fit with Stripe's current openings, otherwise I would simply
love to see how the company operates from the inside.

Keep rocking.

------
jpincheira
Love it, and more companies should make it as evident and public as they are
doing it today with the announcement.

Remote work is here to stay, and certainly the future, and one of the main
reasons I am now working full-time in the space with my product, to help
improve culture and communication within distributed teams, which is one of
the main challenges around remote work. Edit: ps. in case you'd like to check
it out it's [https://standups.io](https://standups.io)

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ezekg
This is great to see. In the past, I had wanted to apply to Stripe, but left
saddened when they didn't offer remote positions as I've worked remote for the
past 3 or 4 years.

~~~
ztratar
There are a lot of factors & regulations that make South America uniquely
difficult. For example, regulations state that in Brazil the payment
processors (like Stripe) cannot pay out funds until 30 days after they are
earned.

This obviously isn't the best user experience. It will just take longer to
build something truly great that can span the globe.

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throwaway201905
If anyone from Stripe is reading: is there any precedent for taking a remote
role with a view to transitioning to an office role in the US while being
sponsored for a visa?

Who would I talk to about this?

Thanks.

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kierenj
Uhm, "Remote in North America only" though?

~~~
redisman
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.

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mars4rp
I embrace remote as the next guy, but if all companies start doing that. how
do you think that effects bay area and big hubs wages?

~~~
fiveoak
Probably lower them, which is bad if you're part of that demographic, but
better for everyone else outside that very small group (which admittedly is
probably a significant proportion of HN readers but a small proportion of the
entire population)

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hobofan
I've seen a sign on the street level in Berlin of a Stripe office and heard
that 10-20 people are working there with half of them in engineering. I
realize that this probably doesn't count as a hub, but how does it fit in with
what's explained in the blog post? Has Stripe more non-hub locations?

~~~
patio11
Stripe has offices in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Seattle,
Amsterdam, Bangalore, Berlin, Dublin, London, Paris, Melbourne, Singapore, and
Tokyo. Engineering hubs have organizational infrastructure that the rest of
our offices may not, like dedicated reporting lines for engineers at the hub,
engineering teams which exist at the hub and don't exist elsewhere, and
similar.

We have engineers who work out of our non-hub offices as well, but there
generally isn't intensive, permanent core engineering work being done out of
them like there is in the hub offices.

~~~
jamestimmins
I've always been curious why Stripe doesn't have LA offices. It seems
(superficially, at least) to be ideal: same timezone as HQ, multiple top-tier
colleges, a desirable climate, and a large engineering pool to source from.

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revskill
Any companies that requires in-house engineering is bad.

A good culture doesn't depend on location between participants.

~~~
JimDabell
"In-house" typically refers to work performed by direct employees of the
company, in contrast to outsourced work.

I think you mean "on-site", which refers to work performed by people in
offices occupied by the company, in contrast to remote work.

~~~
revskill
Yeah, it's what i mean. Thanks for reminding ! Edited.

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

~~~
ahstilde
You can explore Stripe's website to get an understanding for their product
size and scope: [https://stripe.com/](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.

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

------
phreack
It's sad how they don't just have plans to hire in South America, Stripe as a
service doesn't even work in South America. It looks like a market that's
overdue for disruption.

------
fnord77
> There are still some constraints on our ambitions. In our first phase, we
> will be focused primarily on remote engineers in North America, starting
> with the US and Canada.

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roland35
Are there any other well known Silicon Valley companies that also are
committed to remote work? Particularly with a focus on hardware/firmware type
engineering? ;)

------
thedangler
Where I currently work they wont let programmers work from home because:

Jealous coworkers who need to be at work. It's not fair clause.

Company insurance doesn't cover people working from home

------
jamestimmins
Is there any information on the application/interview process available?

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IloveHN84
Only in North America unfortunately

~~~
ztratar
Stripe has remotes across the world, but we're just formalizing this new "Hub"
concept in North America.

------
skizm
Where do I apply?

~~~
patio11
Our jobs page is at [https://stripe.com/jobs](https://stripe.com/jobs) or you
can attend a coffee chat with us and then let the conversation continue that
way. [https://stripe.events/remote-coffee](https://stripe.events/remote-
coffee)

~~~
selimthegrim
Are there any plans for remote data science or remote data engineering roles
beyond those listed on the jobs page?

~~~
patio11
Specifically: We have remote data scientists (I work closely with one in
Tokyo) and will have more in the future. Generally: every engineering
workstream at Stripe will have remotes in it.

